So, in this day and age, one of the big buzz words is Information Rights Management (IRM). This branch of modern IT is concerned with protected the information produced by companies and individuals as information is worth billions in our information economy.

So we've all seen Back to the Future and from this movie I think most people would have gotten their idea of linear causality. To put it simply this means that if you make a change in the past, it will bubble into the future. This is Marty McFly fading away because he prevent his parents form meeting, hence he was never born. This concept has always amazed me as it introduced me to the concept of the paradox. The most famous paradox used in example is that of the "grandfather paradox".

Imagine you have constructed a time machine and you decide to go back in time and murder your grandfather in 1950, before he met your grandmother. If you successfully kill him, you will never be born (no parents), so how could you have traveled back in time to kill him? This is pretty straight forward, but what fascinated me is at what point do you cease to exist? At some point you need to have made the decision to kill your grandfather, but had you made that decision, you would never have been around to make it. Confused?

Now, take this time machine and turn the dial forward. Imagine you could use it to travel into the future. You decide to travel forward one week and get Saturday's lotto numbers. You see that on that particular weekend, nobody has won the jackpot. You take the numbers back with you, fill out a ticket and in a couple of days you're a millionaire. In order to have build this time machine you're probably not short a buck or two, but let's ignore the mundane details.

When you look at it, what you're bringing back from the future is information. Information in the form of Lotto numbers. Information that has helped you change your future by making you rich.

We have now seen that it's possible to take information back from the future (no reference to the movie) and use it to your advantage. Take this information a little further. If you could record the worlds weather patterns for a whole year and send that back, you would be able to accurately predict the weather for one year. Imagine the number of lives that could be saved through the perfect prediction of hurricanes, typhoons and tornadoes? Earthquakes and floods could be "predicted" and the areas evacuated before they happen.

This transfer of information isn't immune to the temporal paradox however. Let me explain. Take an event London for example. One night a fire beaks out in a family home (faulty appliance) and all the occupants are killed. This incident is reported back and the family are saved by the fire brigade. By changing the family's fate, this incident would no longer appear in future newspapers. This means the information could never be sent back to prevent the tragedy and we have another paradox on our hands.

It would also be fair to assume there would be some effects of chaos theory occurring too. I would imagine a machine capable of bending time would produce amazing amounts of heat (or cold) and that heat would eventually be released into our atmosphere possibly affecting the weather patterns, potentially nullifying any information that has come from the future. The purchase of stock on believe of a big announcement can also affect that's stocks price by generating a frenzy of purchase or sale, and this activity could ultimately alter the future, thus introducing another paradox.

If scientists did manage the construction of such a device, the transmission of information back through time could have massive implications for the future of the human race. Millions of lives could be saved as famines, floods, earthquakes and other "acts of god" are planned for and successfully managed.

But, like any technology that offers great good, it would be open to abuse, abuse that could have far reaching effects. I won't go as far as saying it could unravel the space-time continuum (I think the law of physics would have something to say on that matter) but it could destroy society with people using future information for extortion and other such endeavors on an unprecedented scale.