Slashdot Mirror
Searching the Internet For Evidence of Time Travelers
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Here's an interesting paper by two physicists at Michigan Technological University who have come up with a practical methodology for finding time travelers through the internet. 'Time travel has captured the public imagination for much of the past century, but little has been done to actually search for time travelers. Here, three implementations of Internet searches for time travelers are described, all seeking a prescient mention of information not previously available. The first search covered prescient content placed on the Internet, highlighted by a comprehensive search for specific terms in tweets on Twitter. The second search examined prescient inquiries submitted to a search engine, highlighted by a comprehensive search for specific search terms submitted to a popular astronomy web site. The third search involved a request for a direct Internet communication, either by email or tweet, pre-dating to the time of the inquiry. Given practical verifiability concerns, only time travelers from the future were investigated. No time travelers were discovered. Although these negative results do not disprove time travel, given the great reach of the Internet, this search is perhaps the most comprehensive to date.' Stephen Hawking's similar search (video) also provided negative results."
Haven't been found out yet!
is somewhere in time
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Now you know what to do for April Fool's Day.
Your time-travelling student,
T.S.
Posting such info could endanger the future, or risk causality paradox issues --- changing the future in such a way, that time travel is not discovered.
Time travelers from the future are historians.... they may be tweeting, but they are tweeing about the past (our present), and possibly sending those tweets into the future.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
And not all of us do time travels all the time. :)
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
*speaks into cell phone*
The Organization has infiltrated Slashdot. I am posting anonymously as a result.
El Psy Congroo.
That they didn't know about this research and ensure all comments posted prior to this date were pro-actively/retroactively deleted/undone?
Worthy of front page news and very technical and insightful for all the science and computer internets who make up slashdot.
http://saveie6.com/
The history of the world ins quiet long compared to just the part of it humans have been around so really our time is a small fraction of when and where time travelers could go it. For all we know they could be at the global orgy that happens in the future :P
Why would anyone coming back in time bother with Twitter? When I go back in time, I can't wait to setup a new MySpace page in the year 2001!
HOLD ON.
Who said anything about traveling backwards in time? I conducted the same type of search described in the paper, but instead looked for indications that someone should know something but does not, which would mean they have been traveling forward in time. And the number of positive matches is incredibly high.
They did, however, find L. Ron Hubbard, Blackadder, and the Easter Bunny. Well worth the research!
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
also having excellent spaceships. By excellent I mean able to accelerate to a significant percent of lightspeed.
Say you wanna go back to 1920 and assassinate Hitler while he was a nobody and easy to get to. You build a time machine and POOF, you're in 1920. And you're also dead, since you're also in the vacuum of space... unless your time machine is also a spaceship. The earth is in a different position around the sun, and the sun has orbited to a different spot in the galaxy, and our galaxy has shifted position in the local group, and all this time the universe itself has expanded quite a bit.
I have no idea how far from earth you would be if you time traveled from 2014 to 1920, but I'm guessing it would be measured in parsecs.
If you post about it, there will be a record of how we will find you. What you have to do is not tell anyone how you are looking, then not tell anyone when you -do- find them. That way, they will never find out in the future how they were fond in the past and try to avoid it when they travel back in time.
Logically, since nobody has ever posted proof of time travelers, that means they must have found some.
Have they looked for power surges of 1.21 gigawatts?
I'm pretty much convinced that if one travels back in time, you would be by default in a different time continuum. Your mere presence in a past time would alter it such it will be forked from our own time line. So our "internet" will be oblivious to said time travelers. You would have to figure out a way to search all time lines "internets" to find such evidence. Good luck with that...
Karma: Bad
His name is not Steven Hawkings.
Eddie's in the space-time continuum.
I must admit to being time traveler. I started time traveling in 1939, inadvertently to be sure. I had no expectations that my travels would be as interesting as they have been nor as boring, from time to time, either. I've found it to be so addicting that I'm plan to keep on, and on for as long as I'm able.
Nate
... I did experience some kind of "reality bending", about 9 minutes prior to the earthquake that triggered the tsunami in Japan.
The date was April 11, 2011.
It was 16.07 local (Singapore) time, as I was in Singapore for a business meeting.
I was sitting in front of a computer display typing away, inside a hotel room. The desktop computer was provided by the host, and it was plugged into the net. The computer clock had just been synced with some online atomic time at noon time (some 4 hours ago).
For some reason I felt something weird, nothing moving, but I felt that something is not right. I look out of the windows (it was a high-rise hotel, and my room was in the 23 or 24th floor) and I witnessed "reality bending".
I can't really describe it, but what I saw was the window frame and the concrete pole "bend", not unlike what the "bending images" of some old vhs tapes where part of the scenes got scattered to one side.
That weird sensation only lasted a few seconds and the first thought that came across my mind was that there was an earthquake.
Since Singapore is located very near to earthquake zone, I expected that something gonna shake and was waiting to see if the shaking gonna be big and if that I have to evacuate from the hotel room.
But nothing shook.
So instinctively I look at the computer clock. It showed 16:07.
I sat there for a minute or two, waiting for some "signs" of shaking or whatever. Nothing.
Satisfied that nothing gonna happened I continued what I was doing.
A few minutes afterward, news started to trickle in over the net - a big quake in Japan, and later, a devastating tsunami.
Till now I still can't explain what exactly happened, and why my first thought after I experienced that "bend reality" was a "earthquake".
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
I agree - and if they do something it has to be actions that dissipates quickly in the noise and don't disturb the future. A small gambling win is quickly absorbed in the currents of time but a major one makes the headlines and may hurt the future.
Killing Hitler in the cradle might have stopped WWII, but it could also have been a stopper for the Apollo project. Or it might only have delayed WWII and made it a nuclear war where the whole world now would be speaking German. Ordnung muss sein!
Another problem with posting on twitter - how do you distinguish between an accurate prediction based on existing facts and a post from someone from the future? Especially if a post made is somewhat fuzzy in the prediction.
If we have time travelers - then I doubt that they actually do show up in our time where there's a crapload of information produced, look back in history instead. Some might want to see and meet Leonardo da Vinci, others might want to see Jesus. The three wise men showing up when Jesus was born?
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
I, like any other slashdotter, am quite familiar with the scenario of inviting myself out for coffee...
It's great. We get to talking, find we have a lot in common, and then we go back to my place for some sexy times.
Yes, because travelling forward in time is actually possible. It's called relativistic time dilation. Mostly this gets interpreted as the local time being slower than the time in the space surrounding it due to the speed of the object the time is valid for. But one could also interpret it as the object moving forward in time (actually in time-space).
So many millions of people have posted information to the internet. Is there algorithm so good it did not have a single false positive?
Re 4. Searching for Prescient Search Queries
Would be fun for the http://cryptome.org/2014/01/nsa-codenames.htm lists
2. Types of Sock puppets vs Time Travelers?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
If anyone is seriously interested in Time Travel, the inaugural meeting of the Vancouver Time Travel association will be held last Tuesday at the planetarium.
*Four* wise men, of course, everyone knows th...
...
hold on, what year was this again ?
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
Tell that to John Titor.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Just as I thought. Nothing "insightful" will show up under this story
If I went back to the 1850's with today's technology I wouldn't send prescient telegraphs to my fellow time travelers, I'd use modern methods of communcations. It seems unlikely they'd turn to twitter or the internet if they are here.
An equally useful and scientifically valid effort.
Why is Snark Required?
The research assumes that time travellers would speak and only speak and tweet and post and blog... in the english language, doesn't it?
èYè'--åç(TM)½å..."
"linux" is a very common word and was not included in your search.
because time is imaginary. It does not exist.
Why physicists insist using Einstein's equations as a 'proof' of time travel is beyond me. It is the same as if one used Newton's equations for speeds faster than 0.6 c.
In both cases the results are bogus as these equations were obviously not designed to handle these extreme cases.
Do not forget that these equations try to describe reality and they do this with very great precision, but it does not mean reality itself 'runs' these equations.
Government cannot make man richer, but it can make him poorer. - Ludwig von Mises
...would have been found but there isn't a Twitter client for an IBM 5100.
No false positives = a little too convenient.
The utter lack of evidence is undeniable proof of a gigantic PLOT!
Time travel is such a plot destroyer, such a deus ex machina, it ought to be dropped from SF altogether, much the way psychic phenomena have. It is so overused and tame. The traveler goes back in time, and fixes the mistake without otherwise altering the future at all, then skips right back home to the future to find everything worked out exactly as desired. If they have a difficult time of it, they might have to make several trips back in time to fix the problems, but they of course succeed.
Time travel is also, so far as we know, impossible. Star Trek can lean on the crutches of FTL and time travel, to speed the plots along, but it's not necessary. We can conceive of interstellar civilizations without such fantasy. It is quite possible to build a space ship that can carry us to a nearby star system over a period of thousands of years, and terraform a world for our use. We lack the technology to do it right now, but maybe, in a few more centuries, we can. Time travel does not look like it will ever be possible, and ought to be relegated to fantasy.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
Make that a first post while you're at it.
I was referring to the classical meaning of movement: having a speed difference to your environment (or a referrential system). If you are moving at the same speed than your referrential system, you aren't moving at all.
So you presume someone from today knows every thing that happened in the past? Nothing went unnoticed?
Or everyone meeting a time traveler would rush out and tell someone?
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
This is silly, doesn't it stand to reason that if you know what to look for then the time travelers will make sure not to reveal those things? Doesn't it make more sense to look for things that we don't know what we should be looking for?
Honestly, Stephen, you're supposedly a great physicist, you should know better than to think that this sort of crap could ever work.
Hawking is a huge fake. I saw him surfing on an episode of the family guy!
you can just slip into a coma for a couple of years; hell, if you live outside your country for a year -- and make a serious effort to acclimate in the new country, instead of tuning in your equivalent to Rede Globo via internet and cable -- you can seriously miss some pop culture icons.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
The constant increase of entropy in the universe is real. Now you can call the process that allows that time or you could call it Kevin, it really doesn't matter. But it DOES exist and entropy DOES increase at different rates depending on relative speed and gravity and pretending it doesn't is simply being the physics equivalent of an Ostrich.
I believe that there are no time travelers because every time that someone invents a time traveling machine, eventually some idiot goes back to before the machine is invented and does something that stops the machine from being invented.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
I think this matches the thread/site better: https://xkcd.com/567/
No sig today...
This is totally the same article as the one posted on the 5th!!
Recycle PCs and build a wireless community network www.hillsborough.org.nz
I never really understood this paradox hullaballoo. Simply by virtue of displacing oxygen or, hell, introducing a different quantum state on the volume they occupy that was previously unoccupied, the time travellers have already irrevocably changed any "timeline".
The redneck gut-science tells me that, therefore, either the many-worlds thing is true and "time-travel" is just moving between states or that there is no such thing as a paradox, the timeline that spawned you ceases to exist the moment you go back in time because you have already changed it by arriving. No killing your grandfather needed.
Can anyone with an actual physics background comment on this?
A new technology being invented and not a single person doing something incredibly stupid with it? That does not sound plausible to me. The much more plausible explanation is that it is just not physically possible to use a time machine to travel to a point in time before the creation of said time machine. So if a time machine is build in 2015, then somebody from the year 2020 can travel back to 2015, but they cannot travel back to 2014.
That idea is of course entirely hypothetical. There is no way the first generation of time machines will actually be of a quality, that will last for 5 years. It will go like any other technology as it matures the the products will last longer and longer. But eventually the manufacturers will realize that building them too durable will undermine future markets. And then they will start building them such that they last just a standard-deviation or two past the warranty period.
We all know what will happen once people realize, that they just don't build time machines like that anymore. There will be an incredible traffic of people travelling back to the year 2030 or so, where the most durable time machines were build, just so they can pick up a quality time machine.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
Time travel as a human conception was first documented in 1733 - track the history since then here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_time_travel_science_fiction#Time_travel_in_novels_and_short_stories/
Artificial intelligence is the study of how to make real computers act like the ones in the movies.
So *YOU* are the bastard that told Tom to set it up. No problem, we'll erase you before you get a chance to go back.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Twin towers on Johnny Bravo: http://tinyurl.com/pvblodn, however I'm sure it's a cloud, something photoshopped/gimped or 'not meant to be that'. Intriguing to look at images that 'shouldn't' be too though.
On y va, qui mal y pense!
Heh, I was about to post the same thing, but you beat me to it.
They're probably too new to the internet to have heard of Titor during the era of his famous kook-dom. Almost everyone online now is.
Welp, except for those of us youngsters familiar with Steins;Gate, which has already been referenced above.
No doubt, this general lack of awareness is further proof that the timeline's been tampered with.
El Psy Congroo.
Do you know how hard it is for them to do that? It takes like a whole hour to "encourage" a city to have been founded in a different place.
The big prank is San Francisco. Every time we move it somewhere safe, someone moves it back.
Time traveling sock puppets?
Or just the Wikipedia editors?
I knew they were going to try this. ;-)
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
They're only checking this reality? Not all the other ones as per the Many Worlds interpretation? OK, so if the many worlds interpretation is correct, and some one invents a time travel device in the future and travels back in time, then we will not find them here. You see, everything that can happen does -- Time travel into the past splits the time line as Good 'ol Doc Brown told you.
Now, time travel to the future is more than possible, you're doing it right now, and in fact, GPS has to deal with future time drift: Satellites experience less gravity so their clocks run into the future faster than ours. Just get next to a large gravitational mass for a while, and if you can survive to make it back home, you'll be further into the future than us. To the observers you're just gone in the interim.
However, time travel to the past would be more tricky. When you arrive at a past point in time the interactions you make cause the universe to split, as it does for every interaction. The time-line where the time machine will be created and you will travel back in time remains untouched, and a new series of events unfold. Unfortunately for Doc Brown's plot, you could easily prevent your mom and dad from dating and it wouldn't cause you to disappear -- Because they're dating elsewhere in another universe that you will be from in the future, thus eliminating any paradox.
One could think of the paradox resolution through predestination as well. The probability of you traveling back in time to do the split was already encoded in the state of the universe that allows you to do so. When looking at the time-line hierarchy, as a whole there were events leading up to the discovery of time travel and those universes up to those points all had probability for your splitting of them by returning to them, so by the time you got in the time machine, you had already done the things in the past. From a single time tree moving forward, as time marched forward you would see time travelers appearing and branching off from the time-lines where time travel would become possible up to and beyond the invention of the time machine, this way your single destination still has its quantum probability distribution of when and where to arrive.
So, if you are waiting for time travelers and they don't show up, it could be that they are all showing all around you in separate universes, and this is the universe from which the time machine will first be invented. In other words: You could send yourself yesterday's lottery ticket, but that ticket would exist in an alternate time and you'd remain just as poor as you are in this universe, in some other universe you may get all (or only most) of the lottery numbers correct (depending on if your interaction caused the numbers probabilities to change). If you could maintain stream of information to the past you could call yourself up, and have a conversation, and the current you wouldn't remember being called, and the past you may never get around their past self. This is no paradox in the Many Worlds interpretation.
However, I'm not convinced that interpretation is correct. It hints at mock-free will through predestination of every possible outcome, but it would mean the infinite dissipation of energy for the encoding and processing of all outcomes would be strangely detached from reality. I think it far more feasible that things like quantum "teleportation" will work out to be far more mundane than they first appear -- Hint: the "tele" in "teleportation" has to do with transmitting information, and the teleport is not faster than light... Entropy would seem to suggest that travel to the past in a single time-line would take as much (and more) energy as all the events that led up to the present. However, I have a corner of the house that's always empty the event that I'm wrong since our dreams have often proven more powerful than reality.
But they showed up in the wrong place, and clearly didn't know where to go
I've done this experiment many times during my life. I wouldn't meet my future selv, as nothing would happened.
However, now, years later, I don't remember which date I was trying to set up the meeting on! So of course I wouldn't be able to travel back.
We are not enough to type really at random all shakespeare works, but we are enough to put things that end being true in the middle of all spam, jokes, typos, tales, car analogies, several musings, and, in particular, random "predictions" that we put in internet every minute. If you find deep enough, buried in the mountain of garbage, will be some gold, but that is because the amount of garbage, not because someone intentionally created gold. If enough people write numbers at random around 16000 some could hit tomorrow's dow jones value, but that won't mean that it was predicted or written with actual knowledge of the future.
Time travel to the past is a mined field for paradoxes, even for information. Even knowing for real a future that we could change could make weird things like blue butterflies. And, btw, we are all time travelers, but we travel only to the future, never back.
All of this presumes a single timeline where those events occurred in the same way for all observers. What if there are a large number of parallel universes that follow through on all of those possible threads? It seems to me this would make the probability of detecting evidence of time travel so close to zero that it simply wouldn't be found.
Even if you could jump through time instantly, the earth isn't going to be where you left it anyway, tricky business to be in...
If time travel is possible, then at one point in time they will actually physically travel to our times. But we don't see them, do we? Even if they have instructions to not make themselves known, if you wait long enough one will, and will travel to our time or before. Unless of course the world ends soon after time travel has become an option.
no, I don't have a sig
Kill Hitler, and someone more militarily competent would have risen to take his place, given the economic and social conditions of Germany at the time would remain unchanged. That isn't something we would have wanted to happen.
There's a theory that the Titanic sank so quickly because it was weighed down by a huge number of time-travelers from the future.
'John Titor is the name used on several bulletin boards during 2000 and 2001 by a poster claiming to be a time traveller from 2036
I'd be satisfied with a paper that could explain the last third of Primer to me.
Given that for each "not immediate dismissable" time traveler there are thousands of plausible future-tellers, I don't know how
positive identifications of "events published before they happen" could actually signal one rather than the other.
-><- no
In 'Cryptonomicon' (Published 1999) Neal Stephenson introduces a character (Avi Halaby) and a few locations (a town and a pub called the Bomb & Grapnel) who are set up, created, founded in the Baroque Trilogy of novels (Published 2003,2004,2004)
- Halaby's family background is included as an irrelevant throwaway comment which jars with the storytelling trend, until 5 years later when one of his characters in a storyline centuries earlier, founds the dynasty
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
The issue with searching for evidence in time travel is that once it's happened, no one would know it except the time traveler themselves, assuming they avoiding any paradoxes which eliminated their very existence, or eliminated the circumstance whereas they invented or gained assess to time travel proper. Once time travel (into the past, presumably) has taken place, all evidence of the previous time line is erased from existence. Therefore, only the word of the time traveler(s) itself exists to confirm or deny the actuality.
Unless of course, you have an appropriate tachyon emitter than can track the rate at which all matter in the universe spins and locate matter that is out of sync... localized to a single person or location or item that may have been sent back....
a) wrongly set system clocks leaking into page timestamps, etc.
b) conspirators communicating about/cashing in on their nefarious schemes
I have come here from the second half of the 20th century.
I have pictures of myself standing outside CBGB with the bad hair and punk rock clothes to prove it.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Why would he need to spend more than one day at the coffee shop? He knows when he went, all he has to do is go back to that day to meet himself - theres no need to go to the coffee shop day after day.
This is time travel we are talking about, after all.
I have been traveling through time since I was born, forwards, at very large portions of C relative to the third planet from your sun. In fact, I have traveled over 35 years since I was born, its been quite a wild ride.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Posting such info could endanger the future, or risk causality paradox issues --- changing the future in such a way,
that time travel is not discovered.
Time travelers from the future are historians.... they may be tweeting, but they are tweeing about the past
(our present), and possibly sending those tweets into the future.
You can go forward in time, one-way trip, and not cause any problems. Your knowledge of things in the past does no harm in the future where those things already happened. In fact, you "skip" some time and probably are worse off for it.
You cannot go forward in time and then return, or backwards in time at all. You will have knowledge of at least some part of the future and you would return to a timeline permanently altered, if ever so slightly at first. This slight difference would be magnified as the years pass (i.e. the butterfly effect) to a degree perhaps only noticeable to yourself, but it is necessary that, as you make choices, due to your future knowledge, when your new timeline catches up to the point you jumped to in the future, it will be extremely different.
You cannot go backwards in time. Once you do, your alteration of that timeline is permanent. The mere existence of time travelers immediately and irrevocably inflicts an alteration of that timeline which is cosmic in scale, paradoxes can and will (and have) happened.
So given that we have no known time travelers my postulation is that either it is impossible or our universe -- that is, the specific probability vector we are currently on -- is the only universe, out of the infinite set of vectors comprised of every permutation of possible events, that has not and will not and will never invent, or discover, or experience time travel. (Or, it is one-way to the future only, which is rather pointless, if you think about it even briefly.)
Spam filtering put a stop to that.
...in subjective time and used it as a guide for things not to do, if I want to remain undetected when I went back to the past. So far it seems to have worked.
There are two Bethlehem too... One outside Jerusalem, the other outside Nazareth.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
It currently is only capable of moving forward only at normal speed.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Silly researchers. Don't they know that Time Travelers take a course on Adaptive Obfuscation in their junior year of Time Traveler School in which they are taught all the methods history has every come up with to detect time travel? All they've done is added an inset to the course textbook in the chapter on the late 20th/early 21st century.
But wait, maybe they SUSPECT this is the course of history, and the researchers have invested heavily in industries that will be involved in time travel textbook publishing!
Let's not forget the episode of the X-Files spinoff "The Lone Gunmen" about a government conspiracy concerning an attempt to fly a commercial aircraft into the Twin Towers.
The episode title was, coincidentally enough, called "Pilot".
Reality is not just stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we CAN imagine.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Or it proves that, in the future, you think of the possibilities of time travel as too cool to waste on something as mundane as meeting your younger self.
Or, you remember not seeing yourself and if you now go back and meet yourself, you risk changing the timeline to such a degree that you won't have access to time travel. Therefore, you continue to not meet yourself.
There are lots of possibilities with time travel.
*steps into a blue box that is bigger on the inside*
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
holy crap, context please.
:
I mean, I know there are people that don't like the GCC compiler, but I never knew there where people who just refused to admit it's very existence.
Oh wait, you're talking global climate change.
re: (#45854281)
There's a lot of dumbasses on teh intarwebs.
THAT'S THE JOKE.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Wouldn't they have known about this article from the past and then just used counter measures to avoid detection?
-Xen
Better go with higher than P(0.9). Mitch Albom tried what you suggest and got busted for it.
Isaac Asimov didn't use twitter.
Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
Yes, because travelling forward in time is actually possible.
I'm doing it right now.
I am not a crackpot.
...for a movie or a novel.
Some search engine software engineer testing a new search algorithm somehow starts finding information in search results that contradicts the dates information was actually known. Engineer thinks its a bug in his algorithm, but can't find the bug and starts investigating the anomalous results and using them as a starting point discovers time travelers/time travel conspiracy/aliens/whatever.
If I were looking for Time Travelers I would start with a very detailed background check on anyone that's ever won a major lottery.
Recently had a thought you could totally f--- up much of modern Christianity, and alas give more ammunition to the ultra-rich, if you went back in time and, a year before Jesus's birth, built a giant Las Vegas style luxury hotel and entertainment complex (with, for reasons that'd be unexplained at the time, an adjoining hospital with a substantial maternity wing) in the middle of Bethlehem. making it absolutely impossible for his parents to arrive and be forced to sleep in a stable.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I graduated from Tech. in 2000. The CS dept. was in the same building as Physics. It was in the basement (yes, I know that's normally reserved for us programmers). Nice guys, but yeah so not surprised.
I mean, most of the physics majors had beards that would put both a Civil War general and most UNIX sysadmins to shame, and yet had a prescient idea of quantum things I still don't understand (and can't spell according to my browser). I think they're doing this to look for their fellow stranded time travelers. Or to stop their parents from sleeping with grandma or something.
Or maybe they're making sure nobody's breaking The Code.
This one is a shoe-in for time traveler. He's like Dr. Emmett Brown stuck in the 1890's...
boom goes the dynamite....
Time travel is not possible. But if the point is just theoretically interesting I guess the work is valid on its own merit.
You cannot go backwards in time. Once you do, your alteration of that timeline is permanent.
That's assuming any alteration could be made.
The mere existence of time travelers immediately and irrevocably inflicts an alteration of that timeline which is cosmic in scale
Why? They could have always been there, contributing to but not altering in any way the events of the timeline.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
One version of this law states that in any universe which permits time travel to change the past, time travelers will change the past until time travel is no longer possible. Whether sexy brunette time policewomen are part of this are not I do not know.
Ofcourse they won't find anything with arbitrary limitations like that.
Time flies when you don't know what you're doing
I have done time travel experiments in coffee shops. Unfortunately, I have only managed to travel forward in time and now I am stuck here.
I think it's from April 1, 2014.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The con artists make a whole batch of 'predictions' and then disavow responsibility for those that don't come true. This is made easier by the anonymity of the Internet. Make predictions, each under a pseudonym. And then only prove ownership of the names that made the correct guesses.
Have gnu, will travel.
And then there's that 12 digit Slashdot ID. You'd get modded down so far by the old timers nobody would ever see your posts.
Have gnu, will travel.
Ok, ok... I know this is a hokey article and it's a funny idea to search for time travelers on the internet. God knows there are always people out there willing to 'say' things to indicate that they're something that they're not. Many of them actually believe themselves. Probably because they have not found their true Self in life. However...
The next time you have a lucid dream, and think about how cool it is to fly around in the sky, or underwater, or whatever else you may think to do; try time travel instead.
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
They forgot that when they stepped back in time, Earth was no longer in the same position as it was. Having moved through space in orbit around the sun and galaxy center. So they appeared in the vacuum of space and promptly expired.
Have gnu, will travel.
start looking into the lives of lottery winners or big sports gambling winners. I suppose if one could travel backwards through time there wouldn't be much need to cash in big when you could simply cash in small as often as you need money for anything. Still, there are some very expensive things one might want that would require large cash outlays.
What a coincidence or premonition of my buddy, McGrew, who wrote a book about this exact subject! He says it was inspired by Slashdot itself so what perfect timing. I'm hooked on reading it and recommend* it... Check out here to purchase or read online as he is releasing a chapter a week on-line for free.
http://www.mcgrewbooks.com/
On Sale Now
Hardcover $24.95
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*I am not being paid or compensated in any way to promote his book and have no direct ties to it other than having "friended" McGrew on /.
My abilities are only limited by my imagination
Such as this purchase made by Uncle Rico?
WANTED: Somebody to go back in time with me. This is not a joke. P.O. Box 322, Oakview CA 93022. You'll get paid after we get back. Must bring your own weapons. Safety not guaranteed. I have only done this once before.
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Time travelers from the future are historians....
A confounding factor is that good historians also sometimes appear to be prescient.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
with the idea that you will travel back in time to meet yourself there
Wouldn't that violate the laws of conservation of matter and energy?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Oh great, so now we're going to accept dating advice from Mr. I'm-My-Own-Grandfather?
With time travel that most people overlook is that the Earth is constantly in motion, both around the sun and through space as our solar system and the Milky Way travels. So if one where able to travel back in time you'd end up someplace in space, not on Earth, as the Earth is not going to be anywhere near where you emerge.
One would need to not only traverse time but also space, and be able to calculate precisely where the Earth was at the moment in time you are attempting to travel to. And it needs to be *really* precise, because you need to arrive in a location that's not inside the Earth, or high in the atmosphere, not underwater, or within either a man-made or natural structure (such as a mountain or building).
In other words, you need a TARDIS -- a vessel that can travel both thru time and space and provide you with some level of protection.
That's basically correct. Another idea is that of "protected history", where time travel is possible but can't change the timeline at all, because the quantum dice only get rolled once, so the time traveler was always part of the timeline. That one holds up quite well mathematically, as it turns out.
But you're correct overall: there's no "you can change small things, but not big things" anywhere outside of fiction - it's all or nothing.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Could the "force" or "energy" you felt perhaps have been some seismic phenomena related to, but prior to the earthquake?
The study assumes that a time traveler is able to interface with out current computing technology, which could be horribly primitive, to the point unless they are a historian or archaeologist they may not comprehend how to use it.
1. All of us time travel into the future.
2. You can travel farther into the future using relativity - get a space ship, go REALLY fast for a a good long while and then come back. Time dilation will have occured - you will have aged little, but the earth will have relatively accelerated its time in your absence. While technologically not presently possible, it is trivial in terms of theory.
3. You cannot go back in time. Why? Because space. To go back in time, even if it was possible, means going someplace else in space. Listen to the Monty Python Galaxy song and it will give you the numbers you need to calculate, because even if you go back in time, you have to go back in space as well. If you went back in time now, you would appear in outer space and die very quickly. And that place you need to be would be millions or even billions or trillions of miles away from your present location.
So, no time travel. Sorry.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Ignore this paper or continue to be victimized by imperialist time-travelers.
1. If this study had found examples of prescience, are we expected to believe that time travelers wouldn't have looked at the results of the study and then zipped back prior to the study and expunged the evidence?!?!?
2. You know, if I were a time traveler looking to hide my existence, I would probably publish a study just like this.
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You cannot go backwards in time. Once you do, your alteration of that timeline is permanent. The mere existence of time travelers immediately and irrevocably inflicts an alteration of that timeline which is cosmic in scale, paradoxes can and will (and have) happened.
The paradoxes are neatly avoided if the jump back in time causes a copy of the universe to be made -- as a time traveller, you land in the newly-created duplicate universe, and you're free to kill Hitler or whatever without causing a paradox, because your own past remains safely unchanged.
As to whether making an automatic copy of the universe is a reasonable thing to do, I won't speculate, but there are hints that such a thing might not be completely implausible. (or at least, no less implausible than reverse-time-travel in the first place ;))
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
While it doesn't directly correspond to your story, it seems that people near an earthquake have sometimes reported unusual lights: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=mysterious-light-associated-earthquakes
I thought you might be interested in the article.
The paradoxes are neatly avoided if the jump back in time causes a copy of the universe to be made
That theory only makes sense, if there are multiple "identical" mirror images of our universe, that are just behind us or ahead of us in time; for example, a pre-existing universe that is identical to ours in every way, but started 1 year after ours --- so the Earth calendar today would read Jan 3, 2013..... and of course, another existing universe at every offset between 1 second and 200+ trillion years behind us, and ahead of us.
That theory only makes sense, if there are multiple "identical" mirror images of our universe, that are just behind us or ahead of us in time; for example, a pre-existing universe that is identical to ours in every way, but started 1 year after ours --- so the Earth calendar today would read Jan 3, 2013..... and of course, another existing universe at every offset between 1 second and 200+ trillion years behind us, and ahead of us.
Why not create the required universe "on the fly"? I don't see any particular reason why every possible destination universe would need to be pre-created in advance.
Not to mention that a fixed set of pre-created universes would still suffer from paradoxes as soon as the second time traveller jumped into the same destination universe as a previous time traveller, so it wouldn't really solve the paradox problem...
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Had I traveled back from the future, I would certainly bet all my money on the stock market or raise a technology company with future knowledge. Gathering resources are essential to any kind of mission they were sent to, or if they have no mission at all, who wouldn't like to live comfortably and rich.
You got me. I'm traveling forward in time right now.
But you can't stop me.
Liberty.
I was thinking about this this morning, before I read the article. Spooky!
However, the clear answer is that this is the reason we never see aliens. They invent time machines, and then some alien schmuck goes back in time and prevents life from existing on their planet.
We are almost there. Watch for strange gravity waves from Neptune. Oops, spoilers.
Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company -- Mark Twain
Why not create the required universe "on the fly"? I don't see any particular reason why every possible destination universe would need to be pre-created in advance.
Because, tunneling to an existing universe might be feasible some day. Constructing a new universe would require way too much power output --- requiring essentially an amount of energy output greater than all the potential energy sources available in this universe
Not to mention that a fixed set of pre-created universes would still suffer from paradoxes as soon as the second time traveller jumped into the same destination universe as a previous time traveller
If the traveller is tunneling through universes that are mirror images running at different times --- then there is no time paradox, as nobody has travelled through time from the perspective of either universe.
The traveler loses their "identity" though, since the universe arrived at -- the traveller will either be an identical-appearing clone of someone else, or someone arriving in this parallel universe, whom will be completely unknown to it
The first version of this experiment had positive results.
Please, help! I am trapped in 1985. Please send a DeLorean with a Flux Capacity quickly.
Sure enough, the cow costume was hanging up next to the superhero outfit and sailors uniform. (S,Spud)
Rose and Mickey use the internet and find out about the Doctor.
"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." -- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
But what if time traveling back is only possible to the point when the time machine was invented. So there are no time travelers because the machine has not been invented yet.
What's so special about the invention date, that it should affect all future time travelers?