Searching the Internet for evidence of time travelers • Hacker News Board

Re: Searching the Internet for evidence of time travelers

#21

Post by raverbashing » Thu, Jan 02, 2014, 11:02 AM UTC

binarymax wrote: post #16

This only covers time travelers from the future. If one were to use similar methods to find time travelers from the past, we'd probably find millions of candidates :)

I believe finding time travellers from the past is trivial, especially those who travelled at a speed of 1s/s (or adimensional 1)

Re: Searching the Internet for evidence of time travelers

#22

Post by 3rd3 » Thu, Jan 02, 2014, 11:03 AM UTC

The NSA probably has enough data at hand for answering this question.

Re: Searching the Internet for evidence of time travelers

#23

Post by lucaspiller » Thu, Jan 02, 2014, 11:04 AM UTC

Udo wrote: post #11

This is interesting, but these methods don't strike me as really viable. The Twitter outreach was specifically targeted at the cooperation of Twitter-using time travelers, and while Pope Francis might or might not be historically significant enough to warrant prescient mentioning, I'm sure comet ISON is not. The assumption is also (and maybe it has to be) that time travelers would blurp out important prescient inform…

> Twitter-using time travelers

If I were a time traveller I probably wouldn't use any of the social networks that are popular for non-time-travellers. Firstly managing so many social network accounts to keep up with the latest fashions would be a right pain (imagine having to change your profile picture on all of them...), but also their 'timeline' view would be completely different to my relative timeline.

I'd assume the network format would be distributed, running on something akin to a phone that you keep on you at all times. Whenever you make a post it records your relative 'life time', or just increments an id, so posts are always ordered in your relative timeframe. When you meet someone it would sync up with their account - I'm not quite sure how that would work though. The issue is you could post something about them publicly that hasn't happened yet in their timeframe (that could be embarrassing). Private messages are even worse...

(N.b. I should probably patent this idea for when time travel is invented)

Re: Searching the Internet for evidence of time travelers

#24

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jan 02, 2014, 11:06 AM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Searching the Internet for evidence of time travelers

#25

Post by onion2k » Thu, Jan 02, 2014, 11:06 AM UTC

Perhaps Twitter is run by a cabal of evil time travellers who have created technology to check whether tweets reveal temporal anomalies and delete them automatically to cover their tracks and protect the status of an elite class in the distant future. What if all communications technology has been built around this capability; everything routed through a network of 'security agencies' that ostensibly protect the function of the current government but really work to design a future that benefits a rarified few.

That'd be cool.

Re: Searching the Internet for evidence of time travelers

#26

Post by DanBC » Thu, Jan 02, 2014, 11:08 AM UTC

There's a relevant Mitchell and Web scetch. Someone travels back in time and meets Faraday. Faraday asks a bunch of questions, none of which can be answered because the traveller is just an everyday person who has little clue about how things work.

Re: Searching the Internet for evidence of time travelers

#27

Post by praptak » Thu, Jan 02, 2014, 11:10 AM UTC

I'm about to go back in time. If I succeed, the silicon transistor gets invented in 1954 and Christmas goes to happen in the winter (northern hemisphere).

Re: Searching the Internet for evidence of time travelers

#28

Post by lazyjones » Thu, Jan 02, 2014, 11:12 AM UTC

If time travel is possible at all, we'd eventually discover and use it. I wonder if this means that we'll destroy our civilization before becoming able to use time travel (seems more likely than time travel being impossible to achieve within thousands of years from now).

Re: Searching the Internet for evidence of time travelers

#29

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jan 02, 2014, 11:17 AM UTC

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Re: Searching the Internet for evidence of time travelers

#30

Post by primitivesuave » Thu, Jan 02, 2014, 11:18 AM UTC

praptak wrote: post #17

awjr wrote: post #10

Isn't the issue here that they are describing the methods through which they are trying to determine time travel. In effect, telling anyone in the future exactly what not to do. Let's also assume that somebody had a reason to travel into the past, say to kill Hitler. Our timeline would record that an Austrian artist was murdered in the 1920s. We would not consider this historically significant. I think time travel is…

> Let's also assume that somebody had a reason to travel into the past, say to kill Hitler. Our timeline would record that an Austrian artist was murdered in the 1920s. This would prevent World War 2 and the associated advances in technology, possibly including those leading to the time travel being possible in the first place.

You could also imagine the converse, where someone from the future brings back all scientific knowledge, thus reducing the time it takes scientists of the past to invent time travel, which in turn leads to that person bringing back all scientific knowledge sooner, perpetuating onwards until massive amounts of knowledge are acquired in small amounts of time. Such is the nature of the grandfather paradox.