Reply #34: I detect the work of a TIME TRAVELLER [View All]

[GarySeven]

You see, it happened like this: A spacecraft carrying humans from the future was forced to return to the earth of their past to change something which is happening now that will affect the future in a bad way - for example, an attack by an extragalactic species. But there would be a problem: the spacecraft would be unable to return to the future once their mission is over unless they make some major repairs. Even more troubling, most of the things needed for the repairs would not have been invented yet. So what would happen, see, is that the crew would have to go out into the general public, and of course they would have to disguise themselves so as to avoid detection. Nevertheless, public education being what it is, they would probably be not too up on their ancient history, especially on the way we in the 21st century dress, act and especially the slang we use nowadays. They may not understand the meaning of "exact change" when using public transportation say, or explain their odd behavior by saying they "took too much LDS during Berkeley" or something like that. Anyway, they would be able to assemble all the necessary parts they needed for repairs from things that exist now - like capturing protons from a nuclear reactor - but there would remain one problem: how to fix the captain's reading light over his bed. The reading light, of course, would be a light-emitting LED, but the technology simply didn't exist to recreate that vital piece of ship's equipment in early 21st century America. And, because their memory of the past is so poor, they wouldn't remember who invented the darn thing so that they could pay him a visit and nudge him along. And by now they would probably be in a real hurry to get back, since it had been days that their captain, who is a horn dog, had gotten laid and he was starting to look at his crew mates a little funny, especially the one with the ears. So a couple of them would go to this guy and see that he was working with something similar and, overnight - like the shoemaker and the elves (a very improbably story) - they would make some "adjustments" to the guy's experiment and, voila, a lumpy LED bulb. They could then take the prototype, put it in the captain's overhead, and they could return back to the future just in time to save the galaxy from whatever threat it had been facing.

Of course, this is all conjecture.