The energy needed to send something back in time increased triple-exponentially with size, and even our machine’s small volume required exajoules. Sending a person was out of the question, but we dropped off tiny video cameras and instruction packets at hundreds of points in history.

At various archaeological sites around the world, ancient flash memory cards were dug up: we had been successful. Data forensics teams pieced together the video clips, and soon we had a representative sample of what people in the past had wanted to record.

We had optimistically imagined a revolution in the historical sciences. Actual video evidence of the great wars, the great leaders, the great events! We failed to take human nature into account.

Not to say that our work was without merit. We gathered some amazing data; it was just of interest to a more… specialized subset of scientists.

Anyway, our first paper is being published next month. “An Analysis of Historical Sexuality and Pornography: Trends and Techniques”