Man Trying To Send Warning Back To 1935

"When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, 'Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.'" That's what Fred Rogers used to say. 

And so, a weary nation turns its eyes to Joe Davis, the man attempting "to break the wheel of time" by broadcasting a coded warning into the past. Davis, who was described by colleagues in a short NOVA documentary as "a very creative interdisciplinary scientist pretending to be an artist," is a man with a long and impressive resume. He's created metalized silk, designed an electron gun that turned heads at NASA, and helped pioneer the use of laboratory lasers in sculpture and design. In 1986, he used a radar dish at MIT to transmit, according to Mic, "the vaginal contractions of a troupe of local ballerinas into space to protest NASA's decision to censor female genital anatomy in SETI missives." The Air Force shut him down in less than half an hour .... but, like, still.

And for the better part of a decade, Joe Davis has been trying to warn denizens of the 1930s about everything that's coming their way. Wait, it gets better. There's a black hole involved.

"Well, I figured, what the hell." -Doc Brown

The plan is simple, really. You've probably thought of the same thing yourself.

Utilizing a powerful transmitter, Davis would like to transmit a message in Morse code into space, aimed at a Kerr object in the Cygnus system — basically, a rapidly spinning black hole. In theory (by his own admission, a remarkably shaky theory), this cosmic phenomenon could be used to transport signals through time, and the hope is that Davis' message will reach 1935, the first year when he suspects it could be picked up by human beings on radar. Included in the message: details of the Holocaust, the HIV/AIDS epidemic, the Fukushima disaster, and others.

So far, Davis has yet to find a willing participant with the transmission equipment necessary to make his dream come true. Even if he does, he admits that the project might not succeed. "If such a message was received, it probably wouldn't be believed," Davis stated. Still, he's determined to make his dream, poetically titled Swansong, a reality.