Ever since I was a wee child I was fascinated with developing a handful of technologies. I've worked on these things on-and-off over the course of my life, sometimes professionally, but more often on my own.
Heartbreakingly, I've seen most of the co-opted by industry and evil men and twisted into things that not only fail to live up the standards I held my own work to, but become actively harmful. The most recent is of course Artificial Intelligence, but before that Virtual Reality befell a similar fate which leaves only one thing that I've worked on since childhood which has not yet (to the best of my knowledge) been taken over by evil men.
Time travel
The last time I worked actively on time travel was probably the first year of my short high school career. I remember it distinctly because I woke-up with my head on the table in the study hall that started an hour ago to the sound of the bell. The last thing I remember before falling asleep (really passing-out) was the sense that I was experiencing a breakthrough.
I never recovered exactly what that breakthrough was, but over the years I've pieced-together the things I was studying and working on that led up to that moment. I've also read a few books and papers and performed some though experiments but I've largely left the subject alone because other topics have kept me occupied and as we all know from science fiction, time travel is problematic.
But as I try to work on other things I'm surrounded on all sides by the necrotic realization of the tools I depend on. Everything involving a computer is becoming corrupted by AI slop, and the amount of things I can work on without a computer (or at least without relying on a contemporary computer) narrows to hobbies or other activities that so far I have not found a way to make a living with.
Computers may be involved in the work of time travel but they don't need to be the kind of computers we use every day. As you can imagine, much of the work involves custom hardware and while this includes computing capacity it is by it's nature easier to keep the botlickers away.
It's also a notoriously bad investment, doesn't scale and can't be mass-produced so it's quite repulsive to the types of people who have spoiled the other subjects that have captured my imagination since childhood.
So it feels like a safe space, and probably a hard enough problem (and set of sub-problems) to keep my occupied for the time I have left.
Since it is impossible to even begin to imagine how this work could support me and my family financially there's no distraction of trying to make that happen, and there's no justification of investing too much time or money into it because it's going to "pay off". The most likely outcome will be a body of knowledge on the subject that won't get realized within my lifetime. In other words, time well spent.
Jason J. Gullickson, 2226