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John Titor

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Re: John Titor

#151

Post by as1mov »

mirimir wrote: post #117
jessedhillon wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a construction crew, and they are building a larger/newer version of the machine.

OK. So they're planning an invasion of the past?

One of the main characters (Aaron) fled the country and is seen with the people in the warehouse presumably making a bigger version of the machine for unknown reasons.

The other one (Abe) stayed back and kept on trying to travel to the past and messing around with the machine so that his (and Aaron's) past selves will eventually give up assuming that the machine doesn't work. But this seems to have been thwarted by one of the future-Aaron's as he has sent a recording detailing the whole scenario to some unknown recipient (this recording serves as the narration of the movie).

Re: John Titor

#152

Post by djantje »

swalsh wrote: post #4

How is this so high on the news feed? This is old, and not relevant.

Don't tell anyone, but y2k is high on the frontpage

(And we must not forget to check & remove 32bit timestamps from things, if we want these things to be predictable)

Re: John Titor

#153

Post by n0rbwah »

aidenn0 wrote: post #98
tjalfi wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of my classmates in an IT course was named Aragorn. I thought about asking him whether his parents chose the name but decided I didn’t want to know.

My sister has a friend named Arwen and her dad says she would have been named "Frodo" if she had been a boy. Dodged a bullet there.

Arwen isn't that weird though, a quick search says it can also be of welsh origin rather than LotR geek origin.

Re: John Titor

#154

Post by dorkwood »

themodelplumber wrote: post #144
chrsw wrote: post #134

How does time travel work with the Earth spinning, the Earth orbiting the Sun and Solar System orbiting around the center of the Milky Way? By the time you finish reading this comment you've moved thousands of miles with respect to the galactic center. Or am I missing something?

I like this question. It broke my mental model of time travel because I like to think of time as tied to space, maybe. If you want to rewind a thread of time, you can't really stay in the same place and poof, like Christopher Reeve laying in bed. Because the old hotel isn't in that place anymore, at some physical-historical-galactic-geography level. Maybe it's not meant to work that way though; maybe you can uncouple…

I think that's a cool idea for a story. It also addresses the question of "if time travel were possible, wouldn't we have seen some time travellers by now?" Perhaps somewhere out there in space is a graveyard of time travellers who ended up landing in the empty void that the Earth once occupied in the time they were travelling to.

Re: John Titor

#155

Post by n0rbwah »

3fe9a03ccd14ca5 wrote: post #124
29athrowaway wrote: post #101

John Titor made poor predictions. He also said that his timeline could have been different than this one, as a way to justify prediction failures. He said an organizarion pays him a paycheck then said he lives in a society based on bartering. There are contradictions in his posts. The Mad Cow disease epidemic never happened, neither did the civil war he predicted, or any if the other stuff. He also talked about using…

The bug was y2036, which he said we knew was a problem even then. It is definitely still a problem.

How that problem can be solved by an IBM 5100, a computer that has never ran any flavor of unix is a mystery though.

I guess we'll find out when we have to send someone into the past to retrieve one so we can fix the bug.

Re: John Titor

#156

Post by 29athrowaway »

n0rbwah wrote: post #155
3fe9a03ccd14ca5 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bug was y2036, which he said we knew was a problem even then. It is definitely still a problem.

How that problem can be solved by an IBM 5100, a computer that has never ran any flavor of unix is a mystery though. I guess we'll find out when we have to send someone into the past to retrieve one so we can fix the bug.

You may not be able to open the files to be fixed in such ancient computer.

Re: John Titor

#157

Post by dragontamer »

mirimir wrote: post #117
jessedhillon wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a construction crew, and they are building a larger/newer version of the machine.

OK. So they're planning an invasion of the past?

> OK. So they're planning an invasion of the past?

No, you can only go back to the point where you start the time machine. Secondly, its Aaron, so its probably his private corporation running the new machine. Aaron is the one who is manipulating the stock market and in it for the profit.

Its the "success" story for Aaron, he rebuilds a bigger time machine, but with the power of a corporation / large money backing him now (probably funded from repeatedly winning in the stock market). Aaron cannot stop the original experiment or otherwise travel to the past, but he can make money in the future.

------

There are roughly 3 machines you need to be aware of.

1. Machine #1 is what the movie is mostly about.

2. Partway through the movie, Machine#2 (failsafe) is revealed. The main character turned on the failsafe simultaneously with Machine #1, so if the time-travel got too confusing, he could always go back to the beginning and turn off Machine #1, cancelling the entire experiment.

3. The other main character, reset Machine #2. Instead of sending you back to the beginning, it now sends you to Day2 or so, preventing the change of the early days.

4. The conclusion, where Machine #3 is revealed. There was no leadup to machine#3, its just a bit of closure for the greedy Aaron.

-------

The movie goes off the rails and really stops making sense. I've put a lot of effort into trying to understand what they were going for... and ultimately came to the conclusion that Stein;s Gate is just a better thought out time travel plot.

I give Primer credit for being a relatively consistent time-travel movie with more thought put into it than the average time-travel timeline. But the ending is still in the "audience's hands", and still leaves ambiguity for the audience to figure out on their own.

A lot of actions in the middle of the movie don't seem to have any relevance to other events. The father (Thomas Granger) randomly coming in through the time machine but unconscious for example. While it is clear that Thomas Granger is from "some future timeline", such an interpretation naturally conflicts with the Primer theory thus far (which has no "multiple timeline", everything should be consistent)

There is also an Aaron clone running around, but it isn't really clear from what time the time-clone is from.

Re: John Titor

#158

Post by dragontamer »

crummy wrote: post #132
mirimir wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK. So they're planning an invasion of the past?

I don't think their intentions are clear. It's more that a powerful organisation or government now has control of it and is planning something large scale, beyond what we'd seen in the film before.

It isn't explained, which is my main fault with Primer. Primer leads you in with a crystal clear beginning that makes sense, but goes off the rails by the 2nd half.

A lot of people are tricked by the crystal clear beginning and assume that the end makes sense, but the movie goes into ambiguous mode about half-way through. Its audience interpretation, as opposed to a singular answer. (Contrast with something like Inception, which doesn't really have more than one interpretation).

Some people like ambiguous movies. I don't, which is why I kind of prefer Stein's Gate, where all actions are clear.

---------

Either way, its clear that the powerful organization is Aaron's goons. Aaron was the guy who played the stock market with the time machine, so its obvious that Aaron used the time-machine for ill-gotten gains at that point... and is using the money to fund a bigger time machine.

Re: John Titor

#159

Post by rossdavidh »

russdill wrote: post #148
rossdavidh wrote: post #25

So, in the late 90's I went to a goth convention in New Orleans, where my wife met a time traveller named "Butterfly". I saw her talking to a weird looking guy, and swung by to see if she needed help, but she had that "oh this is going to be a great story" look on her face and kind of shooed me away. Later, she told me he had claimed to be from the future. He made some predictions: - there would be a war in Iraq, but…

The only year in the past 140 years that there have been at least 5 babies with the given name Gandalf in the US is 1970. Iraq had been at war 12 of the 20 years between 1980 and 2000. Not exactly a genius level prediction. Implantable tracking chips in pets were invented in the mid 80's and have been a commercial thing since 1990. We've had "new" viruses every few years especially since international travel has been…

Wait, are you saying this guy _wasn't_ a time traveler?

Re: John Titor

#160

Post by iNate2000 »

29athrowaway wrote: post #156
n0rbwah wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How that problem can be solved by an IBM 5100, a computer that has never ran any flavor of unix is a mystery though. I guess we'll find out when we have to send someone into the past to retrieve one so we can fix the bug.

You may not be able to open the files to be fixed in such ancient computer.

Bringing an artifact forward in time would skip over the times where degradation occurred. Wouldn't it?
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