For about a decade, Joe Davis has been trying to send a message into space. This message is not intended for potential intelligent alien listeners, though. He’s already sent two signals into the void for them. He hopes that this communiqué will reach humans. On Earth. Ideally around 1935.
The dispatch, which Davis calls Swansong, is at its simplest a one-hour Morse code transmission listing numerous pandemics, natural disasters, genocides, and other tragedies that humans failed to mitigate or prevent between 1935 and 2011. The idea is to send it towards Cygnus X-1, a black hole over 6,000 lightyears from Earth, in order to slingshot the signal off of its time-distorting edge, into the past, and back towards us. If the gambit works, the Swansong project could, as Davis put it in his notes for a 2017 presentation on the idea, “be used to break the wheel of time.”
It’s easy to brush Swansong off as an outlandish idea, especially when you know that Davis is not a trained scientist. He earned a BA in creative arts in 1973 from the now-defunct Mount Angel College in Oregon, then moved back to Mississippi, where he’d grown up, and started working blue collar jobs, usually with machines. (He reportedly used his art and machine skills to design his own prosthetic after losing a leg.) In recent decades, he’s struggled to make ends meet as an artist, taking dishwashing gigs to help cover basic expenses — and occasionally failing to do so, facing eviction, and sleeping on friends’ couches or in his truck for days or weeks on end.
But Davis’s lack of credentials and material success do not reflect his intellectual capabilities. As an undergrad in the early 70’s, he reportedly got permission from notorious innovation hub Bell Laboratories to use their laser rigs to carve acrylic, glass, and plastic, publishing his techniques in an academic journal. Then, while working as a laborer, he drew up designs for an electron gun that NASA agreed to launch on its space shuttle to conduct an experiment that could have theoretically produced artificial northern lights. (Despite the agreement, theproject, dubbed Ruby Falls, never got off the ground due to a NASA budget shortfall.) And in 1982, he talked his way into a meeting with the head of MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies, outlined his Ruby Falls plan and several other ideas, and walked out a research fellow. He’s been affiliated with MIT ever since.
Hellbound and Down 
If it succeeds, then I expect 1930s governments/scientists/super rich will work on sending messages even further back in time, in an attempt to engender tremendous advantages for their present.
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