This paper was fascinating when I read it tomorrow. Unfortunately, I had to warn my former future self about their compelling results and prevent myself from posting all those really fun tweets.
Searching the Internet for evidence of time travelers
131–140 of 158 posts
Re: Searching the Internet for evidence of time travelers
#132Earlier 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.
Oh, youre running a binary that uses CPU extensions or dependent on a kernel that doesn't exist yet? Enjoy your segfaults.
Re: Searching the Internet for evidence of time travelers
#133There'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/
I believe that there was a similar premise in a series of Star Trek: Voyager episodes, where a businessman steals a time traveler's technology and uses it to bootstrap the modern computer industry.
Re: Searching the Internet for evidence of time travelers
#134If 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.
Larry Niven phrased it thusly:
> If the universe of discourse permits the possibility of time travel and of changing the past, then no time machine will be invented in that universe.
Re: Searching the Internet for evidence of time travelers
#135This makes no sense... here is why: "Hey Bob, you idiot! Someone found you by a stupid tweet you made. Then they posted a research paper online and now everyone knows about time travelers. Go back and fix it." "Done" The very act of publishing the results of this study could have caused the results to be changed, thus showing a non-positive match...
That would be a great (yet unsatisfying) twist for the end of a low budget sci-fi movie.
Re: Searching the Internet for evidence of time travelers
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Because of Columbus I and most of Latin Americans are born, most of us are a mix of European and Native Americans. If all of that population was really killed, there would be just white people in the spanish and portuguese territories.
Ignoring the rest of your comment… how would this kill you all?
Re: Searching the Internet for evidence of time travelers
#137Earlier 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…
Have you read "Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus" by Orson Scott Card? It get's a little weirdly preachy, but the idea that Columbus really is the fulcrum about which the fate of the Americas tips, and that if you could go back and get him to think of the locals as actual people and not savages, things could work out pretty good.
Re: Searching the Internet for evidence of time travelers
#138I'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..
I'd say the very fact that most Bitcoins weren't created in the first few hours is a good indicator that there are no time travellers. Or if travellers do exist, access to time travel has been restricted, or perhaps Bitcoins and possibly even currency is not of interest in the future.
In fact, time travel could render investments obsolete.
Re: Searching the Internet for evidence of time travelers
#139Wouldn't it be more useful to examine the stock and options markets for evidence of time travel? If I had a time machine, I would almost certainly try to use it for personal profit with maximum secrecy, rather than giving myself away by blathering about the future over Twitter.
Also, the study does not rule out Back to the Future style time travel, Terminator style travel, or Primer style traveler isolation protocols. Nor does it rule out multiple universe theories, such that future events become unpredictable to a past-traveler within a very short period of time due to the butterfly effect.
Re: Searching the Internet for evidence of time travelers
#140Isn'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.
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