They were of course found the first time the study ran but the time travelers just kept going back in time and cleaning up traces of themselves until the tests stopped finding the evidence.
Searching the Internet for evidence of time travelers
111–120 of 158 posts
Re: Searching the Internet for evidence of time travelers
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
Totally serious question: If I go back to 1990, can I distribute a current version of emacs? The toolchain to build the current source tree won't exist for a while.
Why not? Any computer program is just a very large number. Even thought the emacs build process that calculates the large number corresponding to the current version of emacs hadn't been performed in 1990, the number itself "existed" back then as the outcome of any number of other possible computations. On the other hand, you might have problems with dll dependencies.
Or maybe Emacs can't run in a home machine of 1990
Remember? Eight Megs And Constantly Swapping
Re: Searching the Internet for evidence of time travelers
#113I'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…
Almost, but I'd like to suggest an amendment to your first conclusion: Time travel may well be possible, but unbounded backwards time travel is clearly not possible. It may be the case that a machine will be invented that allows people to travel back only as far as when the machine was first switched on. Similarly, a technique may be invented by which you may be able to temporarily travel infinitely into the future,…
Garry Kilworth's story "On the Watchtower at Plataea" involves a group of time travelers, from the story's "present", who push back earlier and earlier into the past... until they can't go any further because another group is coming the other way, from the past (due to the technology involved, each prevents the other from going further in their desired direction).
The "present" group then end up, essentially, in a standoff, watching the other group from a vantage point near an ancient Greek battlefield, and pointing out that they must eventually "lose" because both groups are now essentially in normal time. Which is moving from the past to the "present" from which they left.
Re: Searching the Internet for evidence of time travelers
#114This 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 :)
Travel to the future is actually more probable(theoretically possible), I am basing this on a good explanation by Brian Cox(based on Einstein's theory of special relativity).
The basic premise is that to travel to the future an object would need to reach near the speed of light, the closer you get to the speed the further you can travel into the future, but travelling back would not be possible.
A direct quote from Brian Cox "If you go fast, your clock runs slow relative to people who are still. As you approach the speed of light, your clock runs so slow you could come back 10,000 years in the future".
Re: Searching the Internet for evidence of time travelers
#115This 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…
> a time traveler "will" change the course of history in the long run
Going by the current recognized (theoretically possible) understanding of time travel based on Einstein's theory of special relativity[0] it would be only possible to travel in the future (near or distant based on technology that is not yet available).
Travel back would not be possible. And for the entire period of the time jumped the person(s) would not be present.
Based on this theory alone the time travelers would not be able to change history.
Depending on how far they travel I doubt they'd be able to change the future either.
Re: Searching the Internet for evidence of time travelers
#116There'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.
There's a slightly silly-but-entertaining film in which an aircraft carrier goes back in time. The spoiler of the film is that one man who is left behind in time becomes absurdly rich by becoming a pioneering "inventor". So we should look for absurdly rich people who have made dozens of inventions. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080736/
This is a great lazy Friday night film.
Re: Searching the Internet for evidence of time travelers
#117If 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).
One could also posit an Anthropic Principle of time travel: the fact that we still exist means that our universe is among the tiny subset of potential multiverses in which time travel is not discovered, or whose use is sufficiently constrained so as to not result in destruction or paradox.
Or that time travel is discovered so far into the future that change in our time would have un-calculable consequences even for that advanced society.
Or that they have discovered immortality and view us as a subspecies like we would neanderthals.
Re: Searching the Internet for evidence of time travelers
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
7000 personally executed over 28 consecutive nights, through a shot in the base of the skull while wearing a leather apron, gloves and hood, 300 a night for 10 hours each night, one every 3 minutes? That's some character... It takes a certain kind of monster to order the execution of 7000 officer prisoners of war. It takes another kind to carry it out personally with a collection of pistols brought in especially for…
I can't wrap my head around this. I'm not even sure he went insane because of the unhumanity of such an act or because he was out of the system.
Re: Searching the Internet for evidence of time travelers
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why not? Any computer program is just a very large number. Even thought the emacs build process that calculates the large number corresponding to the current version of emacs hadn't been performed in 1990, the number itself "existed" back then as the outcome of any number of other possible computations. On the other hand, you might have problems with dll dependencies.
Or maybe Emacs can't run in a home machine of 1990 Remember? Eight Megs And Constantly Swapping
I assume @danielweber was asking whether it was possible in principle - as in, can information exist before it is created.
My remark about dlls was an attempt at humour, not a comment on practicalities.
Re: Searching the Internet for evidence of time travelers
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Would it not be a much better idea to kill Columbus, and prevent the 'discovery' of the Americas, thereby saving the population of nearly two whole continents? Can't be much more efficient with your time travel than that I reckon. edit: Just read the interesting link you posted to 20th centuries bloodiest tyrants. I wonder why Johnson and Nixon are not in the third list, bloody tyrants who killed over 400.000 innocen…
Columbus was a particularly unsavoury individual whose instinct was to sell the Taino natives he encountered as slaves, but it is difficult to imagine a scenario where the inevitable large scale contact between the Old and the New Worlds would not have resulted in calamitous declines in the native population of the Americas who had no resistance to smallpox and other Old World pathogens, no matter the nature of the intial contact. Even without Columbus, it would have been a matter of time before the Europeans found out about the Americas.