If I had the ability to choose which point in space and time I can arrive, I’d pick some astronomer at a university…someone with the academic chops, but socially “invisible”, so, not un-approachable…and tell him that at such-and-such inclination/declination…somewhere between Orion’s Belt and Cassiopeia, a New Star will ignite within the next 72 hours.
Something NO Astronomer even today can predict.
How can I possibly influence astronomic events?
I’m thinking this is in the neighborhood of correct. For it to work, in my mind, the 6 random low-probability events have to be “freak” events. Predicting a hurricane is not a big deal, hurricanes occur where hurricanes occur during times of year when they occur - it won’t seem like a big deal to know about a specific one. Unless something weird happened with it…
I’m thinking, Buffalo Bills player Damar Hamlin will die during the football game in the second quarter with exactly X minutes on the clock, and then be resuscitated. They will cancel the rest of the game - that’s not a normal thing that happens and yet it did and on national TV - it might be just as statistically improbable as knowing exactly what all the stats are down to the decimal, but the impact feels more improbable because there are always stats at the end of every game, but almost no game includes a player dying. Then predict another, and another event similar in style to that one. So you’d need to find a specific day where enough global well known “freak” things happen - some can be purely scientific that your scientist would only understand as being extremely improbable to know. I bet it’s not that hard. Also, have a nice broad range of predictions (sports, finance, science, etc.) since you never know what’s going to trigger someone to hear you out.
The key, to me, is finding something really odd that happened during a normal event.
Just choose a day when a few unanticipated natural, or man-made disasters occur somewhere on Earth (e.g. tornadoes, flash floods, commercial or military air crashes, etc.). They don’t have to be huge disasters, just unexpected and reported on a legitimate news-outlet somewhere. And, yes, the more freakish, the better.
I just got back from tomorrow. Somewhere in the world, tomorrow, there will be an earthquake.
Where? And, how many casualties?
There’ll be an earthquake in Japan. No casualties. (The likelihood of this being true on any given day isn’t so bad. See here: https://www.data.jma.go.jp/multi/quake/index.html?lang=en)
Then that should not be one of the 6 headlines for you to use to convince someone you’re from the future.
Me too! To further prove my credentials I’ll let on that Donald Trump will say something stupid.
It would have to be incontrovertible proof; simply taking next Tuesday’s WSJ back wouldn’t necessarily do it, because someone could produce one today for next Tuesday that says anything.
There’s always going to have to be that element of accurate prediction- once Tuesday rolls around, and Tuesday’s WSJ matches yours exactly… several days later, then you’ll have proof.
That’s the key thing- it’s going to have to involve something fairly local in terms of time- that day or the next day, I’d imagine. So sports scores, stock prices, any really notable news events, etc… would all suffice.
I think it would have to be something that you couldn’t easily guess and have a reasonable chance of getting right- maybe not only the sports score, but how many hits and errors, or strikeouts, or first downs, or passing yards or whatever as well. The reason this came up is because I was thinking “What if a time traveler came back to Nov 2, 2024?” and realizing that there are likely a small number of realistic combinations of electoral votes for either candidate, and that would be something that could be guessed at with some reasonable likelihood of getting it right. But if you were to come back today and guess the score of tomorrow’s NFC championship along with the number of passing yards for each starting quarterback, I’d be convinced. That’s not the sort of thing that can be easily guessed.
That’s something that might be subject to the butterfly effect, though. Especially if the supposed time traveler shares the prediction before it happens. After the fact, when opening that envelope, Occam’s razor says that’s just sleight of hand.
HUMPH!
meant to type “anonymous” but had a serious deficiency of caffeine.
Events occurring over the past 24 hours:
Magnitude 2.6 earthquake 9km Southwest of Homer, Alaska. Time 2024-01-27 19:50:58 (UTC-08:00) Location 59.580°N 151.650°W Depth 49.9 km
And so on and so forth: Latest Earthquakes
A 25-year-old dancer from New York died after having an allergic reaction after eating a mislabeled cookie sold by grocery chain Stew Leonard’s.
Sabalenka won the Australian Open titles with a 6-3, 6-2 win over Zheng Qinwen on Saturday.
Jackie Robinson statue stolen from youth league field in Wichita, Kansas.
Given reporting delays a 48 hour window would require less double checking.
Was that the short story Wikihistory by Desmond Warzel?
Yup! Thanks for finding it! I had lost track of where it was posted. It’s a funny read.
Apply the scientific method:
Make some observations (this guy is providing near-future predictions - quakes, volcanic eruptions, repeated lottery wins, share prices, etc. - that are accurate to a galactic level of improbability).
Formulate a hypothesis (this guy is either a con artist, or he’s a real time traveler).
Test the hypothesis (e.g. observe him popping in and out of existence in your timeline, or take steps to protect the chain of custody of his near-future predictions to assure no sleight of hand, or…any other test you can think of, the results of which will either lend support to the hypothesis or give lie to it).
Develop more tests, the results of which should add/subtract support for your hypothesis.
Maybe they won’t convince you on the first pass, but there must be some level of evidence, less than infinite, that would convince you beyond any reasonable doubt that you are dealing with a time traveler. A dogmatic dismissal of the possibility of time travel no matter what evidence is prevented puts one in the territory of religious believers and flat-earthers.
No, blindly applying the scientific method with a child-like naivety that human beings don’t lie and deliberately make things up leads to scientists falling for thinking the worst kind of woo is real. Comparing it to flat-earthers is utterly absurd. Scientists have fallen for all kinds of flim-flam and belief in paranormal and psychic powers because they neglected the very obvious possibility that the one demonstrating these proofs was deliberately cooking the data in the worst possible way. Sorry, if someone can come up with the numbers for Powerball or Mega Millions, the logical and scientific conclusion isn’t to take them at their word that they are time travelers or possess psychic powers, or are receiving visions from the future, or that God is talking to them, or aliens are communicating with them, or that magic is real.
Scientists fell for Uri Geller amongst a litany of others because of this. Just because you can’t immediately figure out how someone is committing fraud is a poor basis for coming to the conclusion that their wildly absurd explanation is in fact the truth.
I’m starting to wonder whether you read my post. I did not advocate for accepting a purported time traveler’s claim on the basis of one Powerball win, or even many such wins. If someone reports the winning numbers for the next half-dozen Powerball drawings, there are four possibilities I can think of:
What I advocated for was further investigation - not specifically into how a series of Powerball wins might have been achieved but into other observations that might be consistent with time travel while lacking any other plausible explanation. Having the time traveler provide detailed predictions of natural or manmade disasters might be one such observation. Watching him come and go from our timeline might be another such observation.
If instead your approach is to immediately claim sleight of hand and then refuse to investigate the matter any further, then it would seem there is no level of evidence that would convince you that this person is a time traveler. If so, then this is entirely analogous to flat-earthers, who refuse to believe any round-earth evidence presented to them, to the point of reflexively dismissing really irrefutable evidence as the product of conspiracy or fraud on the part of round-earthers.
If I’m wrong about that, then what level of evidence would convince you?
Also, there is absolutely nothing about the scientific method that precludes considering the possibility of fraud or deception on the part of the person making the extraordinary claims.
The OP asked about a fast and easy way to prove one’s time travelling capabilities, and that’s where the problem lies. It’s certainly possible to devise a sophisticated experimental set-up that excludes other explanations for the accuracy of the traveller’s predictions to such an extent that we’d have to accept his time-travelling claims; but they’re complicated, expensive, and lengthy. The fundamental problem is that time travel is such an extraordinarily strong claim to make that we’d want extraordinarily strong evidence to accept it; this pretty much excludes any fast and easy way of the sort the OP is asking for.
Not directed to me, but it’s a good general question. My answer would be no evidence would convince me. Not in a real life scenario of how this would occur.
I don’t think human time travel is real or possible. So, I’ll never “get there”. It would only ever come across to me as a trick that I cannot figure out (imagine the time traveler happens to be David Copperfield - that helps understand my thinking). It’s like an inverse flat-earth situation. Let’s say it is actually flat and Copperfield comes up to me with real evidence to prove it. I just wouldn’t believe the evidence. I’ve been too pro-round earth for way too long based on some really solid well-vetted evidence and flat earth has been roundly rejected. I’d likely need other credible people to tell me it’s actually flat (based on their own observations, etc) and telling me over a long period of time.
I think all this says more about me than I realized. I’m not completely open-minded like I’d like to believe and I’m reliant on group-think. But there’s just no way I’d ever come to the decision that someone is a time-traveler by myself. I could never discount or get past that it’s just some sort of trick.
I’m starting to wonder that myself, because that is exactly what you advocated, bolding mine:
Would you be so quick to take the ‘time traveler’ at his word if the reason he gave for his seemingly inexplicable knowledge was ‘God told me,’ ‘aliens communicate with me,’ ‘I’m psychic,’ or ‘magic is real, I went to Hogwarts?’ Would you be accusing me of coming from the realms of flat-earthers or (ironically) religious believers?
Just because you can’t explain how a magic trick is performed is no reason to take a magician at his word that he has performed actual magic. Just because you haven’t found the mundane explanation of how someone has ‘predicted’ a bunch of Powerball and Mega Millions drawings isn’t extraordinary proof that they came from the future, or any reason to take them at their word that this is the actual explanation. Again, if the reason they gave was God, you’d be in the awkward position of both saying this is extraordinary proof that God exists while at the same time telling me that I’m in the territory of religious believers.
As an aside, there’s a rather obvious and immediate mundane motivation for winning so many Powerball and Mega Millions drawings. Accepting time travel as being real and the reason because one can’t figure out how they committed fraud is bizarre at best.