We're you, dude.
No way.
Yes way.
Posted on 01/09/2014 5:20:12 AM PST by JoeProBono
You can find people bragging about almost anything on the Internet these days, but apparently traveling through time isn’t one of them.
Researchers combed through social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, Google, Google+ and Bing to see if anyone had mentioned people or events that occurred from the early 2000s to mid-2013 before they happened. Using terms like Pope Francis or comet ISON, the team investigated for evidence of time travelers speaking about major future events on the then present-day Internet.
The author of the study, Michigan Technological University physicist Robert Nemiroff, said the results don’t prove that time travelers aren’t real, they just show that no one is bragging about future events on the web.
According to the study’s abstract: “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.”
Nemiroff came up with the idea for the study while playing poker with his students.
The abstract continues:
“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.”
The study is going to be submitted to several journals.
I wrote THIS post next week.
your are thinking of a Conservative time traveler......
I come to you here from yesterday.
Yep, like any mere mortal would be. I just hope there haven’t been and won’t be any so-called “Femi-Nazi” time travelers coming back hell-bent on rearranging the furniture!
Anyone capable of time travel has thought about it a lot. Whether to go forward in time or backward is a central question.
If the past cannot be changed, or it is extremely dangerous to do so, travel to the past becomes tourist travel at best, an exercise in voyeurism - look but don’t touch.
Far more interesting would be to travel forward in time. Great wealth & power could be gained today by knowing what will happen before it happens. But would that trump time travel itself? The marvel of seeing the future might tempt the traveler to see even further into the future. Like a kid at Disney World, leaving is not an option. Having done this a few times, history - the past - becomes ever more boring. Why ever return to the “present” when the future is so much more interesting?
This is why you never meet a time traveler. They are 10 million years ahead of you. You don’t know about them, yet, & probably never will.
Another useless, wastful “study”.
So if someone had posted “Pope Francis” in 2012, that would show there was a “time traveler”. Sorry, but prescience is not “time travel.” Both are frauds and fakes, but they are not the same.
Ok. Pope Joseph, Pope Anthony, Pope Gregory, Pope Peter, Pope Paul, Pope David, Pope George, Pope Christopher. One of those is sure to be a pope’s name, and this posting will be taken as proof of “time travel.”
What a stupid study. Anybody with a brain would know that posting comments about future events on social media would be a blatant violation of the Temporal Prime Directive, and would be easily detected by the time cops and the violator would be severely punished.
Ha! FRAUD! I caught you. There are no books in 3451.
By 2264, the last person who could read died, and all the books were used as kindling to fight global cooling.
You could look it up. But, of course, you probably can't.
The fact that I am aware of the Temporal Prime Directive does not in any way imply that I am or ever have been or ever will be a time traveler.
If it were EVER possible (even 1 billion years from now) we would be flooded with visitors from the future, because once something has been invented you can never put the cat back into the bag and eventually (even if it's policed) average people will get ahold of the technology and use it.
Now what I do think may be possible is for future humans to create simulations of the entire world starting at any particular time that they can then enter in the form of an avatar and interact with people and situations from the past in such a realistic way to be almost indiscernible from real life and for the simulation to seem completely real to all the NPC which are taking part in it.
LOL! Besides, that whole slingshot-around-the-sun thing is hard on ships!
Someone remarked on the obvious, that there are relatively few reasons to go back to the past, other than:
1) Attempting to change the future. However, the drawbacks to this are so blatant that the assumption has to be that it would be avoided. The one exception being to cause an *indeterminate* statistical aberration, that *could* have happened naturally.
This can be subdivided into three things in time: a probability, a possibility, and an alternative.
A probability is like flipping a coin, which would typically be heads or tails. Probabilities end when they “normalize”, say you put the coin back in your pocket, assuming the coin flip was not used to change something that “mattered”.
A possibility is typically more complex. There must be multiple instances that fit the Standard Distribution, aka “bell shaped” Curve (SDC) in their outcome. Like ball bearings on a peg board.
http://i.imgur.com/3CbdeM7.png
To demonstrate temporal interference, you have to show that the distribution is *even*, that is, a “flat line” distribution; or to really nail things, an *inverted* bell shaped curve, which should not happen in nature.
However, like a probability, a possibility still normalizes after the event is over. In the real world, people regard such things as phenomena, and promptly forget them in other than “how about that?” or anecdotal terms. So unless people *act* on such information, it is lost.
An alternative actually causes a temporal rift. That is when a probability or possibility actually causes a split in time with two distinct alternatives that even when they reach the same conclusion, they have caused a “butterfly effect” far outside repair for the foreseeable future.
This happens naturally all the time when people choose irrevocable outcomes in their lives. Such as “Should I become a Marine, or a ballet dancer?” Whichever one they choose, their future is split in half. However, there is “overlap”, such as becoming a Marine who really loves to watch ballet, or does ballet as a hobby rather than a career; or a ballet dancer who fantasizes a lot about being a Marine, and goes camping a lot.
Alternatives matter a lot to time travelers, because if they influence them, they may migrate from one alternative future to another. Some have even theorized that there is no way a time traveler from the future could *return* to the same future from where he left. A lot of debate about this theory, however.
2) (Back to the reasons for time travel) The second reason is the gathering of accurate historical data. As was pointed out by Asimov, this one is extremely problematic, because, as we might say today, the National Security Agency (NSA) would *love* such a capability, to spy on people in the unchanging past, of perhaps an hour ago. It creates a “fish bowl” world of zero privacy. And a scoundrel, like Obama, would absolutely love the ability to use secrets for political gain; or even to change the past to make America the disaster he wants it to be.
3) The third rationale is “wasted resource recovery”, which is the ‘Star Trek IV’ idea of bringing extinct whales to the future to repopulate the Earth. Other things would include recovering brilliant people who died young, like Mozart, while substituting a replacement to take the place of their body, putting the real one in a suitable place adapted for them, so that they can continue to be creative.
Future hasn’t happened yet. As I said last time.
We use old books for neutron moderators in our home reactors. They are the only allowed use of carbon. As I mentioned and you clarified, all books were destroyed.
We do have some books in the Relics Museum, I’m here looking for a copy of Venus On The Half-Shell. It is being hotly debated whether Chworktap was Ingólfur Arnarson’s first or second wife, and that book may answer this question.
You could travel back to buy rare coins (or book, painting, etc) and bury them, or some resource like gold when it was $35/oz, or get some disease bacterium before it mutated.
The Time Travelers have scrubed clean all references to Time Travel on the Internet with their advanced science.
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