If you’re just trying to convince one person how about telling them the winning numbers on a huge lottery when there’s too little time to buy a ticket. And make the prediction in a big drawing that nobody wins. It can’t be sleight of hand as I’m simply telling them verbally. And I’ve demonstrated I know but am not using my knowledge to get rich so that sort of destroys the idea it’s a massive fraud.
If you want multiple predictions how about the time on the clock for every score in the upcoming Super Bowl. Even if you could rig the game getting the times right would be very hard to rig.
Scientists have a terrible track record with hucksters. Scientists live in a world where the data doesn’t lie, where images aren’t intentional tricks, etc. So I don’t think anyone would believe a scientific pronouncement here. You need a James Randi type to debunk a fraud.
Thinking about it, I think we have an amazing capacity to deny uncomfortable things. Let me give you an example: Przybski’s star. Back in the 80’s, Carl Sagan and others tried to come up with an unambiguous sign of extraterrestrial life. They decided that if they found a star with a spectrum showing short-lived actinides, it must be artificial because there are no known processes in a star that can continually create such short-lived things. So if we found one, aliens.
Of course we found one. Przybski’s star has just such short lived actinides in its atmosphere. What did scientists say to that? “Huh, that’s interesting. But obviously it’s not going to be aliens.” And it’s very unlikely that it is aliens. But we went from ‘sure proof’ to ‘nah’ once the ‘proof’ materialized.
There is almost no combination of wild, unlikely scenarios what would be wilder and more unlikely than time travel, so proving time travel is going to be a really heavy lift.
Here’s the deal. I’ll give you the winning numbers for the next PowerBall drawing if you sign a contract that says you have to give me the money you won if you don’t believe that I have those numbers because I traveled back from the future.
Do you take this deal? If those are the winning numbers are you gonna stick with foolishly prideful skepticism and hand the money over to me, or are you going to swear under oath that you believe I did travel from the future?
No matter what method you use to persuade people you are from the future, you must look like a time-traveler in order to be convincing. I recommend this look.
Why when there’s too little time to buy a ticket. How about you just buy the guy a ticket, say, dude, I’m from the future, here’s a winning lottery ticket, when you win, I don’t want the money, I want you to believe that I’m from the future, or something like that. Like when that kind of actual payoff is in the game and that you’re willing to just give him the winning ticket. And then you can add one more random piece of news about tomorrow, if you feel like it. Or did we eliminate someone else profiting from the information somewhere along the lines?
Like, I don’t believe in time travel (at least in the reverse direction), but if that happened to me, you bet I’m believing time travel. I don’t 100% know how the world works. I don’t know 100% all that is possible and impossible.
The very first thing I would suspect is that you rigged the powerball somehow. That you are in cahoots with someone responsible for the machines or something.
Next, I’d look at every other possibility - you discovered a flaw in the system, the balls weren’t weighted properly, etc. And if I still couldn’t find anything, I’d probably still assume I just missed the trick rather than believe it’s time travel. Because just about any explanation that’s remotely possible is going to be more likley than time travel.
I suspect it would go down in history as ‘the powerball mystery’ that time the strange guy who claimed to be a time traveler won the powerball. But hardly anyone would assume it was really time travel. It’d be another Kennedy conspiracy kind of thing.
For that matter, if you showed me an advanced device that clearly no one on Earth can make today, which is more likely: Time travel, or the device came from aliens? In this case, I’d say even aliens are more likely than time travel.
And I’m not ever 100% convinced of anything. No matter how firmly I believe anything I know there’s always the possibility I’m wrong, that there’s some exception I don’t know about, that this is all just a simulation and nothing is real. So yes, there’s sufficient proof to convince me of anything to a reasonable certainty, but not enough to rule out what seems impossible. That’s why I’m a Last Thursdayist. I don’t have to know if anything actually existed before last Thursday as long as everything keeps working as if it did.
Then you’re not that interested in convincing me you are from the future. Anything you do to convince me could have wide ranging effects in the future. If you aren’t afraid of vanishing by convincing me, or just telling me you are from the future, or just time traveling at all, then you aren’t concerned with any butterfly effect. And we all know if you travel back in time and as a result of that you are never born in the future you will vanish. Your image will even disappear from photographs.
Ok. But isn’t there going to be some sort of butterfly effect no matter what? Granted, winning the lottery is an obvious immediate change, but just interacting with our time traveler has changed the future in some way or another.
“The Butterfly Effect” is just a way of saying that complex systems are highly sensitive to initial conditions. Change any little thing, and It MAY make huge changes over time. But that’s not guaranteed. Complex systems are also metastable, and have forces resisting change. So not every butterfly flapping its wings makes a difference in the world.
Also, changes take time to propagate. A time traveler popping up in San Franscisco would not create instant changes anywhere but in the immediate environment. And whatever changes are made could be dampened out by negative feedbacks and never propagate to the wider world.
Or, you could step on a bug which would have otherwise interfered with someone placing an order for a stock, delaying them and altering the stock price, which happens to be near a tipping point, which causes a cascading stock market collapse. No way to know. But global changes aren’t guaranteed.
I’m not sure there’s a line that can be drawn. You could go into the past and live out your life without much affecting any big trends, or you could swat a fly and cause an eventual war. It’s just risk. I imagine you could put rough parameters around the likelihood of change at a certain distance, but not much more than that.
You travel to the past, and you takes your chances that your predictions will still hold. One thing true is that the more time that goes on while you are in the past, and the more things you do to change it, the more likely it is that the change will show up in the macro world in a measurable way.
You know, arriving out of nowhen in front of people at the right point in space and time is, arguably, the fastest and easiest way to get folks asking you to explain how the heck you did that…
Appearing out of nowhere in front of yourself might be even more convincing. At least for the few nanoseconds before the paradox loops unravel and prevent you doing it.
Someone with knowledge of future events isn’t necessarily from the future. They may simply have access to information from the future. Still doesn’t help the overall problem. The bar remains impossibly high.
Dr Who contains so many contradictions and paradoxes that they had to invent a whole new set of ideas to cope. The Earth, and in particular the UK, appears to have been invaded by aliens so many times in the last few decades that it is impossible that some of the invasions were not occurring at the same time. So there is the idea of timey wimey lack of linearity. And then the idea of fixed points in time, things that can’t be changed. If a police box materialised in front of me, I would take the advice from the TV show and start running, and keep on running. They don’t have red shirted ensigns, but there is usually a lot of collateral damage to bystanders.
I’d take the money, claim that I believe you’re a time traveller (I have to claim that, otherwise I’d have to return the money), and still think to myself that you must either be some kind of fraud or just incredibly lucky. I don’t care which of the two it is, either option is still, in this scenario, more plausible to me than time travel. Perjury charges are not a risk - who could possibly disprove my claim that I believe you’re a time traveller?
you mean showing up naked during a lightning storm (with german accent) doesn’t automatically convince people?
From the above discussion, I can’t imagine anything that would actually convince people. Because - the logical inference would be, if time travel is possible, you should be surrounded by time travellers and all sorts of inexplicable and strange things would be happening, and shoot-outs between the Time Police and strangers with weird and wonderful weapons would be daily occurences, no bank vault or precious item would be safe, any remote population would be subjegated by time travelling dictator wananbees with fancy weapons and robot minions, etc. etc. It wouldn’t just be one guy with lottery numbers - that guy would have to explain where everyone else is…
doesn’t say that winning a sequence of lottery draws is incontrovertible proof of the traveler’s claim. But it is evidence, i.e. a starting point for an investigation.
It’s also not the post I was referring to when I questioned whether you were reading what I wrote (this is now getting as confusing as time travel…). The post I was referring to advocated a thorough scientific investigation, to include consideration/exploration of the possibility of fraud and deception. It sounds like you are opposed to any such investigation, preferring to dismiss claims of time travel (and any evidence presented) as trickery.
I’m saying that someone who wins an extremely improbably sequence of multiple lottery draws has achieved something so incredible that it bears further investigation. Don’t accept the truth of traveler’s claim just yet, whether he claims to be a time traveler, prophet, or alien liaison. Look into it, and devise your own tests rather than accepting tests or evidence that the traveler proposes.
If you’re not keen on tests that are possible to hack (like lottery draws), what about things like predicting tomorrow’s closing prices on a thousand different stocks? Or the time, location, and magnitude of an upcoming major earthquake?
If you’re concerned about sleight of hand, what about having the traveler verbally recite his claim to you over a phone from a thousand miles away, and you write his claims down in pen, on paper, and you (and that paper) remain isolated until his prediction either comes true or gets falsified? Or something else? Again, what would level of evidence would satisfy you that sleight of hand is not involved, and that the event being predicted wasn’t hacked?
Only if the traveler is actually buying tickets. If he’s just spewing out winning numbers without playing them, then what’s his motivation now?
Compared to who? Moreover, if a scientist has failed to adequately consider fraud/deception, then that’s his failing as a scientist; I don’t believe it’s a failing of the scientific method.
Are you saying that Randi wasn’t a kind of scientist? He was, at least on the surface, open to the possibility of outlandish claims, provided they passed tests that met his requirements:
Before Randi’s retirement, JREF sponsored the One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge, which offered a prize of one million US dollars to eligible applicants who could demonstrate evidence of any paranormal, supernatural, or occult power or event under test conditions agreed to by both parties.
People here are getting hung up on the lottery test, and saying it’s not enough:
OK, so be like Randi: devise your own tests, ones involving something other than the lottery. Control for sleight of hand and other trickery. Do a lot of repetitions, a lot of different types of tests. Have the traveler explain and demonstrate how he time-travels.
This reminds me of creationists who make claims of irreducible complexity, saying that for complex organs and systems (like vision), it’s impossible to imagine viable intermediate forms that each confer an advantage over previous forms, therefore evolution can’t be true. That is, until somebody else sketches out a series of intermediate forms that do exactly that, showing that evolution is indeed possible. For scientists to conclude that something must be artificial because they’ve never before seen it in nature would be the height of arrogance.
That is, assuming that’s what actually happened. Przybylski made his puzzling observations in 1961. Looking into it further, I see that there were theories - formed after that discovery - that perhaps alien civilizations were salting that particular star with said actinides, either for disposal purposes or to advertise the presence of an advanced civilization. The earliest such theory I can find from Sagan was in a book he co-authored that was published in 1966, 5 years after the actinide discovery, and it was only presented as a possibility, not a conclusion:
Finally, it’s intriguing to consider the possibility, as posited by researchers like Daniel Whitmire, David Wright, Carl Sagan, and Iosif Shklovskii, that advanced civilizations could use stars like Przybylski’s Star to dispose of nuclear waste. This idea, while speculative, underscores the fascinating potential revelations in our quest to discover extraterrestrial intelligence.
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The third hypothesis: aliens. The last of the three solutions I know of, Wright says in a whispered but never published voice, is that the heavy elements would be the product of artificial nuclear reactions. “Here on Earth, someone has proposed disposing of nuclear waste by throwing it into the Sun.” In fact, he notes, “Whitmire and Wright proposed that alien civilizations could use their stars as repositories for their fissile waste. In fact, in 1966, Sagan and Shklovskii in their book Intelligent Life in the Universe proposed that aliens might throw artificial elements into their stars to attract attention.”
Can you provide a cite that documents astronomers saying, prior to the discovery of an actinide-laden star, that the discovery of such a star would be proof of alien civilization?
