In the interest of serving my small but loyal readership, I'm experimenting with targeted content: stories written specifically for frequent readers who I hope will find them interesting.

Anna is one of my loyal European readers, a savvy mathematician, and an aficionado of time travel writing.

So Anna, this link is for you. It's the Time Travel Fund. In a nutshell, it's a group trust fund intended to pay people of the future to retrieve you from the past when time travel becomes technically feasible.

The site goes out of its way to assure you that it's not a scam, and in fact I am inclined to believe that it is not, at least not entirely. However, I do think it's a great way to live free off the fanciful aspirations of others--portions of each $10 contribution are earmarked for "overhead in running the website, covering legal fees, paying for your certificate, and maintaining the database of members". Overhead in running the website could easily be inclusive of a nice salary for whoever is behind the website.

If you're really interested in this sort of thing, I dare say you'd be better off setting up your own fund and structuring any necessary provisions in your will. The site acknowledges that you could do this, but tries to dissuade you from it. On the contrary, I think if you believe this sort of thing is possible and likely to be feasible and legal, you might as well spend a couple thousand dollars to have a lawyer do your own fund and do it right, than trust someone else who might botch the job.

I will say this for schemes of this sort: I think that time travel is more technically feasible than post-mortem resuscitation of a cryogenically-preserved corpse. Modern physics is generally in agreement on the theoretical possibility of time travel.

Unfortunately, I'm inclined to agree with novelist Connie Willis and partially with Stephen Hawking on the point that the spacetime continuum will, to put it simply, have some serious checks and balances on time travel into the past, or potentially even contrive to prevent it completely. And even if those are circumventable, there will be some thorny ethical and legal issues to deal with, too.

If you're still interested, I don't blame you. $10 isn't much. Just remember that someone is probably living free off of the $10 of dreamers like you, even if the plan itself is perfectly legitimate.

As for myself, I'm actually somewhat considering working my own personal solution into my will.

Note: For a good introductory discussion of Hawking's "chronological protection conjecture" that the laws of physics disallow time travel, and a general overview of the basics of time travel, try Sagan on Time Travel. For a more in-depth discussion, here's an online paper discussing such conjectures and ways to discredit them. Finally, Connie Willis's time travel novels posit that time travel into the past will be possible, but governed by slippages of the time continuum that prevent time travellers from altering history or achieving personal gain. On a purely unscientific gut-feeling basis, this seems a very plausible and tidy solution to me. See The Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing Of The Dog.