Could John Titor be right?

[HipChick]

But his predictions off by a few years?

Should I go dig my IBM 5100 out of the basement now?

[snagglepuss]

1. ?

[Angry Dragon]

2. Your post lacks some information

[DeSwiss]

3. Here ya go....

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Titor">John Titor

[Angry Dragon]

5. thanks

[sofa king]

4. Oh, that was a great gag.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Titor

It appeared to me to be one hell of a marketing scheme for a science fiction novel, which sure enough was vanity-printed by a fellow named Larry Haber as a nonfiction book about two years after "John Titor" began tickling the Art Bell forums. Unfortunately, though the story still occasionally pops up, it doesn't appear to have sold many books.

The guy doing the posting was pretty clever, leaving a nice exit for himself by claiming that his presence would necessarily disrupt the timeline of this universe (he claimed to be traveling between an infinity of universes, some of which were nearly identical but farther back in time). Thus, his defenders can claim, his presence tipped off the Bush Administration and allowed them to steal the election of 2004 without the civil unrest that would have led to the total revolution he predicted would be happening today.

Most of his other predictions turned out to be equally unreliable, but the guy had so many nice touches he's worth admiring just for them. For example, in addition to his primary mission of acquiring a particular make of IBM computer, he claimed that as a research study he was supposed to highlight the dangers of CJD--a.k.a. "mad cow" disease. It was a shame, he said, to see people who had lived through revolution and nuclear war dying from a fast-food hamburger they ate in the 1990s. Now that's thinking a yarn through, I tells ya.

[HipChick]

7. Interesting about the timelines..

http://johntitor.strategicbrains.com/

[sofa king]

13. You know who else I think picked up on him? Dr. Who.

I don't know if anyone has been watching the newer episodes, but one important plot-point is that The Doctor saved his companion Rose by depositing her in a parallel universe which he could potentially destroy by visiting again, thus forever separating the two.

To be clear though, The Doctor generally constricts his travels to within his own universe, stomping all over the old-school time paradoxes we all know and love. One of the things I love about Dr. Who is that its story line is as revisable as a Nixon press conference.

Larry Haber, by contrast, deliberately built uncertainty into his yarn, so that it could continue to pay off long after John Titor's unusual introduction. Any divergence from Titor's predictions is "proof" that he was here. With just a pinch of suspension of disbelief, his story has an annoying consistency that is nearly unassailable.

But I still think it's a marketing scheme.

(Edit: I should add that at one point in the Dr. Who series there was a character who took the John Titor scheme one step further. I forget his name, but he was a time-traveling xenosexual swinger on a quest to bed every alien species in the universe! With an American accent, of course.)

[sufrommich]

6. "Titor claimed that as a 13-year old in 2011,

he fought with the Fighting Diamondbacks, a shotgun infantry unit of Florida" Uh huh.

[HipChick]

8. yep..that's what Time Travellers do...

Slip Timelines..

[sufrommich]

10. Wow, that "multiple world theory" he claims is true makes it

impossible to prove that his preditions were false. For all we know , this Florida army he claims to have fought with in 2011 was in another world. Yea, that's the ticket.

[Hugabear]

12. Plenty of scientists take the "multiple universe" theory pretty seriously

Basically an infinite number of parallel universes, covering every minute possibility, right down to the quantum level. Which means there would be an infinite number of universes almost identical to ours, as well as infinite numbers vastly different.

Chances of someone being able to travel between these universes? Possible...although absolutely no evidence for it. Still, I'd give it a higher likelihood of possibility than ghosts or any number of things that people believe in nowadays.

[DavidDvorkin]

9. Which predictions, specifically?

[baldguy]

11. It's obvious: he changed the timeline somehow when he came back.