So, here’s the deal: You’ve managed to acquire the data, but disaster strikes, and your time machine is destroyed by an enemy time traveler team. This is crucial historical data that you’ll have to get into the future to avert the apocalypse. Due to the constraints of the space-time continuum, all time travelers staying outside of their “home” time for longer than 1 year will die, so you have exactly 1 year to prepare. How do you make sure the future discovers the data, while preventing the enemy time traveler faction from stealing the data?
(Remember: don’t just chuck it in a hard drive and bury it in a forest somewhere, the data will degrade)
I set up like a million dead drops, craigslist entries and graffitti telling the other time travellers to come pick me up where I am. As long as one makes it I will get an instant pickup materializing next to me instantly and can carry whatever server rack I’m salvaging inside their DeLorean or TARDIS or whatever. Bonus points, I get to survive. Extra bonus points, let’s go to the place the other guys jumped me and bootstrap their asses into the curb.
I get that the idea is chatting about how to preserve data, but time travel breaks every premise if you think about it for two minutes.
What if the enemy time travelers get to you first?
There is no first. Time travel! Just keep going back. Hell, screw telling my future friends about coming to pick me up, tell them to tell me where I got jumped so I can avoid it and I don’t even have to be here in the first place.
I will Primer the crap out of this situation if there are time machines. I will Primer the crap out of every situation if you let me have a time machine.
Okay, so there are flaws with this. There is first. Because it depends on whether in the future, the good guys or bad gouts see the communications first. If the bad faction of time travelers see the message first, they could come destroy the data. You could hope that the good guys see it later in the timeline and undo that by rescuing you with your data but there is still a circle effect going on. The bad guys can still counter the good guys and vice versa. An endless undoing/redoing cycle.
You place X amount of messages, but it is not specified how many enemies versus good time travelers there are. So it is impossible to know who will see one of your messages first, starting the cycle. Even getting the data to a safe place, someone in the timeline along the way can see your messages and go to a place to stop you from securing said data. It would be never ending. The idea is to let the good guys know without the bad guys if you go that route. If you rigged the messages cryptically and they ended up asking a question that only the good time travelers would know, giving them say a location to rescue you for this plan to work.
No, it doesn’t matter. There are infinite good and bad guys. They all can spawn a second before each other until the big bang. You can assume the friendlies aren’t complete morons and have set up some encrypted comms, although presumably that itself is in its own time loop of decryption and re-encryption, since you effectively have infinite time to both track down and decrypt any code.
The real answer is time travel makes no sense.
The real answer is that time travel to the past is never possible.