Ah yeah. 20 years would be hard to explain (although not impossible. Frozen embryos and IVF maybe). I was assuming this was the travelling to 24 hours in the past scenario.
There is so much locally stored on an iPhone and so many apps that if you can’t convince a person from the 80s much less the 50s you’re a time traveler, you’re not trying.
Show off the phone camera. Show off the low light abilities. Show pictures from the future that you already have in your phone! There should be some interesting and unexplainable ones there.
Open up your music app. If you’re like me, you still have local libraries of stuff. Once again, there’s something there (if not most of it) that is just not going to make sense to someone from the 50s (less so with the 80s person.)
And, yes, you can download offline maps. The scientific calculator is impressive. You can show some offline translator apps. You can even show them all the crap that doesn’t work and explain what it is for even more convincing. Like why would you go through the trouble of making up to a of apps and coming up with plausible reasons for why they don’t work?
What else? For me I have tons of games that would wow people of the past; I have stuff like music instrument apps like drum machines and virtual keyboards… I have several different tuners! That would be cool in the 50s! You also have an audio recorder in your pocket!
I can go on longer, but that should be enough to quell the questions of the most hardened skeptic.
Now proving you’re from the near future is much tougher.
I’d go for some layered approaches:
- Make multiple predictions
- In multiple unrelated arenas
- That can’t plausibly be predicted without supernatural or dishonest means; and
- Many of which could be exploited for gain, and I’m not doing so.
At some point, motive becomes important. If I’m somehow fixing the lottery, why am I not buying tickets, or why am I buying them and donating all the cash to a random NGO? If I’m fixing the stock market, why am I not investing?
Also, magicians and scam artists are very, very good at being persuasive; but they do so in a highly curated environment through almost ritualistic actions. If I can pop back and forth between the present and the future, I can make my proof much less ritualistic and much less curated. “You tell me,” I’ll say, “What would convince you.” Even without that ability, making predictions across a broad spectrum of areas (weather, stock markets, lottery numbers) precludes any trickery that I can imagine.
Unfortunately, other time travelers will prevent you from doing so because the non-Hitler timelines actually turn out worse.
I recall a joke blog post about someone protecting the timeline from people going back in time to kill Hitler.
One of those who went back bragged that they brought back some artwork Hitler painted and it would be worth a lot. To which they were reminded that if they brought a painting back in their time machine it would seem it was painted a few days ago and be deemed a fake and thus worthless.
If you have a choice of which day you go back, it’s easier. Just pick one where a totally random event happened.
I show up and say, “In 9 hours and 23 minutes, a meteor that has previously been undetected will come down over Chelyabinsk. Russia. It won’t kill anyone, but there will be many injuries from flying glass as windows are blown out.”
That would give people 9 hours to check with astronomers who would laugh and say no, we haven’t detected any meteors coming in, and a meteor blowing out city windows is so rare as to be ridiculous to predict. Then it would happen.
Pick a day where you can male two or three such predictions.
As for taking a cellphone into the past… I remember in my adult life when flat-panel displays were wondrous future tech. And when I started working, a 5MB hard drive cost thousands of dollars. Show someone a list of songs on a phone, and they’d be blown away. Show them on a high resolution flat screen, and they would be convinced you are either an alien or from the future.
Sounds like what happened in the book, “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.” (sorta)
I like this OP, but I don’t think it’s possible to prove it. I think a “you got lucky” explanation would win out over you must be a time traveler, regardless of your proof.
I think the best way to prove you were a time traveler is to be able to also prove how time travel is possible. Not that you actually did it (which you did), but that it’s possible and here are the physics of it and how I did it. Not sure that would be fast or easy, though.
That ain’t going prove it. You’ll have nothing to prove if there’s never a Hitler, to begin with.
I think I’ve got this figured out. The time travel part, that is. I’ll work out the proof method soon as. Should be simple.
The only problem with the time travel part of the task is that I need there to be some copper alloy dodecahedral receiving antennae distributed fairly evenly around the target timespace coordinates, in order to make the jump, and it seems like I would already need to be able to go back in time to put them there… Minor setback. I’ll figure it out somehow
Thanks, Professor Positive!
“Look at my iPhone. It has iOS 666 version.”
I don’t think you understand the level of tech in 1950. Anything remotely resembling flatscreen be incredible. Even for Hollywood doing mockups (i.e. the iPads in 2001 ) they had to use special effects tricks.
But… I hope you brought the charger brick and cable.
Here, too - the camera capabilities - let alone electronic cameras - are so far removed from 1980 let alone 1950 as to be magic. (I recall a ham radio slow-scan TV camera that consisted of a light sensor and a rotating disc with a series of perforations; state of the art. Light-sensitive video tubes were EXPENSIVE.
Exactly.
This isn’t evidence that you time traveled, of course. It’s evidence that an iPhone traveled.
And this is assuming that iOS 666 isn’t able to run on 2024 hardware.
Suppose that iOS 666 is so efficient that it can run on 2024 hardware, and yet has so many impressive features, not thought of in 2024, that it is hard to imagine them not coming from the future.
I don’t really know this, but it seems a lot more plausible to me that information could be time-traveled than that something with mass could be time traveled. Maybe information cannot be transported without some carrier having mass, but the carrier can be far less fragile than a person. So it’s going to be easier to convince me data traveled than that an object weighing hundreds of grams traveled, much less a person.
If time travel could really be made to work, wouldn’t it put enormous stress on the traveling object? I’d think the person would likely die either from the stress of time travel, or the stress of hopping back to the starting location when the earth is in such rapid motion with respect to other astronomical objects.
That’s right. But it fits the OP, who specified that I have access to the Internet 24 hours from now. The provee gives me the starting number (which they can choose however they wish, like rolling a die), and I’ll set the computer to upload the results of a 24-hour calculation to the Internet. But I’ll have the answer immediately. Since repeated SHA-256 calculations aren’t parallelizable, there’s very limited ability for me to cheat somehow. I could have some special dedicated hardware that’s a little faster, but it couldn’t reduce the answer time to seconds.
What if I cause a “paradox” by cancelling the calculation before it’s finished? There’s no paradox, since it just means I accessed a future from a different universe where it did finish. The calculation itself is still deterministic, and if I get any answer at all, it’ll be the right one (most likely). Unlike many other proposals here, in which quantum indeterminacy will affect the answer.
Events that aren’t affected by microscopic details, like the unknown asteroid, would be more useful. But those things must be fairly far and few between.
The ‘many worlds’ interpretation of quantum mechanics would allow for time travel without paradox, because the minute the traveler appears they would be an observer and collapse the wave function, splitting that universe off into a new one. That probably also means that the new universe would get progressively different from the old one as time goes on, in ways you couldn’t predict. Better make your predictions and your money soon.
On the other hand, maybe quantum mechanics doesn’t allow for it, because the universe is bupposed to be one giant wave function. I’m not sure how that fits with travelers from the future suddenly appearing.
Given the constraints of the OP ([snip} what if you wanted to predict something immediately? Like you have access to the Internet from 24 hours in the future [/snip}), I believe the best way to accomplish this is two-fold:
-
Scour the Internet and record at least 6 random, low-probability, global headline news events from 24 hours into the future. Then time-travel 24 hours into the past.
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Gain the attention of at least two well-credentialed scientists (with a firm understanding of statistics), and tell them, I know this sounds psychotic, but I’m from the future, and I can prove it. Here’s a list of 6 events that will occur over the next 24 hours. If only one or two of these occur as I predict, you can attribute that to incredibly good luck. But, if all 6 occur, you must conclude that that’s statistically impossible to occur by chance alone, and I must be from the future, or at least have access to future events.
Just read a novel where a time traveler from the present day goes back to New York City in the late 19th century, and is caught wearing a digital watch and carrying a taser.
They don’t buy his claim of being from the future, concluding that he’s an anarchist in possession of infernal devices.
If I look at the headline news of the last 24 hours, I get stories such as Trump ordered to pay $80m in defamation compensation, Israel ordered to comply with the Genocide Convention in Gaza, Jürgen Klopp resigning as Liverpool manager, and King Charles undergoing prostate surgery. If somebody had told me these stories yesterday, I would not have been impressed and surely not taken it as evidence of time travel.
Heck, the second effect here is a prediction trick where it may well seem to the audience that no sleight of hand is possible.
Yeah, he’s not doing sleight of hand.