Searching the Internet for Evidence of Time Travelers

Factual Questions
1

See subject. See article at arxiv, by two physics professors. Spoiler: No time travelers, at least not from the future.

Nice point about possible time travelers from the past…

Good bunch of references, BTW. Also, from the abstract, they make a pretty broad claim:

…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.

If so, impressive, in it’s own igNoble way? Especially if they themselves are time travelers, but let’s ignore that for a moment.

In a nutshell, they search the Net for the words “Comet ISON” (discovered in September 2012) and “Pope Francis” (a unique pope-name) in various Net orthographies, including #popefrancis, etc.

But they ignore (I think it is not mentioned) secret insertions in code, which I would do, and is obviously the only correct interpretation of the data.

They cite (not posted here) pop fiction of time travel using examples that are generally irrelevant to their methodology. The only credit given is to other physicists (see below).

Which science fiction authors have gotten into this specifically? There’s gotta be.

From the intro:
Although less well known than popular fiction, experiments designed to discover human time travelers have been conducted. In May of 2005, then graduate student A. Dorai at MIT publicised and held a convention for time travelers [17]. No one claiming to come from the future showed up [17]. S. Hawking did a similar experiment in July of 2012, holding a personal party for time travelers, but sending out the invitations only after the party [18]. No one claiming to be a time traveler showed up [18].

In this work, we report on a series of searches for digital signatures that time travelers potentially left on the Internet. Specifically, we search for content that should not have been known at the time it was posted. Such information is here referred to as “prescient”. To the best of our knowledge, no similar search has ever been published previously. Section 2 of this work outlines possible types of time travelers. Section 3 describes one search for prescient content placed on the Internet, highlighted by a search of tweets on Twitter. Section 4 describes a search for prescient terms submitted in Internet search engines, highlighted by a search for two specific terms in the online search engine for the Astronomy Picture of the Day web site. Section 5 describes an experiment involving the request for a prescient timed communication to be sent either as a tweet or an email. Section 6 summarizes the results and draws some conclusions concerning the nature of the results.

2

Heh. Like I’d be that sloppy. There’s a reason for the extensive training and selection process, you know.

3

In Asimov’s otherwise lackluster The End of Eternity, he has a time traveler to the past (well before the invention of the atomic bomb) communicate to his associates still in the future by means of a newspaper advertisement, consisting of a phrase with the acronym “ATOM” against an abstract mushroom cloud-shaped background.

4

All the
Talk
of the
Market

as I recall (this bit from “End of Eternity” was the first thing I thought of when I heard about this paper, too.

5

Of course, the question remains why on Earth a time traveller (assuming that they can go in time, and can use the internet there) should google or mention terms such as “Comet ISON” before September 2012 or “Pope Francis” before March 2013 if they know pretty well that they wouldn’t find any information online on these topics.

6

The answer is that the PsykBlok injection inhibits them from mentioning anything that would be anachronistic, while the MonitR program wipes any info from native memories when it can, and when it can’t it changes the names of anything from the future so that it cannot later be traced back-forward.

7

Oh… Yes, of course. :confused:
:slight_smile:

8

There’s plenty of narrative ideas that could explain that - for example, the time traveller might have been involuntarily transported, and not an expert on this period. All she remembers is that back in the primitive days, some trend that in retrospect will be very important started with Pope Francis - so she’s curious about whether Pope Francis already exists…

9

Unless she’s clever enough/lucky enough to search “who is the pope now?” and “list of popes.” That wouldn’t set off anybody’s Time Traveler Radar.

10

Replay featured a time traveler stuck in the past searching for other time travelers in his predicament. The protagonist places classified ads asking people if they remember certain things that hadn’t actually happened yet:

“Do you remember Three Mile Island, Challenger, Watergate, Reaganomics? If so, contact me at . . .”

Travelers from the future would know the references (and hopefully contact the protagonist), but ordinary people would just ignore the cryptic ramblings in the ads.

11

In Tim Powers’ Anubis Gate , the time travelers whistle Beatles tunes in 1830s England as a recognition signal.

12

“John Titor” fooled a few people until, uh, all his predictions about the future didn’t come true. This suggests to me that a fake time traveler simply needs to set his predictions sufficiently far in the future so that all his readers would be dead, or at least long enough to exit stage left.

13

These people are a pain in the butt, is what they are. Twenty of our time travelers attended Hawking’s party, but since he then published the results, we knew about it in the future. So we had to send all twenty of them back again to undo it.

We’d get way more of our real missions and research done if these yahoos didn’t keep trying to detect us. Fortunately, they always tell people afterwards (or at least we don’t care about the ones who don’t), so it’s easy to retroactively clean it up.

What?

14

I wouldn’t be too sure about what you say in your last clause. People wouldn’t know that Three Mile Island, Challenger, Watergate or Reagonomics are historic events that will be of importance in the future, but they would realise that something unusual is going on - either something suspicious (even if there is no clue as to the nature of the suspicion), or there are some weirdos at work. In both cases, such ads could possibly attract attention, e.g. from cops who suspect that the ads are coded messages with which criminals or spies communicate with each other, or from jokers who just want to pull a prank.

15

Elon Musk is a time traveller from the future. Isn’t it obviou to everyone? Do I risk my life by posting this?

16

And those ordinary people might choose to respond, but they wouldn’t be able to explain the significance of those terms - IOW, they wouldn’t be able to pass themselves off as time travelers.

17

That’s right, but that’s not the point I was trying to make. My point was that placing these ads in a newspaper would call other people’s attention to the time travellers, for whom such attention could be undesirable.

18

During the Superbowl (last year? year before? I forget…) a friend of mine posted on Facebook that the power was out in the stadium, the game would be cancelled, and everyone had to go home. I read the post about ten minutes before the power went out at the game. We still laugh about it.

I assume he’s a time traveler.

19

Just hide the clues better. Who, back in 1975, would have questioned a personal ad which had the phrase “never gonna give you up”? A bit wordy, perhaps, but within the realm of what some people do anyway.

It’s just Parental Bonus for a different class of people: If you aren’t clued in, your eye just slips right over it, but if you Know Things, it attracts your attention.

20

Actually, it in the book it does call attention to them, and in one of the loops (he keeps reliving history over and over) history gets pretty mangled when the government catches him and makes him tell the future.