Time Traveler

[spinbaby]

My son gave me this link yesterday:

http://www.johntitor.com/

It's about a person who posted on usenet in late 2000 and early 2001 claiming to be a time traveler from the future. He made some predictions that seem eerily on target today and predicted a civil war in 2004.

Strange and fascinating.

[Brucey]

1. Very clever... and

someone has a lot of free time on their hands. Now, if we can just get hold of that time machine and go back before the election of 2000, to Florida...

[MrBenchley]

2. Funny story

In the late 1990's I became program chairman of a social group, replacing a new age ninny who was driving the sane members around the bend...the speakers he programmed were all UFOlogists, pseudoscientists and crackpots...and the final straw was supposed to be an actual time traveller....who had to cancel HIS speech because "something came up." I don't think he EVER got why we all laughed.

[Brucey]

7. Priceless!

I'd love to be at the meeting, but my time machine is on the fritz...

[wyldwolf]

3. Does anyone else remember the story a few months back...

...about the guy who up seemingly out of nowhere with very little money, created a small fortune on the stock exchange, was somehow arrested, then confessed to being a time traveler?

on edit: link

http://tv.yahoo.com/news/wwn/20030319/104808600007.html?

[SweetZombieJesus]

12. Yeah, that's a story from the Weekly World News

Infamous tabloid that carried such other "news stories" as "Bat Boy Joins Baseball Hall Of Fame" and "Space Spiders Will Invade The Earth!"

So in other words, it's bullshit.

[GoddessOfGuinness]

14. I know a few space spiders who'd take issue with that!

;-)

[Enraged_Ape]

4. There was a thread about this last week

It is a fun read, but I agree with a lot of the others here that the guy is just a good science-fiction writer, extrapolating from stuff that was in the popular consciousness at the time the posts were written (the election theft, mad-cow disease, etc.). If you read through the whole thing you will see that he contradicts himself several times on the happenings of "the future".

I think somebody here also said they recognized parts of a standard present-day medical x-ray machine in the schematics for his "time machine".

[liberalhistorian]

5. My 12-year-old science-loving son

insists that it really is possible to build a time travel machine, and has been working on a "blueprint" for a year now. Something to do with physics and relativity and warp speed, and all that other kind of stuff that I never seemed to fully understand (obviously, he didn't get his math and scientific aptitude from me, lol)!

When people tell him he's crazy, that there's no way to time travel and there will never be any kind of time machine, he simply reminds them that that's what people thought about airplanes and cars and the telephone, etc., etc., and it just took people thinking outside the box, so to speak, and doing things differently, believing it could be done, to do it. I don't know, I let him have his fantasy, but really, you just never know! I, too, have always been fascinated with time travel, and one of my favorite type of science fiction stories is time travel stories.

[Brucey]

8. What the top physicists say:

Experts in physics do not believe we will ever have a time machine. However, they say that if we do the laws of physics will not allow travel to a time when a time machine did not exist. So, if a time machine will be invented in 2038, people then will not be able to travel back to now. However, people in 2050 will be able to travel back to 2039. Anyway, gotta go... time waits for no Dem

[liberalhistorian]

9. LOL!

Since I've never totally understood physics, I'll take your word for it!

[mrfrapp]

11. Not a law of physics

"Experts in physics do not believe we will ever have a time machine.
However, they say that if we do the laws of physics will not allow travel to a time when a time machine did not exist."

No law of physics says that you can't travel back in time before a time machine exists. What has been said, originally by Stephen Hawking IIRC, is that if time travel is ever discovered/invented then the use of it would most probably be governed very strictly. One rule might be to not travel to a time before the machines were invented. Thus helping to explain, according to Hawking, why all the famous periods of history have not been inundated by tourists. In short, what you are speaking of is matter of legality rather than physics.

[Deja Q]

15. I don't want to see a time machine built

Historically speaking, humans are opportunists. Anybody WOULD go back in time for their own reasons and change history in the process.

Even cloning is exponentially more ethical than time travel.

Not until humanity grows up.

With Reagan and Bush et al supporting childish greed, immaturity, and immorality, we'll never be mature enough to handle such technology. Bush would even use small tactical nukes if he had them, thank goodness nobody's allowed to build them...

[liberalhistorian]

6. Just for the hell of it, I read what he said about

the second Civil War starting in 2004, and the results of it, and, frankly, the guy may be a prankster, but I have no trouble at all believing that something close to what he described may happen, beginning next year. I can't explain it, but I feel that something similar is getting ready to happen, I've felt that way for awhile now.

The divisions Shrub is causing, and the damage his policies are causing, coupled with half the country vehemently supporting him and half hating his guts and not being able to stand what's happening anymore, make some kind of civil war very likely. I'm already seeing things similar to what went on shortly before the first Civil War, which I NEVER thought would happen! I think we'd all better begin to prepare for it.

[BigMcLargehuge]

10. Wired Magazine profiled this "time traveller"

He's a spam merchant known as Bobby Roddino a kid who made money on unsolicited e-mails and apparently fraudulent web businesses, sending these mass mails out of his home in Mass.

He's young, like in his early 20's, is on probation for fraud (see fraudulent web businesses) and may be mentally unstable (according to his father with whom he lives).

The whole time traveller thing, according to him, has two purposes:

1. He figures SOMEONE has figured out time travel and will get in touch with him.
2. He wants to use the technology to go backwards and fix some aspect of his life.

I'll snoop around wired.com for a link.

http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,60141,00.html

[trotsky]

13. The biggest flaw

Any "stationary" time machine, as described in his posts, is actually moving at thousands of miles an hour in a highly complex curved path caused by the earth's rotation, its revolution around the sun, the sun's orbit around the galaxy, the galaxy's motion due to universal expansion, etc.

If you pop out of time and pop back into the same exact spacial coordinates, you'll 99.99999999% of the time end up in deep space.

[ThoughtCriminal]

16. Time Messages

A bit more realistic is the possibility of sending messages back in time. Now all I have to do is make a receiver, someone in the future can figure out the transmitter.