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!”
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.
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.
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
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 !
So many millions of people have posted information to the internet. Is there algorithm so good it did not have a single false positive?
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.
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.
...would have been found but there isn't a Twitter client for an IBM 5100.
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.
Nah, I've just seen him chopping logs out back.
You're a temporary arrangement of matter sliding towards oblivion in a cold, uncaring universe
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
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.
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.
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"
...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.
FWIW, I count only one tower. And burning/exploding skyscrapers is hardly a concept that was kicked off with 9/11, never appearing in action movies prior - I can think of two movies featuring them off the top of my head, from the 1970s and the 1980s.
It's a generic action movie poster featuring a generic action movie scene.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
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.
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 $24.95
6x9 168 pages
ISBN 978-0-9910531-0-0
*I am not being paid or compensated in any way to promote his book and have no direct ties to it other than having "friended" McGrew on /.
My abilities are only limited by my imagination
Time travelers from the future are historians....
A confounding factor is that good historians also sometimes appear to be prescient.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)