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Searching the Internet for evidence of time travelers

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Re: Searching the Internet for evidence of time travelers

#51

Post by andyjohnson0 »

lucaspiller wrote: post #23
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 assum…

Nice idea. Although the user-base of time travellers might be a bit limited. I would suggest broadening your product to include the soon-to-be emerging high relativistic speed and FTL travel sectors. Part of the process of friending someone could be to indicate how your respective light-cones intersect, for example.

If your network is ad-supported then there might be extra complications in temporally localising the ad content so that it doesn't induce the wrong kind of causality violations. You might want to give that some thought, now or in the future.

Disclosure: I'm not a VC in this timeline.

Re: Searching the Internet for evidence of time travelers

#52

Post by infruset »

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 :)

Here's a good way to spot them : http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=3001#comic

Re: Searching the Internet for evidence of time travelers

#53

Post by astrobe_ »

graylights wrote: post #43
threeseed wrote: post #40

I've never understood this logic. If say time travel is invented in year 3000. Then surely by 3050 it would be affordable for a certain segment of society. And be 3070 available for a mass market. And by 3100 available in watch form. So shouldn't we expect there to be millions/billions of people interfering with the past. A significant percentage of which would be deliberately aiming to manipulate, destroy, communica…

It's been 60 years since nuclear power was invented, so in 10 years it'll be available for mass market? I'd also like my watch form plane. What if it's so energy intensive that a future dyson sphere can only power it once a year. It doesn't matter how cheap the machine is, if the resources are expensive.

Indeed energy conservashion and entropy equalizashion was a large problem.

Re: Searching the Internet for evidence of time travelers

#54

Post by astrobe_ »

threeseed wrote: post #40

I've never understood this logic. If say time travel is invented in year 3000. Then surely by 3050 it would be affordable for a certain segment of society. And be 3070 available for a mass market. And by 3100 available in watch form. So shouldn't we expect there to be millions/billions of people interfering with the past. A significant percentage of which would be deliberately aiming to manipulate, destroy, communica…

Interventions in the past are possible as long as they don't change the future in significant ways. Think of it as Schrödinger's cat who is not dead as long as you don't look inside the box.

Re: Searching the Internet for evidence of time travelers

#55

Post by andyjohnson0 »

infruset wrote: post #49
andyjohnson0 wrote: post #38

I'm not sure why time travellers from the future would bother to leave prescient messages on the net. What's the motivation? Something like graffiti artists tagging difficult locations? What I can see them (hypothetically) doing is manipulating present-day financial markets by exploiting their knowledge of future events (e.g. sudden commodity shortages or unexpected mineral discoveries) to increase their wealth. Even…

Yes, I would probably go back to 2009 and mine bitcoins (or fill captchas for 5 BTC a piece..) with a CPU..

Good point. All the early bitcoin miners are clearly suspect. And Satoshi Nakamoto's sudden appearance and then disappearance now makes total sense.

Re: Searching the Internet for evidence of time travelers

#56

Post by DanBC »

bwindels wrote: post #50
DanBC wrote: post #26

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.

Armstrong and Miller actually: http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6c2kyNJ3Omo

Whoops, thanks for the correction.

I did wonder why I couldn't find the clip in YouTube.

Re: Searching the Internet for evidence of time travelers

#58

Post by mcv »

arethuza wrote: post #34
andyjohnson0 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"...say to kill Hitler." Everybody kills Hitler on their first trip. http://www.abyssapexzine.com/wikihistory/

Why just Hitler? Stalin and Mao were arguably equally as bad: http://necrometrics.com/tyrants.htm And there are monsters like Leopold II of Belgium (possible victims in the range 2-15 million) who hardly anyone remembers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_II_of_Belgium#Exploitat... Actually, as hardly anyone remembers Leopold II maybe he is the ideal target.... :-| [NB I eventually remembered that I'm against the…

Killing Stalin without killing Hitler might not be the best idea, considering the vital role Russia played in the defeat of the nazis. And maybe Leopold II gets overlooked by time travelers exactly because they also don't remember him.

(Good of you to mention Leopold II, though. Also note Henry Morton Stanley's role in that despicable piece of genocide.)

Re: Searching the Internet for evidence of time travelers

#59

Post by njharman »

arethuza wrote: post #34
andyjohnson0 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"...say to kill Hitler." Everybody kills Hitler on their first trip. http://www.abyssapexzine.com/wikihistory/

Why just Hitler? Stalin and Mao were arguably equally as bad: http://necrometrics.com/tyrants.htm And there are monsters like Leopold II of Belgium (possible victims in the range 2-15 million) who hardly anyone remembers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_II_of_Belgium#Exploitat... Actually, as hardly anyone remembers Leopold II maybe he is the ideal target.... :-| [NB I eventually remembered that I'm against the…

Actually, the H man and those guys don't make the cut. The ones deserving of time-travel assassination have already been dealt with. Hence we don't know of them.

Re: Searching the Internet for evidence of time travelers

#60

Post by arethuza »

venomsnake wrote: post #42
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…

And have you thought about how many potential hitlers were pruned in the WW2 ... every one that died in the conflict could be much worse than him. So maybe Hitler was a historical fuse. A maniac just 20 years later could have destroyed humanity. Dead serious here, assume that nuclear weapons were available from day1. So maybe there was time travel manipulation to ensure WWII so that humanity could survive.

Perhaps the WW2 in our timeline is the least worst outcome.... :-|

e.g. What if the Normandy landings had failed? The Nazis would still have been defeated by the Soviets but the whole of Europe north of the Alps could have been occupied by the Soviets, perhaps making a far worse later nuclear conflict much more likely.

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