Written by Jean Paul Booyens in 2022. Updated in 2024.
Are time cops real?
- Time cops are a science fiction concept and/or speculation. The existence of time cops cannot be verified.
Why should we have time cops when there is so much suffering in the world and the past?
- There may be a lot of suffering in the world and in the past but there will be much more of it without time security guards.
- Something will always occupy the role of time cops even if the time cops are not formally instituted into their role.
- An encounter with the metaphorical Joker of Batman legend (bad guy from the future) should be quite convincing that we need the metaphorical Batman (time cops)
- Batman may be scary. But which is better to have around? Batman or Joker?
Important probable facts about time cops:
- They are not all-powerful, all-knowing or all-present – don’t expect them to be able to function at the level of God – they are very human and make mistakes and be careful not to assume that they are responsible for all the bad things in history as that is very naïve – some contextual history is just too dangerous to mess with especially the further back in history you go
- They are not likely to be easily detected unless they want to talk to you
- They can stay in the future and communicate from the future using time-space crossover technology
- They need a case for interference and therefore they cannot mess too much with the context of a case involving time travel – for example, they need to know what kind of case it is, and there is no case if nothing happened
- Time cops usually get involved with a time travel case knowing the whole story of the case and all the important events, whereas people from the past involved in a case deal with the case as it comes – time security guards therefore would react to the big picture whereas the people from the past react to the present, which gives potential for conflict between people from the past and time security guards
- They know what actually happens in your past, present and future, but they can usually only guess at what could have happened and still have to rely a lot on common sense, facts, guesswork and context to keep a case together
- There are two basic categories of events when it comes to an interaction between time cops and the past:
- Trigger of involvement – events (often unpleasant) which bring the time security guards onto the scene and which time security guards will actually protect as they need to build a case – some may be late in the case and some may be early in the case
- Marker of involvement – regular events which mark a change in the strategy or a change in direction that time cops follow or which are waypoints (like in a flight plan) in the time travel case
Reasons why we need time cops:
- To ensure that the timeline is not excessively contaminated
- To protect against gene edit and multiverse disasters that involve time travel
- To keep the weird from the future in the future such as weird metaverses from the future people from the past do not know how to deal with
- To ensure the survival of the human species when, for example, there has been a nuclear war
- To protect world leaders and important leaders from mental and emotional interference
- To protect the human race from advanced threats that the human race does not know how to fight
- And more…
Intervention Principles:
- There would be a default policy of non-interference – always, always assume they will follow a policy of non-interference unless they decide otherwise
- There would be some exceptions to the default policy of non-interference that would likely be implemented that would probably include:
- Interference would be permitted to correct illegal time interference
- Interference would be permitted to ensure the survival of the human species (which would include the limiting or prevention of nuclear war)
- Interference would be permitted to prevent any kind of mass death scenario where there are mass deaths of people (which would include the limiting or prevention of genocide by opening up genocide perpetrators to attacks from the future)
- Interference would be permitted to try to prevent the human race from getting into a dead end scenario (which would include a global infertility epidemic) or to speed up human progress (which would include readying the human race to deal with a dangerous extraterrestrial alien species)
- Interference would be permitted to help people from the past start the time cops
- It is also allowed to allow people rescued by time cops to perform legitimization tasks to stay part of the timeline
- Interference will potentially be allowed to assist people who are frontierspeople of some kind such as space settlers, research scientists or the like (frontierspeople is a very loose term here)
Some Random Principles that would also apply:
- It would not be smart to privately benefit from assistance or information from the future either as a person or a company (private benefit)
- It is considered acceptable to use information from the future or assistance from the future to provide the public with considerable benefits such as making interstellar space travel possible (public benefit)
- It would be considered smart, if you know information about the future, to keep quiet about it until the event in question has come to pass unless of course a significant loss of life is involved (confidentiality)
- If you encounter time cops, it is smart to keep quiet about their presence, unless they ask you to talk about them (confidentiality)
- It would be considered smart to avoid talking about end-times prophecies around time security guards as if time security guards exist, it could take at least a number more centuries before the end of the human race (end times fallacy)
- If you are picking up any kind of deity speaking to you, it is considered important to make sure you take the appropriate precautions and controls to make sure that you are in fact talking to the deity of your religion and not a mischievous person from the future (false deity problem)
- Time security guards appear to be sympathetic to sales pitches that gets the human race space settlers when such people could die in a genocide on Earth and may keep such groups alive until space travel is possible (space settler escape route)
- When a person from the past gets badly hurt in an attack from the future, time security guards like to provide healing but at the same time get the person from the past once healed to invest in the world in some way such as helping start time security guards – they need to justify why they are healing the particular person from the past (invest in the world escape route)
- Time cops seldom heal damage that relate to a naturally occurring event in the past, but they do heal damage from time interference (resolution of issues from the future only)
- Time cops are sympathetic to those who are on the frontiers of human expansion, technology and progress and may give assistance in various ways (pro-frontiersman sentiments)
Ideas for keeping errant time security guards under control:
- Later time cops can easily keep earlier time cops under control with more advanced technology
- Time cops probably report to the governments of their respective countries and if these governments are democracies, there are additional safeguards in place against time security guard abuse of power
- There are a number of tactics that can be used to keep time cops under control:
- Firewalls
- Segregation of duties
- Term limits
- Audits and auditors general
- Media scrutiny
- Shadows which are layers of time cops checking on earlier time security guards
- Specific rules for people who have more financial powers than most to curtail their powers, for example, insurance agencies and stock trading companies
If a country like the USA gets in trouble with the deep future for time travel-related abuses such as shift out operations to shift out people out of their roles affecting families in the deep future, some mechanisms that can save the day include the following;
- The attorney general or similar investigating the case shares the details with the opposing party from the party causing the time travel-related abuses and attempts to create a situation where the party causing the problems is voted out.
- Creating mechanisms where the other party from the party causing the problems can use the details of the case to take the problem-causing party out of power.
How Do I Make Contact with Time Security Guards?
- Think about what time security guards are worried about or what they will be monitoring the past for
- They are looking for:
- People who have been hurt mentally or physically from the future
- Weird, wonderful or unexplainable events that may have undertones of illegal time interference
- Threats to people of importance to the future
- Ways to get around certain thorny events that may happen in the near future from your time zone
- And things in related categories
- Based on this information, your strategy is to make moves that reach those time security guards that are monitoring one of these areas
How time security guards are likely to get started:
- Certain scientific research projects such as in the area of time travel as well as anything leading to them, if undertaken by nations such as the Americans, would likely be greatly resisted by the future enemies of the Americans from both the present and the future
- There would be all kinds of problems such as team members’ lives going haywire, logical fallacies in otherwise rational people, sources of funding mysteriously disappearing and countless rabbit trails
- It would therefore be wise to train people to oversee such projects, fight the resistance from the future and try to keep the whole research team motivated and moving
- Such people would be similar to corvettes which are anti-submarine ships that protect convoys of ships from submarines and many of the same principles in escorting a convoy of ships apply
- Such people are probably going to be the original time security guards
- They would also need to convince future time cops to assist the team against the enemies from the future, which takes a level of diplomacy, strategy and educated guesswork
- The technology from the future used by the enemies from the future would likely include the kinds of technology that include extremely intimidating telepathic interface technology, time-space crossover technology, mind control technology and computer hacking technology
- People who deal with this stuff will likely find out what time security guards deal with and will at the same time be helping discover time travel – therefore the discovery of time travel is likely to be associated with the creation of time security guards
The bad guys in the time security guard world are usually shift out operatives (shifties for short). Essentially they try to replace historical figures with people more to their liking and may do so for political reasons. Shifties are the scientific equivalent of demons and use various physical, emotional and mental attacks to achieve their goals. In a confrontation with shifties, the following tactics are known to work:
- You need to adopt a strategy of dogged perseverance while continually giving the presence of the shifties away.
- Documentation is your friend.
- You need to find creative and safe ways of advertising to security types that there are shifties on the scene without compromising your interests.
- You need to have a log and keep pointing to it for evidence.
- You need to steward your energy, resources and margins wisely.
- You need to make appeals to the security forces in the future that would work well.
- You need to advertise that you are not a threat to the regular people of the present and the future.
- You need to be crystal clear as to your intentions on areas of concern that the future has with you.
- You need to present a strong front, not show weakness and stand up to the shifty. It is like you have to convince a big cat such as a lion or a tiger not to eat you.
- You need to manage your morale well.
- You need to stay on target on issues of concern.
- You need to keep the movement going on all of the projects assigned to you.
Jean Paul Booyens, Author 