Here is that first assumption I promised you. It’s a big one, but perfectly reasonable.

Time, if it exists, is not linear but circular.

Got that one? Great.

Our logical friends have managed to convince us that one event follows another, with a future and a past surrounding the single moment we are experiencing right now. By their reckoning we move ever onward, inexorably in a step-by-step line. In anticipation of the future and looking back into the past.

The obvious question is why? Even Einstein would tell you that time is flexible. His theory of relativity also tells that were we to travel outward in a straight line indefinitely, ultimately we would find ourselves back where we started. I've no idea why but am willing to take his word for it. Also as you may already be aware, space and time are fundamentally the same thing. So if space is circular (spoiler alert it is) so is time. Why then should we imagine time to be moving in a single straight line when everything else in the known universe is circular? From the smallest atom to the largest planet, galaxies, suns, black holes. Even the shape of the Universe itself as far as we are aware. Wherever you look the end result is something circular.

God doesn’t do right angles, so why should we imagine that time acts conversely to everything else? I would suggest it isn’t too great a step to imagine that, just the same as all the other constituent parts of the universe, time is circular.

One example of how this might work? Well, we know for certain, again according to Einstein, that the stronger the pull of gravity, the slower time moves. An astronaut watching a clock fall into a black hole, for example, would see its hands gradually slow down as the pull of gravity increases. The second hand would tick once every hour, then tick once every decade, and finally appear to stop altogether.

Might it not be possible to take this phenomenon one tiny tick further so that time moves into reverse? That doesn’t seem to be too great a leap of faith. And that would be your circular timeline right there!

And once you make that obvious leap of understanding the next question arises. If time is circular, how long does it take to complete a circuit? Ten billion years? Ten minutes? Is the same routine being played out repetitively every ten nanoseconds? Helluva step to consider, but once you accept the obvious non-linear time theory, these are the questions which arise.

If time does indeed circle in a loop then we have to assume that within that loop the same events repeat themselves. (If they don’t, then it’s not really a loop). This might very well be provable (as explained later under How you can help uncover CT) but for now, trust me on it.

So, having accepted the premise of time being circular, here is an idea. Pick the obvious location in your garden and bury something. In that spot that sticks out as different from the other blades of grass. By a rock or tree. You know the place. Carve your name and the date into a little bit of rock and bury it six inches down. Why? Because the next time the loop comes around, when you go to bury the same piece of rock it will likely already be there. In short, you are laying plans for the future in the hope that when the next loop comes around, for some reason you will have been made aware of the possibilities of CT a fraction of time earlier, and when you do go to bury your rock, you will find that the rock is already there. Hell knows, it may already be there now.

Like I said. A nutter.

And I am happy to be that nutter and want everyone to know I am he. Because in that way, discovering CT should become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Why, I hear you say? Because, he answered, once CT is discovered, the first thing people will try and do is send a Telepathic message back in time down the loop. Why? For the same reason people made the atom bomb, will soon clone human beings, and that mammoths are about to roam the earth. Because they can. And of course, having discovered CT, the ideal person to send that information back too would be your prior self, but your prior self might not be looking for it which would make your efforts a waste of time.

So, for the best chance of someone in the past picking up your message, you would want to send it back to someone who had been actively looking for it. Someone well known somewhere back in history as being a nutter.

I don’t know at what point in the time loop CT will be discovered. It might be a thousand years from now or it might be tomorrow. But those buggers will be sending CT messages as far back in time as they possibly can. So I want the historical records to show that some time way back when, with your help, I was the person looking hardest for the answer.

Or perhaps that will turn out to be you.

So the simple action of actively searching for CT should make discovering CT a self-fulfilling prophecy. If Telepathy exists (and we have already accepted that on some interpersonal level it does) by looking for it, we should inevitably find it.