h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

How do we know if something is an anachronism? For all we know, something that shouldn't be there has always been there. We don't know how everything was developed or built, perhaps the pyramids, or the clockwork, or just about anything else was an anachronism. We just can't know, because to us it was always there anyway, right?

Well, theoretically it should be possible for us to find out or work out how everything happened. Of course that assumes two things (a) that the evidence is available and (b) that that there hasn't in fact been time-travel.

To be honest, I am now in a slightly false position. When I wrote the original version of this, (now backed up to a hard-drive somewhere), I was sincerely of the opinion that it would be impossible to intuit mayonnaise.

I have since done some admittedly fairly scanty reading on the history of paints and am willing to concede that there were guys doing wierd things to egg-yolks in the 16th and 17th centuries which make the production of an emulsion of oil and egg-yolk in the 18th century considerably more possible. Since the thesis of the thing is that it isn't possible to create mayonnaise without a recipe, and that this therefore demonstrates that there must have been a time traveller who provided the recipe, the whole thing curdles where it stands.

However the speculation that if time travel is possible it must already have happened stands, but this leads us into all the standard can-you-kill-your-own-grandfather paradoxes. (A very patriarchal question that - much more certain, surely, to kill your own grandmother, though I assume that is also a story which has been written otherwhere). I am crap at writing fiction anyway - hence the form the mayonnaise-hypothesis takes here.

Anyways, thanks for reading and thanks for commenting. It still surprises me that anyone actually finds this particular piece.

It was written with a mixture of sincerity and bloody-mindedness at the time though.

Cheers!

Ben