The Krononauts

Pushkin The Last Archive, A history of truth.

Imagine there's a place in our world where the known things go, shelves stocked with proof, and all around the clutter of clues. I haven't been down here in the Last Archive for a while, but Jill's stopping by later, and I promised her i'd keep it clean, which, well for starters. There's a car in the middle of the room. Is that a DeLorean from Back to the Future. Cool? I'll deal with that later. May as well start small with this stack of old stencils. Welcome people from the future.

Weird?

And what's this sleigh doing over here? By these candles? There's a plaque and you factured by HG. Wells that it's turning on the date on the dial. It's changing February twenty twenty. Oh no, there's no going back now, So step across the threshold to a highway in California on February seventeenth of that cursed year.

It's like we could.

Be being pulled by Oxen right now, except who lives to Melbom.

I actually think we'd be faster in February twenty twenty, I went to California with Jill Lapour, host emeritus of The Last Archive, and her youngest son Oliver. We rented a twenty seventeen red Camaro convertible for work like this is overpowered for our purposes because we're currently going to ten miles an hour.

Yet, but we're going to pick up speed.

You don't want it so cold in here, Oliver, don't do that.

I'm so cold. You really not that cold. We were out in California because we were recording the final episode of our first season. The convertible was Oliver's idea, very California, but it wasn't really top down weather.

Cold at all.

You're just scared. The first episode of the season was in Vermont. Yeah, were you also contained presence. We were researching ideas about predicting the future, computers, big data, time capsules, that kind of thing. We wanted to see the place that future was being made, Silicon Valley, so we headed west in our red Camaro. We were on a quest to figure out who killed Truth, and.

We're gonna go.

Try to reconstruct some of that story to understand how, I don't know, all the world became California in the nineteen.

Fifties, So that was a good explanation. The tape is totally unusual, blowing out my ears. The episode ended up being a lot about California archives and the fantasy of predicting the future. We spent a lot of time in the old church offices of the Internet Archive. But there was one other stop we made that trip that we didn't include in the final thing to dig for another forgotten piece of computer history, the Yahoo time capsule. Yeah, when was the last time you went to the Yahoo homepage?

This.

I know it just sounds like any social media, but the Yahoo time capsule was before Twitter, TikTok, snapchat, Instagram, when Facebook was just a thing on some college campuses. This Yahoo thing felt new and exciting, and billions of people would have seen it. Hundreds of thousands of people made entries. Then, a little under a month after it opened, the portal closed. The contents of the capsule were beamed vlaser into outer space, downloaded on a Mac Mini hard drive,

What's the story Wishbone's Dream.

If you've never seen Wishbone, it's a PBS children's show where a talking dog reenacts literary classics. Most of what I know about the classics I learned first on Wishbone. So if we're talking time travel, I'm thinking season one, episode twenty three, Bark to the Future, an episode written by a young Morocca. The dog plays the time traveler.

The hero of our story is a man who will defy convention. He is a man who will use to technology to redefine travel.

In Bark to the Future, as in The Time Machine, an inventor claims he's got a new machine that can move through the fourth dimension time. I was probably in the second grade when I saw this. I love time travel stories now, but this, I think was the first one I ever came across. Wish Bon. It turns out was sticking pretty closely to the nineteenth century source material, just with dogs not people. This by the way is the dog's voice?

Have I really traveled to the year eight hundred, two thousand, seven hundred and one.

People like to say there are only something like seven plots for every story. Plots people have been reusing since forever. You know them Rags to riches, the hero's journey, overcoming the monster, the quest. Okay, maybe it's all a little schematic exactly seven, but still it's weird to have this big new story time travel come out of nowhere in the eighteen nineties. People have explained that in a few ways, but what it all amounts to is that at the

This is the problem of time. I'm hungry now, but snack time is lighted.

I'm not saying that. As an eight year old sprawled on the floor after school, I was thinking about how the time travel genre was a way of metabolizing rapid historical change. But you can't watch one of these stories without thinking about time just a little differently. These stories chip away at that standardized public time, and they restate a feeling most of us have privately that was more

And the movie like totally blew my mind. I was like seven years old.

Richard grew up in a quiet, middle class home in Baltimore in the nineteen sixties. His dad worked for the irs. His mom was a part time secretary who wanted to be an artist. Richard was a dreamy kid and a bit obsessive. He kept thinking about that movie, especially the first time the time traveler gets his machine to work. The traveler jumps just a couple hours into the future, and everything looks the same, except the candles he lit just before he left have all burned down to the Wick.

I would like lyon bade awake at night and think about the candles burning Dad, and it was it was just spectacular, you know.

Richard wanted to know if time travel would ever be possible. One day he had a realization, what if we were a few lifetimes away from the invention of a time machine. If someone invented time travel in the future, they could go whenever and wherever they wanted, but they very likely would not come check in with Richard and Baltimore in the nineteen sixties. How could he get them to come to him? And then he had an idea.

Suppose we invited people from the future to come visit us. And it seemed very logical to me, and now it still seems logical to me.

This idea became a lifelong obsession, and it grew in his mind into something totally wild, a party for time travelers. Maybe if Richard made the party big enough, fun enough, absolutely legendary enough that it got into the historical record and centries on people were still reading about it, well, he might wind up with some surprising guests.

It's a logical idea.

Richard thought about this for years when he grew up and graduated art school. He was part of Baltimore's wacky conceptual art scene in the nineteen seventies. He was living in a Rundown twenty room mansion with three or four other artists, throwing parties, parades, making weird art, wearing black trench coats with oversized red buttons, and always he was thinking about his time travel party. He decided to set a date.

So, first of all, the date was chosen because of an astronomical event called a syzygy that was known to becoming in nineteen eighty two, which was an alignment of a lot of planets and was going to be in March. And then I selected a night of the full moon, which would be March ninth of nineteen eighty two.

Once he had the date nailed down, he had to figure out how to get that date into the historical record. I love this part, the pad cap rigor of it. It's like sort of a joke, but then not really a joke at all.

But that was kind of a nature of what we were doing, was trying to figure out possible placements in history that could somehow end up in an archive somewhere.

Artist Doug Retzler he was part of an organization Richard started to manage all this, the Chrononautic Society.

Richard had created a stencil welcome people from the Future of March nineteen eighty two.

They used that stencil to spray paint the date everywhere, including the National Archives in Washington, DC.

And so we went down there and we were about to spray it onto the base of the sculpture that was outside of that and we were apprehended by the National Archives Police and detain.

They wanted to get in the news. They wanted the story of the party and that date to be in the historical record, and they had people working around the country trying to spread the word. In nineteen eighty Richard bought an ad in Art Forum magazine inviting people from the future to come to a party on March ninth, nineteen eighty two. It said welcome people from the future

The place was a go to destination for a let's say, evolving counterculture.

Alan Steipeck, owner of the store, which was staffed entirely by Richard and his conceptual artist friends.

I was the wrong person to own a store with this kind of culture.

The artists became a problem for Alan. They're always throwing parties, sleeping in the art installations, or stealing his books.

There were two separate cultures trying to run a store and concert and that concept. It was like having kazoos and violins.

I completely fell in love with recreating the crazy world of this bookstore. I have to admit, so indulge me for a minute. It's like if Empire Records were an episode of the X files set at MoMA, but in Baltimore. I spoke to a bunch of people who worked at or hung out around the shop, including the artist Lori Stepp, who seemed to confirm the kazoos and violins thing.

I mean, what did you expect, you know?

Despite the chaos for a beautiful moment, the store was at the center of the Baltimore arts scene. Alan Ginsberg read there, so did a lot of famous poets and artists. John Waters, the director, was always hanging around. It was on national lists as one of the best bookstores in the country. The Mayor of Baltimore would start the city's

I do remember thinking serving alcohol to poets wasn't a great idea.

Alan agreed to host the Time Traveler party, and Richard got to work planning the most legendary party of Baltimore's history. Years of thinking Richard's big day was finally arriving the syzygy. The alignment of the planets was actually a big deal, not just for Richard. It was like y two k light. There'd been a best selling book called the Jupiter Effect that predicted that the alignment of the planets would lead to a whole bunch of natural disasters earthquakes, floods, nuclear meltdowns.

As you can see, the planets are not in a straight line.

They're in kind of a crazy zigzag line across the sky.

There's nothing unusual about it.

But who cares. Even the newscasters wanted to believe.

But if Zirpulli and the majority of astronomers in the world are wrong, well we'll see tomorrow, Bill Sider, you've seen too.

A few of the crononauts drove out to a Mesa in New Mexico for the big night. Crews around the world started setting up their spin off parties, but most of the team was in Baltimore. Richard and the staff of Second Story Books got the flagship party started, and when evening came around, the scene was unprecedented.

So it was like, we're here, and I believe that the Mayor came by that day.

The Mayor brought in searchlights helped them up to try to catch the the interplanetary travelers as they came down to Earth.

It was crazy. It was full of people.

So I was on the top of this mesia lighting flares and documenting the star and the different venuses rising.

There was a nude couple who claimed that they were Adam and Eve.

I was getting really nervous because we couldn't really tell who was doing what.

Jello all over the floor and people were like writhing around, and Kirby had a television set on.

The where the people from the future, where we see our future selves.

Not only did the may of thick around, but he stayed there the whole night and led a conga line of people up the stairs of the Washington Monument at Quall for flop.

The New York Times sent a reporter to cover this madness, and I swear to you I am not making this up. The Times reporter at the Time Traveler party was named Benjamin Franklin. They ran out of alcohol, the party just kept going. It was amazing. Except so did any time travelers come to the party.

We don't know. I mean, you know, there wasn't any indication that there definitely was time travelers there.

That was Richard. Again. When I talk to the Second Story bookstore management about this, they had a slightly different take.

I will say, just for the mostly for Ben's sake, that I'm totally open to the idea that the time travelers erased all of that from our memories.

Okay, so probably no time travelers. But the party was incredible. Still, good things never last, and a little more than a year later the store closed. It was just untenable kazoos and violins. But when I talked to Richard about the whole thing, I wasn't so much after whether or not the experiment worked, as I was trying to understand why so many people were drawn to it and what he meant by it. It seems to me like you're not a person who's necessarily like, time travel is real and

Is that that's a that's a pretty correct statement. Yeah, I see it. It's fun and funny, but it's also kind of dead serious. I think that the limitations that people have on their thinking, on their imaginations keeps us sort of you know, and trapped in a lot of pretty lousy stuff in this world, you know. And if they felt if they felt more self empowered to use their imagination and to like follow their their dreams, not only would they be better off, but other people would be better off.

Somewhere in between dead serious and fun and funny. That is the exact feeling that time travel stories express. And this party wasn't just a rave. It was, as Laurie reminded me, a work of art.

I mean, it's all about raising questions, you know, and making making you think so. But I do remember that sort of you know, like maybe maybe they'll show up.

How will we know, you know?

I mean certainly now I'm like, are you the same person? Like if you met yourself, would it be like meeting the same person. I think it's a great conceptual piece. I really, I really do.

Time travel stories and time travel parties raise all these big questions about what happens to us as we move through time, but they also ask a big question about what we would change if we could go back. There are often stories about regret and loneliness and time. The time traveler is almost always lonely. If you visit the past, you know how everything's going to turn out, how people die, when wars break out, who winds up with whom. If you go to the future, your world is gone, replaced.

One of the definitions for me of conceptual art is is that it carries some content, whether or not you're there to experience it or not. It's participating people participating in the idea. Say you're part of the You're part of it. You being here is part of it. Yeah, this is what we were going for forty years ago. It's one day Ben, it was not even born yet. He's going to come back and ask good questions.

Thank you, I'm glad to have been part of whatever weird time lift this is. To me, the party is not really about time travelers in the future. It's about living in the present, which is a hard thing to do because as soon as you're thinking about a present moment,

Isn't it gonna Doesn't it seem like you're entering a wormhole.

Just because it's called the Googleplex? Oh yeah, you know, they used to have this thing that they never.

Back.

On February seventeenth, twenty twenty, Jill, her youngest son Oliver, and I drove all around San Francisco in that bright red convertible for a long time. We were looking, among other things, for that Yahoo time capsule, that archive of the early Internet. We were curious about it because it was strangely like an early social media thing, before social media was really mainstream, Uploading yourself was still new for people. What did that look like right before it became the

And making its return in cinematic fashion, a digital time capsule.

After sitting in the Smithsonian for years, Yahoo's twenty fifth birthday.

Marked the perfect time to take a glimpse at history.

I gotta say, watching the chip or video of Horizon made about the event, I'm happy we weren't there. During the heady days of the early two thousands. This thing was beamed into outer space and projected on canyon walls in New Mexico. Now he was just carried out in a box during an all staff ah the passage of time.

We are aware of time, We're aware of the fragility of time, and we're aware of what happens when your time to do the things you want is taken away from you. And I think that that is the real thing that will have changed, is how people value time.

Valuing time. That was part of what freaked me out about the Yahoo time capsule, how near it came to being lost, and how pointless it all seemed in the end, and just how totally inconceivable everything in between closing and opening that box had been. Like a lot of people don't the pandemic. I had so much time, and all I could do was think about how it was slipping away.

It's like, so it's the brick apartment building smack in the middle of Cambridge. Right, that looks like maybe we can go to that main door and then we have to press a button on the intercom.

Three years after that first pandemic bunch, on March twenty eighth, twenty twenty three, Jill and I met up in Cambridge to go see a time machine.

Hey Stewart, it's Jill and Ben.

Yeah, I'll buy you and go to third flour left.

Great.

Thanks.

I told Jill I wanted to talk about time travel stories. Jill told me she had a crafty neighbor named Stuart who had built a perfect replica of a tartist Doctor Whose time machine.

Look it's perfect.

It's pretty good. I got. They were rebuilding the house next door, and I got all the wood for free. And that's why.

It's to tear. Doctor Who is a sixty year old BBC show which is still running. The Doctor is the last of an alien race called time Lords. Each week he travels in his time machine, which looks like a blue police box. Usually, when Doctor Who shows up, it's because something's gone terribly wrong in time and he has to save the world. It's a mad zany, beautiful, sad show. It's also a show though, about how disorienting time travel is.

It should have been like a four foot square, but I was constrained by the dumpster next do our. It's on wheels though, it can be moved.

Around, and well, I mean also it can tell Oh that's true.

Stuart gave us the keys. Oh my god, it's.

Really the key and you have a little chartist on it and it's the real yellow.

So where would you go if you could?

If it was working, it wasn't temporarily disabled.

Oh I would probably go the future, I guess. Yeah.

When would you go? Is what I'm supposed to Wan scared?

I don't know.

Fifty years to start?

Yeah, I never really thought about that.

Then do you have any predictions for what you would see in fifty years?

No?

I also stopped watching the news about a.

Year though, Yeah, are you still watching Doctor Who?

Though?

Yeah?

It turned out that this particular tartist was full of stacked lawn chairs and buckets.

It is true, the inside is not as exciting as the outside.

We left Stuart and his amazing tartists and headed back to Jill's house down the street. We set up in the kitchen to talk about time.

This isn't really about doctor, but I like I do.

I'm very fascinated by the idea that messages can travel across time.

Like I just really like that, and.

Like that's why I like going to an archive, Like it's a message that somebody left and now I can see it. So when I was a freshman in college, I got a letter in the mail that was from my mother. But inside the envelope I thought it was a letter from my mother, But inside the envelope was a letter in my It was another envelope, and it

Why I like doing history.

But so what was striking about the letter when you got it?

So I was fourteen when I read it and nineteen when I got it, And if you can think about yourself at those two ages, there's a lot of changes.

And I didn't remember what I was like at fourteen.

I probably now can't remember what I was like at nineteen, but I was a lot closer to who I am now. But when I was fourteen, I could actually imagine who I was when I was nineteen, because the letter that I wrote at fourteen was sort of perfectly pitched to that nineteen year old self and was a very effective harangue. Like the letter was like I know you will not actually have done the following things that you really should have done by now, and I'm really mad at you

And I was like, Oh my god, I guess she's right. I didn't. I thought I was going to do those things, but I also thought I might.

Not sending messages to the future. This seemed to me a perfect segue to my old hobby horse. The reason I wanted to do this story is because of the Ahu time Capsule, which, as you may recall, as a

I do think about that trip as a kind of crazy Hurrah last Hurrah turned out because it was a mad cap trip and there was all this weirdness around the Matrix being shot in San Francisco, and we rented this crazy car and then we locked that interview in a vault, like it became its own time capsule.

Every time we had a brainstorm meeting. For years after that trip, I kept bringing up the Yahoo time capsule. I felt like it was finally time for me to

Well, one thing that I noticed a lot during the pandemic is that I think it meant that everyone had a sense of living in historical time.

That is to say that there was.

Not just this is February, but this is a specific time in the history of humanity or the history of the planet, and that I don't think most people walk around with that every day, although I do think most historians do, like that's part of the job, like where are we in time? That sense of orientation is it's kind of a pain, right, but like you're kind of in that a lot. Like so, I remember thinking how weird it was that everybody was thinking that way when it used to just be like I could talk.

To my colleagues that way.

It's good to live in the present, but it's a little crazy making to be constantly aware of the historical contingency of everything. It's like putting a window between yourself and the world.

And it reminded me a little bit of.

A friend of mine who was living with us when she was in medical school, and she talked about the day that you first do start dissecting a human cadaver in anatomy class.

And it's like.

You cross a bridge and then the people that are on the other side of the bridge are other human beings who have also dissected a cadaver, and you're completely separate from all other humans because you have seen the inside of humans and it's transformative. You then belong to that guild. But you even if you don't never become a doctor, like, you'll always belong to that guilt because you were one of the people who has seen.

The inside of people.

And I think of historians as people who've seen the kind of inside of time. And so that it was just weird, weird during the pending that it was like everybody had seen the inside of a human body. Like it wasn't like, oh, great, everybody now knows what this feels like. It was more like, oh, everybody carries the same burden.

I remember how during the pandemic people said they started keeping journals because things just months in the past felt like they came from a different time. But the main reason I think there were so many stories about time and time travel these last few years is that time travel thinking is the same as pandemic thinking. You step on a crack in the sidewalk and suddenly you've changed

I just wanted to mention because it's important to me. The song by the Beatles. I've just seen a face and there's one line in that which I think is so brilliant. Had it been another day, I might have looked the other way. And there's this couplet, you know, this like simple line, and it really encapsulates the whole idea. Am I going to answer the door or not answer the door? Am I going to make the phone call or not make the phone call? And we're constantly inventing

That kind of thinking it can be totally paralyzing, but I think in a spirit of acceptance and letting go. It's also beautiful. All the future depends on even the smallest moments. Now, even if you can't speak to the future, it still depends on you. Okay. It's twelve twenty eight on Wednesday, March twenty ninth, and I am on the Eagle Scout bench just to the left when you come into the main area outside the Dudham Public Library, Massachusetts,

I saw a man in a black zip up with a bald patch walk by. See a man with a shock of white hair and a black shirt approaching movers left, but no sign of time travelers.

I walked home to catch my train. It was a sunny, warm, late March day. The pandemic felt something like it was over. Someone had put new mulch in the churchyard and the church clock was running four minutes fast. The birds were out the daffodils and crocuses were coming up. Richard is restarting the Chrononautic Society, so later I sent him my party's coordinates. But I don't think it matters whether anyone