Lerner's title (future for many is past for some...) brought this to mind. A science article in our local paper last week was quite mind boggling, describing an experiment about to be done at Stanford that could prove the possibility of going back in time to change the past. They call it "retrocausality." The headline: "Science hopes to change events that have already occurred" As I think I understand it, it involves the accepted (if mysterious) phenomenon that occurs when you split a beam photons and decide whether to detect them as waves or particles. Whichever one you choose for Beam A, then Beam B will be (become) the same, however far away it is. What the researchers plan to do is send Beam A through an extremely long fiber optic tube before it reaches its detection point, so that it will arrive after Beam B. If it is still the case (they seem to think it will be) that making the choice on Beam A will affect Beam B, that means one has gone into the past to affect Beam B. Ain't that a kick. The article is at http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/01/21/ING5LNJSBF1.DTL&hw=retrocausality&sn=001&sc=1000 (or go to sfgate.com and search for 'retrocausality'). It didn't appear on April 1. I think they're all serious.
I was particularly intrigued with the idea that intelligence in the distance future, may purposefully affect the big bang so as to make it conducive to life, and thus its own existence. -=Steve=-
Gregory Benford wrote an entertaining Science Fiction called Timescape that sent messages back into time to head off an environmental blunder. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timescape