We need your help.
Since January 2019, we have been receiving one-way transmissions from a source claiming to reside in the year 2049. These urgent communications include blueprints for a cross-temporal communications technology called the SPORE device and implore us to build it. In response to this call, we have organized a group of University of Chicago faculty, staff, and students that we have named the Fourcasters. We have now finished constructing this device. Regardless of the device’s actual origins, the engineers, biological and physical scientists, and computer specialists in our group agree that it relies on a technology that bears little resemblance to other known technologies. The SPORE device combines organic, digital, and human elements in ways we are still struggling to understand.
This much seems certain: On July 15, 2019, a temporary connection to the year 2049 will open at 2:30pm CST. We are not keeping this event a secret. In fact, we are completing software that allows us to convey the video and audio signal that we receive through the SPORE device via a Twitch stream that we think will be most easily accessible to people outside of our lab. If we are able to communicate with the future, we believe that this connection should be public and broadly accessible to anyone who is curious and willing to help. Even if the current usage represents an alpha test (at best), something as precious and unprecedented as this technology should not be proprietary or restricted to only a small group of insiders.
To be completely transparent: we know very little about what the forthcoming connection with 2049 will entail — or if it will even work at all. We do not know who (or what) we will see or hear if we can achieve a stable link. The source of these messages has only used the name TERI. Moreover, the word “terrarium” and the number four have come up repeatedly. Aside from these details, we have only the urgency of the initial transmissions.
And then there is only one other explicit instruction that takes the form of a prohibition: due to potential issues with cross-temporal communication, the Fourcasters who discovered the SPORE device should not watch the initial transmission. Regardless of the precise reasons for this directive, we intend to honor this constraint in order to demonstrate good faith.
Even so, we are not leaving you on your own. We have established a public Slack channel that you can join here in which both faculty and student Fourcasters will be available to help via chat. We ask anyone receiving this message to join the Slack channel now and the Twitch channel before July 15 at 2:30pm CST. We will share that link here in a few days.
As you may suspect, the Fourcasters constructed the Futures Design Challenge in parallel to our discovery of the opening to 2049. This event is an opportunity for brainstorming and design that we have planned to coincide with what we believe will be the period of transmission. We are certain that your contributions to this challenge will become even more important once we have made contact with 2049. As such, UChicago faculty and students will continue to be available for discussions about the SPORE device opening or preparations for the Futures Design Challenge via this Slack channel through September 2019.
We could use all of the help we can get. We realize that this may sound like science fiction to many of you. It certainly sounds that way to many of us. Yet so much of the science and technology on which we rely today seemed precisely like fiction before the moment that it is realized. As such, we ask for your faith and collaboration in this emergent process.
— The Fourcasters
