Having organized the world’s information, Google has decided to tackle time and outer space. That’s the new direction the company took Tuesday, with a new Custom Time feature to send e-mails into the past and its Virgle co-venture with Virgin to colonize Mars.

That is, until you notice Tuesday’s date — April Fools’ Day.

E-mail to the Past

Just as the Google logo feels obliged to dress itself up on holidays, so the search giant, whose day job is to make sense of information, decides on this silliest of holidays to sound sensible while being silly.

This year’s offering includes a gift for those of us who wish they could reverse or change a past communication — perhaps place an order for Google stock when it was cheaper. Gmail Custom Time, introduced Tuesday on the Gmail home page, allows users to predate a message “and we’ll take care of the rest.” Of course, the limit is four years ago, when Gmail first started.

The interface is typically easy. You just “set custom time” from the Compose view. “Any e-mail you send to the past appears in the proper chronological order in your recipient’s inbox,” the announcement says. You even have the option to make it look as if the recipient just forgot about your missive, by allowing the e-mail to be marked as read or unread retroactively.

“Forget your finance reports,” Gmail suggests. You can even “forget your anniversary.” Google will “make it look like you remembered.”

But some people, fans of time travel, will remember the Grandfather Paradox, whose causality trips up temporal reversal. Suppose you went into the past and killed your grandfather. That means you weren’t born. So how did you go into the past?

Google has solved that problem, but apparently it’s not an open-source solution. The company succinctly says only that “it utilizes…

Tags: Google, information, Space