I have vague memories of a short sci-fi story with this premise. The time detective spots the traveller because he doesn’t pull his trouser legs up when he sits down. In the future people don’t wear trousers and aren’t used to pulling the legs up to avoid wrinkles. Does anyone remember what story this was?
I’d look at classified ads for one with four lines that spell “ATOM” as an acrostic.
Ted Kennedy got busted as a time traveler in 1998:
Depending on how far time was traveled, seems like their accent/vocabulary would give them away.
Holy crap! It’s started already!
Depending on their apparent age and where they were born and raised they may be missing a smallpox vaccine scar.
I think you’re vastly overrating how tuned in to pop culture most people are; you’re going to get a lot of false positives with this technique, and the time traveler is more likely to have studied up on background info than a random person. People have stuff that they keep up with, but very few people actually stay on top of all of the current trends. You’d probably peg half the people on this board as time travelers with that test, for example.
You’d be able to tell by the shimmering halo surrounding the body.
Also you can just ask them. Time travelers aren’t allowed to lie if you ask them if they are a time traveler. Oh wait, that’s undercover cops, nevermind.
Hard to say, especially since some kind of technological artificial immunity (like nanotech antigens) seems more plausible than time travel as far as future inventions go.
The way I understood the OP (or rather, one way): If we look at our past history, are there events in it that might have been caused or influenced by clandestine time travel? If such historical events exist, would we even be able to tell? How do we spot them?
For the record: No, I personally don’t think that there are any. There’s a simple test: Does Hitler exist in our timeline? If he does, there’s no time travel shenanigans in it. As we know, the first thing any time traveler does is to kill Hitler.
If your timeline doesn’t have Hitler, you might have time travelers, and you should be able to find them in the historical record. Look for any reported incidents of mysterious and heavily armed visitors queuing up outside a house in Braunau am Inn, Austria-Hungary, at around the year 1900 or thereabouts.
They would speak English but you wouldn’t be able to understand it. Using phrases like “How would spot…”
This is more what I had in mind. You might be looking through archives and see a headline that says, “Unidentified man kills Austrian baby. Police have no motive.” Now, it would be strange that it was an unsolved and apparently random crime, but since WW2 never happened in your universe, you would have no way to know its real significance. Right?
I dont know because I’ve often thought that our computers have developed so fast over just the past few years makes me wonder if somebody is showing some future stuff to a group of engineers. I mean we went from tube technology in Eniac to chips to microchips and computing power keeps doubling and improving.
Granted this is part of the plot for "Terminator and was also a plotline for a Star Trek Voyager episode.
Isn’t the handwave in DOCTOR WHO that some events are fixed points in time and can’t be altered, while most others are fair game? So if offing Hitler would change history so dramatically that time travel is never invented, it’s impossible – but you could still make it so Biff Tannen gets punched out by George McFly, or is handed a sports almanac from the future, or whatever; those changes are minor enough.
They’re holding the mouse like a microphone and saying, “Hello computer!”
The time traveler’s computer has Windows 8.
Author Jack Finney’s protagonist causes the time travel inventor’s parents to not meet and cause the project to have never happened. Members of the time travel project begin “remembering” things that did not happen. One of them travels back to prevent the protagonist preventing the parents meeting. A tangled web, and a darn confusing one at times. There is that darned word again!
Space travel seems to be a lot more within the grasp of cultures with technology similar to ours, than time travel, so if Von Damiken stuff is proven legitimate, my money is on space travelers.
There seem to be two factors working from opposite ends, that militate against time travel: The obvious philosophical limitations, and the high risk that some time traveler screws up so bad, the results wold be abundantly visible.
Like, we, as space travelers, completely ignore the consideration of hiding the fact that we were there. Why wouldnt time travelers do the same, and leave flags and shit all over the place.