Speaker 1: Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Speaker 1: Forward Thinking. Hey there everyone, and welcomed up Forward Thinking,
Speaker 1: the podcast that looks at the future and says it's astounding,
Speaker 1: time is fleeting. I'm Jonathan's Stricklin and I'm Joe McCormick.
Speaker 1: And you know what, Jonathan, I give you a hard
Speaker 1: time about a lot of your lyrics, but I think
Speaker 1: that one was highly appropriate and enjoyable. Yeah. I think
Speaker 1: so too, because today we're gonna be talking about a
Speaker 1: really specific aspect of time travel that I wanted to
Speaker 1: do an episode about for a while. Okay, and why
Speaker 1: is that, Joe? How do you catch a time traveler? Well,
Speaker 1: I guess you have to be really careful. I mean
Speaker 1: someone's going to be able to stop time, or or
Speaker 1: change times, or or zip through time, and would make
Speaker 1: it pretty tricky. Do you mean, like like physically catch
Speaker 1: a time traveler just just figure out that a time
Speaker 1: traveler was around. I mean you'd have to have some
Speaker 1: kind of very clever bait, like, uh, I don't know
Speaker 1: what to time travelers eat? Oreos? You can catch me
Speaker 1: using oreos. I think if you had a sonic screwdriver,
Speaker 1: that'd be a good a good start. I thought at
Speaker 1: least one of you was going to make some kind
Speaker 1: of poke ball joke, like you got to catch them
Speaker 1: all chrono poke ball. You severely under thread old. I
Speaker 1: am okay, No, I don't mean physically catching time travelers
Speaker 1: like in a big bear hug or a net. I
Speaker 1: mean finding evidence of time travelers because okay, So we've
Speaker 1: talked on the podcast in in previous Adventures through the
Speaker 1: Mind space about whether or not time travel is a
Speaker 1: technological possibility, and basically the answer has always been maybe,
Speaker 1: we don't know, like like like a very thin maybe
Speaker 1: sure uh, or more specifically, the question of what kinds
Speaker 1: of time travel are technically possible for humans, because, for example, well,
Speaker 1: we know based on the theory of relativity that you
Speaker 1: can travel into the future. All you have to do
Speaker 1: to do that is go really really fast, or or
Speaker 1: you can just wait right. Yes, we are all time
Speaker 1: travelers can travel into the future faster than the other people.
Speaker 1: If you get into spaceship going the speed of light
Speaker 1: ship a long loop journey, and then come back, you
Speaker 1: will have traveled into the future. Time time will have
Speaker 1: passed more slowly for you relative to the people who
Speaker 1: stayed behind, But traveling into the past, we don't have
Speaker 1: any laws of physics that seem to indicate that that's possible. Well,
Speaker 1: I mean, there's sort of all these scenarios you can
Speaker 1: construct based based on relativity. You can come up with
Speaker 1: the way that, well, if this were possible, we could
Speaker 1: go into the past. We just don't know if it's possible, right, Like,
Speaker 1: for example, if we were able to travel faster than
Speaker 1: the speed of light, we would technically be traveling back
Speaker 1: in time, right, Or if you could create a wormhole
Speaker 1: or create these closed time like curves, you could theoretically
Speaker 1: travel into the past. We just don't know if we
Speaker 1: can do that. But there's one way that we in
Speaker 1: the present here could look for evidence of whether or
Speaker 1: not traveling into the past will ever be possible. And
Speaker 1: that method is, drumroll bela look for people from the future. Okay, gotcha. So,
Speaker 1: in other words, look for evidence that people have done this,
Speaker 1: people from the future have come back, and if we
Speaker 1: find that evidence, then that suggests that in fact, time
Speaker 1: travel is possible. Yeah, totally. So there there could be
Speaker 1: time travelers from the future walking amongst us today. But
Speaker 1: if they're there, how do we find them. That's the
Speaker 1: question that we're gonna ask today. Okay, And I'd say
Speaker 1: the first place we should start, because it's the most obvious,
Speaker 1: is that maybe we won't have to find them. Maybe
Speaker 1: they will just identify themselves willingly, for example, publicly on
Speaker 1: internet forum. Yeah, this is in person. Yeah, well you know,
Speaker 1: I mean, you've got stuff to do. Uh. So there's
Speaker 1: a famous story of a character I guess it is
Speaker 1: the best way of putting it, named John Tetoor or
Speaker 1: John Tighter, depending on how you want to pronounce the name.
Speaker 1: I always said, Yeah, I've heard it both ways. This
Speaker 1: was a persona that was let's say invented. I'm gonna
Speaker 1: go that far, because I think the evidence pretty much
Speaker 1: points to hoax. He was an internet storyteller. Yeah, before
Speaker 1: we closed the book, let's tell the story briefly and
Speaker 1: then and then say what our conclusion. Sure, alright, So
Speaker 1: the story is that this person traveled back in time
Speaker 1: from the year two thousand and thirties six to warn people,
Speaker 1: well really not even to warn people, but he did
Speaker 1: warn people to harold. He happened to post on the
Speaker 1: Internet while he was taking care of some business. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that business was that he said that in two thousand
Speaker 1: thirty six the world was on the verge of of
Speaker 1: a collapse because of a legitimate problem, that is in
Speaker 1: the Unix operating system, that being a date problem. Now,
Speaker 1: you guys remember the whole y two K debaccle, right, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: the idea that programmers had set a two digit year
Speaker 1: in a lot of programming languages, which works fine until
Speaker 1: you hit the year two thousand, because suddenly nine changes
Speaker 1: to zero zero, and all of a sudden, everyone's banking
Speaker 1: is very confused, right, right, All the computer systems are
Speaker 1: working as if the clock has reset, kind of like
Speaker 1: if you've ever played an old style pinball game and
Speaker 1: the the score turns, so it goes back to zero
Speaker 1: and suddenly it doesn't know that you made a high
Speaker 1: score anymore. Think of that except for worldwide consequences. Sure,
Speaker 1: and they two K bugs specifically was not the only
Speaker 1: computer glitch that this sort of system was involved with, right, No, Generally,
Speaker 1: there was this idea that Unix based systems would have
Speaker 1: a similar problem in the year. Right. And so here's
Speaker 1: where the story gets really funny to me. So the
Speaker 1: story is that it's twenty six in his time, in
Speaker 1: two years, everything's going to really fall apart. And their
Speaker 1: big problem is that they don't have any technology that
Speaker 1: interfaces with this Unix system anymore. It's Unix. Yeah, So
Speaker 1: what they need to do is build a time machine
Speaker 1: to go back into time and get an IBM computer
Speaker 1: that can interface with these Unix systems, and with that,
Speaker 1: I guess, single computer fix everything so that catastrophe is averted.
Speaker 1: And so he was sent back to nineteen to get
Speaker 1: one of these machines, then did a quick stop over
Speaker 1: in two thousand in order to just you know, mess
Speaker 1: around a bit, uh, specifically to go and visit his
Speaker 1: three year old self in two thousand. Uh. Now, the
Speaker 1: first first indication of this time traveler at all was
Speaker 1: and I didn't even know this until we were researching
Speaker 1: this recently. I did a full podcast about John titor
Speaker 1: On on a sister podcast, Tech Stuff, many years ago.
Speaker 1: But Art bell received a facts and Art Bells was
Speaker 1: a radio host of Coast to Coast a m and
Speaker 1: the show was famous for let's say fringe topics. If
Speaker 1: it's three AM and you want to tell a story
Speaker 1: about how you saw a UFO land and werewolves got
Speaker 1: out of it and probed holes in your body, you
Speaker 1: call art Bell. Yeah, so the the facts is to
Speaker 1: art Bell, were essentially stating that it was a time
Speaker 1: traveler from the future and Y two K had caused
Speaker 1: worldwide devastation and uh and so this was when the
Speaker 1: facts has arrived, all right, by two thousand, when the
Speaker 1: forum stuff was happening. By the way, there are a
Speaker 1: lot of people who suggest that the facts has sent
Speaker 1: art Bell and the forum person were two different people,
Speaker 1: but both working from the same general idea. Um. Now,
Speaker 1: clearly by two else and we knew the Y two
Speaker 1: K bug didn't cause worldwide devastation because hey, we were
Speaker 1: still here. Yeah yeah, we spent you know, millions upon
Speaker 1: millions of dollars and lots of man hours and woman
Speaker 1: hours in order to fix the problem. So yeah, So
Speaker 1: in this case, the the new person who originally went
Speaker 1: under the handle time Travel underscore zero, I like it,
Speaker 1: wrote wrote in a Time Travel Institute forum about how
Speaker 1: I'm sorry I have to interrupt you because I love
Speaker 1: the idea that a genuine time traveler tried to register
Speaker 1: the account time travel, but it was already taken and
Speaker 1: so underscore zero obviously didn't register in time enough I
Speaker 1: don't see a problem with that. With time travel, that's
Speaker 1: totally true. He could have traveled back to before the
Speaker 1: user name was taken. Look, we all know from dr
Speaker 1: here that some events are inescapable the fixed points in
Speaker 1: our timeline, and perhaps the creation of that particular user
Speaker 1: hadle in that particular for him. So you know, there's
Speaker 1: just a weeping angel somewhere just typing and laughing. Ha
Speaker 1: ha ha. I'm sorry I interrupted you. So he made
Speaker 1: some predictions, Yeah, so, well he didn't. There weren't predictions.
Speaker 1: He was talking about history, not predictions, right, So, first
Speaker 1: of all, he did say this was his get out
Speaker 1: of jail free card. He said that the time travel
Speaker 1: machine actually did not take one back to one's own time,
Speaker 1: but rather a parallel time that would be within one
Speaker 1: to two percent in uh, in agreement, Yeah, in agreement
Speaker 1: with their own So there'd be one or two percent
Speaker 1: deviation from the timeline, so certain things would be changed. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and also had kind of said that, you know, by
Speaker 1: going back and altering things, you could actually change the future. However, uh,
Speaker 1: there were some things that suggested that he suggested what
Speaker 1: we're going to happen, or said we're going to happen. Uh.
Speaker 1: Teacher also said that that the Olympics in two thousand four,
Speaker 1: that's the last one two thousand would be canceled, and
Speaker 1: then there was a little, uh you know, civil war
Speaker 1: in the United States by two thousand. He claimed that
Speaker 1: he had served in it. He said he was like
Speaker 1: a shotgun soldier or something something influenced at any rate. Uh. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that by two thousand thirteen there's a civil war happening
Speaker 1: in the United States. Obviously that has not happened either. Uh.
Speaker 1: He then said that by two thousand fifteen, I believe
Speaker 1: there was going to be a attack by the Russians
Speaker 1: in the United States, but seeing how's how the other
Speaker 1: ones haven't panned out, I wouldn't worry too much about that.
Speaker 1: Um So, yeah, he he was making these statements and
Speaker 1: was also really uh taking a pretty firm stance on
Speaker 1: things about, you know, the stuff that people shouldn't do,
Speaker 1: like they shouldn't eat beef because in the future mad
Speaker 1: cow disease was a real big problem, and that they
Speaker 1: needed to get off of that reliance upon beef now
Speaker 1: rather than than you know, court disaster in the future.
Speaker 1: Um So. The thing was that, you know, the predictions
Speaker 1: that's made so far have not panned out at all.
Speaker 1: It does look like it was pretty much a hoax.
Speaker 1: He also, uh, there was a John Tetor Foundation, a
Speaker 1: for profit limited liability company that was formed in Florida.
Speaker 1: The person who formed that is a lawyer, um, and
Speaker 1: his brother is a computer scientist. And yeah, I think
Speaker 1: I heard about this, didn't they. Like somebody hired a
Speaker 1: private investigator to look into this and found out that,
Speaker 1: like the guy thought it was this computer scientist, there
Speaker 1: are quite a few people who and at least through
Speaker 1: the circumstantial evidence suggests that the uh, the brother is
Speaker 1: in fact the the the brains behind John Tetar and
Speaker 1: the lawyer is the is the person trying to make
Speaker 1: money from it. Um. But I mean again, that's what
Speaker 1: we can say is there is a lawyer in Florida
Speaker 1: who does have a company, the John Teeter Foundation, that
Speaker 1: he formed, and he has a brother who's a computer scientist.
Speaker 1: That's all we can say definitively. However, based upon the predictions,
Speaker 1: it doesn't seem like this was a legitimate time traveler
Speaker 1: who came back and um, you know, used a car
Speaker 1: that had been outfitted with a time travel device on
Speaker 1: it so that he could um seamlessly fit into nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy five. You know, there's this. It was a pretty
Speaker 1: silly story, and of course his his point was that
Speaker 1: Teeter's point was that he could go back to nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy five, retrieve the computer, and then spend as much
Speaker 1: time as he wanted to in the past, because when
Speaker 1: he returns to the present, Yeah, it would just be
Speaker 1: a couple of seconds. So he said, oh, I came
Speaker 1: to two thousand, My mission is done. I'm done with
Speaker 1: my mission. What if he like died in two thousand
Speaker 1: and then never got to take the computer back. John
Speaker 1: Teeter clearly wasn't thinking this through. He was one of
Speaker 1: supposedly one of like eight people on a mission, but
Speaker 1: everyone had different parameters to their missions, and his was
Speaker 1: that he had to go back and get this IBM computer.
Speaker 1: So was he so this car of his that created
Speaker 1: singularities that took him through time? Did he also just
Speaker 1: drive this around take it through the Taco Bell? Yeah? Essentially,
Speaker 1: I mean it was supposed to be like the I
Speaker 1: remember that the requirements were that the car had to
Speaker 1: have a really good suspension because it was a gravity
Speaker 1: drive that was the time travel device. Yeah, I'm I'm
Speaker 1: telling you what the stuff that came out of this.
Speaker 1: The other thing to remember is that even if this
Speaker 1: were all possible, let's assume somehow that they were able
Speaker 1: to create a time travel like device, it would also
Speaker 1: have to travel through space because the Earth would not
Speaker 1: be in the position that it was in when he left.
Speaker 1: And then that's not the way cars travel through space, right,
Speaker 1: but not not through space, Okay, I would have this
Speaker 1: car just appear in the middle of of nothing. Okay, Well,
Speaker 1: I think maybe we can close the book on John
Speaker 1: heat Or it sounds to me like I maybe jump
Speaker 1: into conclusions here, but I think he wasn't a real
Speaker 1: time traveler. I'm gonna pretty much say I think that's
Speaker 1: that's skepticism. Yeah, okay, so of course he's not the
Speaker 1: only person who's ever claimed to be a time traveler
Speaker 1: from the future. But I guess we talked about him
Speaker 1: because he's the most famous. He's the one everybody's heard of,
Speaker 1: or at least he's he's one that we have lots
Speaker 1: of documentation for because it all I'll played out on
Speaker 1: internet forums, right, but all the stories are pretty much
Speaker 1: like his or less interesting. They make predictions that are
Speaker 1: either too vague and too far in the future to
Speaker 1: be verified, or they turn out not to be true.
Speaker 1: But that's not the only way to look for time
Speaker 1: travelers or to find one. Rather, if they just like
Speaker 1: come out and say, hey, I'm a time traveler, guys, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: if we we can, we can have other methods to
Speaker 1: find someone besides just hoping that they are going they
Speaker 1: announce themselves. Yeah, then their ego demands they that the
Speaker 1: world know them as time travelers. Right. Well, the other
Speaker 1: thing we could do is int them to show up somewhere,
Speaker 1: and in fact, we've done that lots of times. Well
Speaker 1: we haven't. Yeah, I've done episodes on time travel for
Speaker 1: text Stuff back in the day, and I said, listen,
Speaker 1: here's the thing. This podcast is going out. It will
Speaker 1: remain out there for quite some time. Here's an open
Speaker 1: invitation for a time traveler to go through and and
Speaker 1: visit how Stuff Works dot Com on this day. In fact,
Speaker 1: we're recording this on October twenty, two thousand fourteen, at
Speaker 1: around three forty five in the afternoon. If they want
Speaker 1: to come by, you have my permission to walk right
Speaker 1: into the studio right now uh nothing, but see that's
Speaker 1: just me doing it. I said five, they did, They've
Speaker 1: got the time so I haven't seen the five flip.
Speaker 1: Oh there just went Okay, Okay, so time travel it's
Speaker 1: never gonna happen, right, or at least completely. We can
Speaker 1: at least suggest that if it does happen, either anyone
Speaker 1: who does time travel doesn't listen to this podcast, which
Speaker 1: is a possibility, or or that there's some other reason
Speaker 1: why they wouldn't reveal themselves, or maybe they've got other
Speaker 1: stuff to do, like go to the m I T.
Speaker 1: Time Traveler convention. Right, I want to talk about this one. Okay,
Speaker 1: two thousand five May seven. If you're a time traveler,
Speaker 1: what are you doing? You're going to m I T
Speaker 1: Campus for an awesome, awesome party or what will be
Speaker 1: an awesome party because or what would have been an
Speaker 1: awesome party? I guess what will be then? What what
Speaker 1: wasn't an awesome party but could be an awesome party
Speaker 1: in the futures past. Okay, Okay, cut it out, cut
Speaker 1: it out. Don't get into the timmey wymy jokes. We're
Speaker 1: going down the road here, all right. Students at m
Speaker 1: I T and may have two thousand five, led by
Speaker 1: an electrical engineering and computer science grad student named Amal Dorai,
Speaker 1: held an official convention for time travelers. And I think
Speaker 1: this is just an awesome idea. A little side note,
Speaker 1: the original website for this event still exists. It is
Speaker 1: delightful and fully worth checking out. I think you should
Speaker 1: go look it up. But according to Dry, any real
Speaker 1: lifetime traveler was welcome to show up at the event
Speaker 1: without rs V ping. All non time traveling attendees had
Speaker 1: to rs VP, but the time traveler had to bring
Speaker 1: proof that he or she was from the future. He said,
Speaker 1: you know, anything that really seals the case will do,
Speaker 1: but we would prefer proof that's also of practical use,
Speaker 1: like a cure for AIDS, or a solution to world
Speaker 1: poverty or a cold fusion reactors. That's very deep thinking
Speaker 1: of him. I like that. Yeah. Uh so, in what
Speaker 1: I think was a very smart move, Dery and the
Speaker 1: people involved with the conference focused heavily on press, on
Speaker 1: getting the word out. This was a case where sort
Speaker 1: of shamelessly hounding media attention was not just understandable, but
Speaker 1: it was a vital part of the experiment. Right. Well,
Speaker 1: you know, because the website wasn't going to stick around forever. Hypothetically,
Speaker 1: that's what he said, but has uh so far. But
Speaker 1: but they did in no way of knowing that at
Speaker 1: the times right. I just want to read directly from
Speaker 1: their sort of frequently ask questions on the official website,
Speaker 1: because I think this is hilarious. So the question is,
Speaker 1: why do you need my help? They said, we need
Speaker 1: you to help publicize the events so that future time
Speaker 1: travelers will know about the convention and attend. This web
Speaker 1: page is insufficient. In less than a year, it will
Speaker 1: be taken down when I graduate, and furthermore, the World
Speaker 1: Wide Web is unlikely to remain in its present form permanently.
Speaker 1: We need volunteers to publish the details of the convention
Speaker 1: in enduring forms so the time travelers of the future
Speaker 1: millennial will be aware of the convention. This convention can
Speaker 1: never be forgotten. We need publicity and major outlets, not
Speaker 1: just Internet news think New York Times, Washington Post, books,
Speaker 1: that sort of thing. If you have any strings, please
Speaker 1: pull them. I love this plea because there's the there
Speaker 1: was the sphere. I guess that I don't know the
Speaker 1: Internet at the time. The Web is just this transient
Speaker 1: thing keep in mind, this was after the dot Com
Speaker 1: bubble burst, and so there was there was already a
Speaker 1: I mean, granted this was five years after that, but
Speaker 1: this was already a time where people had first saw
Speaker 1: the Internet as this this promised land, this this wild
Speaker 1: West where you could build anything. The dot Com bubble burst,
Speaker 1: and then suddenly we all began to be a little
Speaker 1: more cautious about it. So and of course we were
Speaker 1: also talking about what is the next iteration of the
Speaker 1: Worldwide Web, which were still kind of waiting for, whether
Speaker 1: that's the semantic Web or Back in two thousand five,
Speaker 1: we were still even thinking about the possibility of like
Speaker 1: a virtual web where we would have more of a
Speaker 1: a an experience where you're navigating like in the movies
Speaker 1: where suddenly you're you're using a head a head mounted
Speaker 1: display and you're your physically moving past things. And ultimately
Speaker 1: we all said, you know that that sounds stupid, but
Speaker 1: at the time that was really one of those things
Speaker 1: we were thinking about. It's it's definitely more cinematic than
Speaker 1: scrolling and clicking on a web page, but in anywhere
Speaker 1: at any rate. I love those nineties hacker movies where
Speaker 1: the hackers used game controllers and then that you encounter
Speaker 1: a skull and crossbones and that's that's the security firewall
Speaker 1: and yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, so the dery and the
Speaker 1: people organizing the conference asked people to try to create
Speaker 1: a big name for this conference so that it would
Speaker 1: be remembered into the future, and to leave records in
Speaker 1: obscure places like physical lasting records. Right, so write down
Speaker 1: the details about the party and then just hide them
Speaker 1: in library books all over the place, or or carve
Speaker 1: them into clay tablets or right or or or you know,
Speaker 1: put a new face on Rushmore that says party at
Speaker 1: my place and time travelers. Yeah. So they eventually did
Speaker 1: get plenty of coverage in the press, including a subsequent
Speaker 1: rite up in Nature News called Time Travelers Snow Conference.
Speaker 1: Oh well, I mean, you know, that's obviously we all
Speaker 1: failed in our attempt to publicize this, and the time
Speaker 1: travelers of the future just didn't know about it. That's
Speaker 1: one way of interpreting it. Obviously, you can tell yes
Speaker 1: from the title nobody no time travelers showed up. But
Speaker 1: from what I hear, it was a great party. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Another party that happened was put on by Stephen Hawking.
Speaker 1: This was this was the best way of going about this.
Speaker 1: I think Hawking's affair to remember, and I think he
Speaker 1: added a really clever twist to this. So on June nine,
Speaker 1: Stephen Hawking held a party in Cambridge. All existing time
Speaker 1: travelers were invited, so he must have had a lot
Speaker 1: of food and drink on hand. I hope. I don't
Speaker 1: know how many time travelers you expect to be. You
Speaker 1: gotta cast a wide net. Yeah, it's really hard to
Speaker 1: tell the caterers. I mean, just like any Facebook event,
Speaker 1: you invite you know, three times more people than and
Speaker 1: actually fit into the venue because you know, not a
Speaker 1: lot of people are gonna hit maybe and that means
Speaker 1: they're not showing up. Right. Okay, so all the time
Speaker 1: travelers were invited, but the catch was Hawking didn't issue
Speaker 1: the invitation for the party until after the party was
Speaker 1: scheduled to take place, which is well after until after
Speaker 1: the party actually happened, right, Because that's the that's the
Speaker 1: best thing, you know, is the idea that well, with
Speaker 1: time travel it doesn't matter when you announced the party,
Speaker 1: as long as you make it clear enough that the
Speaker 1: party was going to happen. And uh and the time
Speaker 1: travelers would be able to travel back in time to
Speaker 1: when the party was actually happening and arrived there. So
Speaker 1: theoretically of time travel is possible, and if people were
Speaker 1: to hear of it and they were wanting to go
Speaker 1: to this party, they could go to it even though
Speaker 1: the invitation happened after the event actually occurred. Right. He
Speaker 1: was also focused on trying to get the word out
Speaker 1: and make sure that he left some kind of impression
Speaker 1: that would be accessible to the future. So he had
Speaker 1: an invitation flyer made up. It said you are cordially
Speaker 1: invited to a reception for time Travelers hosted by Professor
Speaker 1: Stephen Hawking, to be held at University of Cambridge, Gonville
Speaker 1: and Caius College, Trinity Street, Cambridge. And then I love this.
Speaker 1: It gave the exact global positioning co ordinance of the party,
Speaker 1: So that's pretty awesome. That's good, That's that's important. Champagne
Speaker 1: was served, though it can't have been all that rowdy
Speaker 1: of a party because it was held at twelve noon.
Speaker 1: I don't know, I've been to Cambridge. I think that
Speaker 1: that's have you have you met the Have you met
Speaker 1: the footlights? Because trust me, they could tie one on
Speaker 1: I mean twelve noons, just when they get started in Cambridge,
Speaker 1: might be when they woke up from the previous one.
Speaker 1: I wonder if maybe Hawking just didn't wait long enough
Speaker 1: for the fashionably late time travelers to arrive. I I
Speaker 1: don't doubt. And maybe they kind of peaked in the
Speaker 1: windows and they realized that he'd already drank all the champagne,
Speaker 1: and they were like, well, would you be more fashionably
Speaker 1: late than like anyway? Right? So he He later publicized
Speaker 1: the party in the press and on the web, and
Speaker 1: had a very elegantly designed version of the flyer printed up,
Speaker 1: which you can actually still buy a copy of. I
Speaker 1: thought about buying one because I thought that'd be a
Speaker 1: cool thing to have, he said about it. I'm hoping
Speaker 1: copies of the flyer in one form or another, will
Speaker 1: survive for many thousands of years. Maybe one day someone
Speaker 1: living in the future will find the information and use
Speaker 1: a wormhole time machine to come back to my party,
Speaker 1: proving that time travel will one day be possible. So
Speaker 1: who showed up to the reception Hawking? Nobody, nobody except
Speaker 1: talking Well, I don't know. He might have some other friends.
Speaker 1: No time traveler, No time traveler showed up. He later
Speaker 1: said during an interview at the Seattle Science Festival, quote,
Speaker 1: I have experimental evidence that time travel is not possible.
Speaker 1: I gave a party for time travelers, but I didn't
Speaker 1: send out the invitations until after the party. I sat
Speaker 1: there a long time, but no one came, which is
Speaker 1: so sad. He sounds like he's kind of like it
Speaker 1: kind of hurt his feelings. Well, I mean, you know,
Speaker 1: you might be sad for multiple since One you're sad
Speaker 1: because no one came to your party. Too, You're sad
Speaker 1: because apparently time travel is not possible. Three, you're sad
Speaker 1: because you drink all of this champagne. And so you're
Speaker 1: extra sad about those first two things. Right, So I
Speaker 1: he maybe just sat there and watched all the excellent
Speaker 1: champagne go flat. Yeah. So, but this is this is
Speaker 1: obviously one of those things that we've seen demonstrated repeatedly.
Speaker 1: It's not these are not the only two times as
Speaker 1: has happened. I remember taking some of the most fabulous Yeah.
Speaker 1: I have taken classes in physics where the physics professor
Speaker 1: would say, all right, everyone this class, remember this day.
Speaker 1: Write it down. Uh if this if time travel is possible.
Speaker 1: I want a time traveler to come to the class
Speaker 1: this day. Of course, that depends upon everyone in the class,
Speaker 1: or at least someone in the class remembering that passing
Speaker 1: it along so that that information ultimately gets to a
Speaker 1: time traveler. These other examples we've mentioned had a better
Speaker 1: chance because they were more widely publicized, although again you
Speaker 1: could argue that uh, these, these uh events were publicized
Speaker 1: and then quickly forgotten about. Right, That's always a possibility
Speaker 1: to Oh sure, sure, especially in the grand scheme of
Speaker 1: of human life. You know, these might not last more
Speaker 1: than a few centuries, so we might need to find
Speaker 1: other ways to look for time travelers that doesn't involve
Speaker 1: the time traveler standing up and being like, oh, hi,
Speaker 1: I'm here, I'm here. You invited me here, I am right,
Speaker 1: which is where the use of big data comes in,
Speaker 1: of course, always yeah, and I So, I want to
Speaker 1: talk about a paper that came out in January of
Speaker 1: this year. It was January UM. It was called Searching
Speaker 1: the Internet for Evidence of Time Travelers by Robert J.
Speaker 1: Nimrov and Teresa Wilson of the physics department at Michigan
Speaker 1: Technological University, and I love their idea. I think it's
Speaker 1: really cool. So the paper, uh, it's a fun read.
Speaker 1: If you actually want to check it out yourself, it's there.
Speaker 1: Their approach was, on one hand funny, but on the
Speaker 1: other hand, I mean actually probably the most scientific approach
Speaker 1: to this question that's ever been undertaken so far. Alright,
Speaker 1: So what was this incredible scientific approach I want to know. Well,
Speaker 1: they attempted to find evidence of time travelers by sifting
Speaker 1: huge amounts of Internet data looking for quote prescient knowledge,
Speaker 1: which would be verbal patterns indicating that someone had knowledge
Speaker 1: of the future. And they had three methods. So first
Speaker 1: was to look back at the web for terms that
Speaker 1: wouldn't have made sense at the time they were published,
Speaker 1: but which now refer to something meaningful now that we
Speaker 1: have knowledge taking place later in time. So the two
Speaker 1: examples given were search terms related to quote comet is
Speaker 1: on which was not discovered until September twenty one, two
Speaker 1: thousand twelve, and quote Pope Francis, who was formerly just
Speaker 1: a cardinal not named frances He was Joge Bergoglio, and
Speaker 1: he chose the pope name Francis and mar and there
Speaker 1: was previously no pope named Francis. He is the first.
Speaker 1: So they searched both web and social media. On the
Speaker 1: social media, they looked at Facebook, though they explained that
Speaker 1: a search of Facebook has limited value since results are
Speaker 1: sort of attenuated in terms of time, and you can
Speaker 1: back date posts. Well only that, but you know, you
Speaker 1: have a limited view of what's been posted based upon uh,
Speaker 1: you know, your security. But more usefully, they searched Twitter
Speaker 1: also for instances of key terms associated with these phrases
Speaker 1: appearing basically before they should have in time. Then the
Speaker 1: second thing they looked for, and I thought this was
Speaker 1: really clever, was looking for prescient terms, not as published
Speaker 1: on the web, but in search records, right, just just
Speaker 1: in case of time traveler was you know, again trying
Speaker 1: maybe not to out themselves and so therefore wasn't posting
Speaker 1: about their time traveling adventures all over the Internet, but
Speaker 1: rather might have been looking something up before they really
Speaker 1: should have been. This sounds like the worst history student
Speaker 1: in the world. Like, it's a student who's been assigned
Speaker 1: to write a paper about a specific point in history,
Speaker 1: and it would have to be a point in which
Speaker 1: we have already created the Internet. They go back before
Speaker 1: that event, even happens, because that's how bad a history
Speaker 1: student they are. Then they happen to our limited internet,
Speaker 1: which would look primitive by any futuristic standards, and search
Speaker 1: for terms for things that haven't happened yet. That's exactly
Speaker 1: what what it would have been. I bet somebody from
Speaker 1: a kid from the hundred has to write a report
Speaker 1: on Pope Francis time travels back to two thousands. Like,
Speaker 1: that's about right. Google's Pope Francis gets nothing, goes backusts Now.
Speaker 1: I will say this, based upon the search habits I
Speaker 1: have seen high school students use, this is not that
Speaker 1: unrealistic a scenario if time travel is in fact possible. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so I think this is a really good approach because
Speaker 1: even if time travelers are sort of being on their
Speaker 1: best behavior and not publishing blog posts about future popes
Speaker 1: and comments, they might privately search for these terms. So yeah.
Speaker 1: The Google trends unfortunately did not turn up anything interesting,
Speaker 1: but the authors pointed out that Google may not remember
Speaker 1: searches that have occurred at insufficient volume. So maybe if
Speaker 1: somebody's only searched for something one time, ever, it doesn't
Speaker 1: even show up in Google, right because you're looking at
Speaker 1: your looking at such an enormous number of search terms
Speaker 1: used like at any given time, that would be really
Speaker 1: really tricky unless you have, you know, a a a
Speaker 1: continent worth of students who all came back at the
Speaker 1: same time. One of the studies authors, Nimrof, happened to
Speaker 1: also have access to the back end of NASA's Astronomy
Speaker 1: Picture of the Day site and he he took advantage
Speaker 1: of this to check to see if anybody had searched
Speaker 1: for images of comet ice on before it was discovered
Speaker 1: and named uh. Didn't turn up anything interesting, unfortunately. So
Speaker 1: the third method they used after looking for published things
Speaker 1: in search terms was they invited future people to travel
Speaker 1: into the past and to tweet at them or email
Speaker 1: them with one of two hashtags. And I love this.
Speaker 1: One of them is hashtag I can change the past
Speaker 1: two numeral too UH. And this would be if we
Speaker 1: discover that time travel occurs in a plastic history set
Speaker 1: of conditions where the past timeline is changeable UH. And
Speaker 1: then the other option they did, which I thought was
Speaker 1: really smart, was hashtag I cannot change the past too
Speaker 1: numeral too. This would be if we discover that time
Speaker 1: travel occurs in a fixed history scenario. In other words,
Speaker 1: time travel is possible, but we would already have observed
Speaker 1: its effects. This is consistent with something known as the
Speaker 1: Novikov's self consistency principle. It's the sort of theoretical way
Speaker 1: of thinking about the effects of traveling back in time
Speaker 1: that says that whatever whatever effects are caused by time
Speaker 1: travelers have already been observed. Okay. So, in other words,
Speaker 1: the I cannot change the past two, which you could
Speaker 1: argue actually changes the past by introducing not necessarily because
Speaker 1: they were careful not to search for the hashtag I
Speaker 1: cannot change the past two until after they had placed
Speaker 1: the advertisement asking people in the future to go back
Speaker 1: and place it got you. But even so, then you
Speaker 1: know that time travel is possible, that in order for
Speaker 1: the time travel to have happened, that event must have
Speaker 1: happened in order to precipitate the time travel that happens
Speaker 1: in the future. And we're getting time Oh no, sure, sure,
Speaker 1: now that makes perfect sense. I'm glad that they set
Speaker 1: it up as an experiment not only to find out
Speaker 1: whether time travel exists, but what model of the universe
Speaker 1: of time travel we are operating under. That's that's good,
Speaker 1: that's you know, adding the extra layer. Yeah, so I
Speaker 1: thought this was really clever and a lot of fun.
Speaker 1: But unfortunately they say in the conclusions of the paper
Speaker 1: that they really didn't turn up anything interesting, Like, I mean,
Speaker 1: we learned something interesting from the paper, but they they
Speaker 1: didn't find any results that really seemed to indicate time travel.
Speaker 1: So we've tried all these ways so far of looking
Speaker 1: for time travelers, but we haven't found any. And I
Speaker 1: want to transition to the question of why. In one way,
Speaker 1: we could sort of look at this as a time
Speaker 1: based version of the Fermi paradox. The Fermi paradox says, look,
Speaker 1: there are all these planets out there, you know, they
Speaker 1: could feasibly be holding alien life. So why aren't we
Speaker 1: hearing any transmissions? Where is everybody really far away? Is
Speaker 1: my answer? But that could be yeah, yeah, yeah, but there, Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's a bunch of reasons why we might not have
Speaker 1: found anyone. Well, sure, one of them is just the
Speaker 1: fact that we have already mentioned the idea that people
Speaker 1: in the future may legitimately have not heard these various invitations.
Speaker 1: And it's not that they're being rude, it's just that
Speaker 1: they didn't know about it. Yeah. Another explanation would be
Speaker 1: simply that time travel into the past is impossible, at
Speaker 1: least for humans. Or maybe it's not impossible but simply
Speaker 1: never achieved. We will just never figure Maybe we would
Speaker 1: have figured out time travel, but the day before we
Speaker 1: would have figured it out, we managed to kill everybody,
Speaker 1: everybody on the whole planet. Yeah, like humanity. Yeah that's cheerful. Well, no,
Speaker 1: there there are plenty of scenarios. Have you not heard
Speaker 1: about these? About the doomsday? Various doomsday scenarios where that
Speaker 1: could also be swallowed by a catfish made of bubble gum.
Speaker 1: I'm just saying it's one of the that's my favorite abilities.
Speaker 1: Catfish made bubble bubble apocalypse. Another one is the idea
Speaker 1: that that time travel might be possible, but we can
Speaker 1: only go back so far, right that so the time
Speaker 1: travel sort of you'd have to create a checkpoint. It's
Speaker 1: your safe point in a video game. So you could
Speaker 1: only and this has been suggested by thinkers smarter than
Speaker 1: us before, that it's possible to create perhaps some sort
Speaker 1: of wormhole based time machine that would only take you
Speaker 1: back to the point at which the pathway you created
Speaker 1: was created. So, in other words, any time before the
Speaker 1: time machine was built is inaccessible to us. Another is
Speaker 1: the causality branching idea. Right, that's the term I used.
Speaker 1: There's maybe a better way to explain this. But the
Speaker 1: idea is that when somebody travels into the past, they
Speaker 1: actually travel into one of an infinite number of parallel
Speaker 1: universe is what te Tours was saying. Yeah, so your
Speaker 1: chances of meeting one in your universe are fairly low. Right,
Speaker 1: So in other words, you are not really traveling back
Speaker 1: into your own time, uh timeline, you're trailing slipping dimensions. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it maybe that it has a one to two
Speaker 1: percent deviation from your own home dimensions was talking or
Speaker 1: maybe donuts righting from the guy? Yeah or yeah, exactly
Speaker 1: into that Simpson's treating the hard Exactly. You kill that
Speaker 1: one mosquito and suddenly everything goes haywire. Another one, another
Speaker 1: idea that I've seen in science fiction is the idea
Speaker 1: that if you were to travel back to your own timeline,
Speaker 1: it would automatically create a copy of your timeline. So
Speaker 1: let's say that I go back in time to visit
Speaker 1: my younger self. Um, when I travel back as soon
Speaker 1: as I arrive at that point in time, it's a
Speaker 1: duplicate of our timeline. So everything up to that moment
Speaker 1: in time is identical. But from the moment when I
Speaker 1: come in forward, it's a new timeline. It's it's a
Speaker 1: branch almost. Yeah yeah, so I can. I can change
Speaker 1: that timeline without affecting myself because young you and your
Speaker 1: own timeline grows up and becomes you. Yeah yeah, But
Speaker 1: the the me I'm looking at in in the time
Speaker 1: I travel back to is not the me because now
Speaker 1: it's a branch to me. So I could kill me
Speaker 1: and I'd still be okay, because the me my timeline
Speaker 1: still grew up to become the me that traveled back
Speaker 1: and was homicidomaniac. It's another version of parallel universes. Basically,
Speaker 1: I'm on a lot of cold medicine makes me violent.
Speaker 1: That's really good to know, being that we're all trapped
Speaker 1: with you in this very small st just intellectually violent.
Speaker 1: I'm too tired to be physically violent. Okay, shut up.
Speaker 1: I want to talk about another intellectual possibility, which is
Speaker 1: that it's this is entirely possible. Time travelers from the
Speaker 1: future are amongst us, but they're intentionally hiding, and so
Speaker 1: far they have been successful. This this one, to me
Speaker 1: seems the least likely, actually, okay, most mostly because I
Speaker 1: know people and people make mistakes. Well, yes, people do
Speaker 1: make mistakes, and they're not very good at keeping secrets.
Speaker 1: But the question is how many time travelers are there? Well,
Speaker 1: I mean if you're talking about if you're talking about
Speaker 1: an infinite amount of time, then there's an infinite number
Speaker 1: of time travelers, likely because I'm pretty sure someone else
Speaker 1: will figure it out, not just one person, unless that
Speaker 1: one person figures it out and then eliminates everybody else.
Speaker 1: To go back to my violence, but I would imagine
Speaker 1: that this would be incredibly difficult to hide over any
Speaker 1: length of time. Uh, anyone coming back making a mistake
Speaker 1: would obviously start to raise some eyebrows. Now you could
Speaker 1: argue that maybe other people in the future say, well,
Speaker 1: let's go back and fix that. Yeah. Yeah, I like
Speaker 1: to think that there's like a time travel janitorial crew
Speaker 1: that go out, but that just becomes a domino effect.
Speaker 1: There was some movie I saw a trailer for within
Speaker 1: the past couple of years that had a premise kind
Speaker 1: of like that, didn't they I don't know. I've me
Speaker 1: thinking about Looper. Ben Boland would say, you're thinking about Looper. Okay, Okay,
Speaker 1: So what you're saying basically is that even the really
Speaker 1: smart time traveler from the future eventually is just gonna
Speaker 1: be a total nano rod because we all are sometimes
Speaker 1: and he's gonna make a mistake, She's gonna she's gonna,
Speaker 1: you know, post a blog post that says something about
Speaker 1: the future. I find it less likely that there would
Speaker 1: be only one time traveler. That's the I would think.
Speaker 1: If time travel is possible, I would expect there would
Speaker 1: be multiple instances of it, and I can't be convinced
Speaker 1: that through those multiple instances everyone does it perfectly all
Speaker 1: the time. I would think the more frequently it happens,
Speaker 1: the more likely some trace evidence of that travel would
Speaker 1: become noticeable. So that brings us to the question of
Speaker 1: how can we go about ferreting out any of these
Speaker 1: time travelers that are poking around making mistakes? Right? What
Speaker 1: hasn't been tried so far? So the Michigan study is
Speaker 1: really fun and interesting, and kudos to them, But as
Speaker 1: the authors point out, it was very limited. I mean,
Speaker 1: even if it is the most exhaustive search so far
Speaker 1: it had, you know, it was kind of modest, pretty
Speaker 1: small in scope. Yeah, so what else could we do
Speaker 1: to use the data in the world around us to
Speaker 1: look for time travelers evidence of time travelers? At least
Speaker 1: I thought one thing would be simply to exp band
Speaker 1: on what they already tried, because I mean, how often
Speaker 1: are people from the future really going to be talking
Speaker 1: about commt is On and Pope Francis. If you found that,
Speaker 1: that'd be really interesting evidence, But you wouldn't necessarily think
Speaker 1: time travelers would be leaving data about those things on
Speaker 1: the web. Yeah, so you'd really need to be looking
Speaker 1: for anything that really caught the world by surprise, something
Speaker 1: something that was huge news that there wasn't a lot
Speaker 1: of lead up to a combination of words specifically that
Speaker 1: wouldn't have made any sense before. Yeah, maybe the name
Speaker 1: of an earthquaker disaster or a world leader, or a
Speaker 1: disease that we only really found out about in the
Speaker 1: past couple of decades. Right, And then you know, you
Speaker 1: would want to try and make sure you limit that,
Speaker 1: like anything that had a human cause would be somewhat
Speaker 1: problematic because there's a possibility that the humans who caused,
Speaker 1: it might have had some activity that could change the results.
Speaker 1: So that's why you would try to kind of avoid that.
Speaker 1: Anything that was a plot, for example, there you might
Speaker 1: find evidence of it, but and the evidence you find
Speaker 1: was actually the formation of the plot, as opposed to
Speaker 1: someone going back and studying something that in their past
Speaker 1: had already happened. So you know, it's a little more
Speaker 1: tricky if it's a human caused event. But if it's
Speaker 1: anything that was not caused specific specifically by humans, like
Speaker 1: a scientific discovery that was unexpected, would be a good one.
Speaker 1: But again that's a little tricky because there's probably people
Speaker 1: who are actually actively looking into that kind of thing. So, right,
Speaker 1: and there's another problem with scientific discoveries, which is, I mean,
Speaker 1: how much does the average person actually talk about scientific
Speaker 1: discoveries by name? Well, I mean, if you're talking about
Speaker 1: a time traveler, you expect that they would be coming
Speaker 1: back for some significant purpose, right, Maybe I don't know.
Speaker 1: I mean, So to remedy this, I thought of another option,
Speaker 1: which would be to look for older hypertext containing a
Speaker 1: relatively high density of recently coined words that are part
Speaker 1: of common use language. So, for example, like a person
Speaker 1: from the future, unless they are like a Vatican astronomer,
Speaker 1: probably wouldn't have much reason to talk about Pope Francis
Speaker 1: and comment ice on. But you might see people, say,
Speaker 1: posting online in the year two thousands saying words like
Speaker 1: unfriend and selfie and sexting. Yeah, if someone's talking about
Speaker 1: lull cats and twerking like too early in the internet timeline,
Speaker 1: that's a that's a dead giveaway. It's also something of
Speaker 1: an unusual um example, simply because you're assuming that such
Speaker 1: words would have longevity and not fatal. We don't know,
Speaker 1: but we can try it. I'm just thinking about slang
Speaker 1: and how quickly it changes, and how quickly we abandon
Speaker 1: lots of it. I'm sure people will still be saying
Speaker 1: selfie and sexting in a hundred years. I think we'll
Speaker 1: probably have evolved to a different form of terrible harassment
Speaker 1: than sexting. But but all cats will be around forever,
Speaker 1: that's true, and they truly live in our hearts. They
Speaker 1: then at the internet, too, so they did. I tried
Speaker 1: another version of this. I was gonna say, actually, I
Speaker 1: thought this was brilliant at first, but I just a
Speaker 1: quick experiment blew it out of the water. I was
Speaker 1: going to say, we should look for uses of the
Speaker 1: word muggle appearing before the publication of the first Harry
Speaker 1: Potter book. In it seems good on the surface, Yeah,
Speaker 1: but I did a Google Ingraham search for the term,
Speaker 1: and either the word has other uses throughout history, or
Speaker 1: I just discovered evidence of future Harry Potter fans going
Speaker 1: back in time and publishing books in the eighteen sixties
Speaker 1: and nineteen o eight in a bunch of other years, right,
Speaker 1: A lot lots of fan fit activity in the eighteen
Speaker 1: six I mean there's another there's another possible explanation, which
Speaker 1: is that perhaps not everything and the book was original,
Speaker 1: but you know, well a lot of the terminology, specifically
Speaker 1: the J. K. Rowling used was very much based on
Speaker 1: already existing um slang. Sure, and there was a lot
Speaker 1: of of course faux Latin in there too, right, so
Speaker 1: you know, I could have probably looked it up. I
Speaker 1: don't know what muggle actually meant before Harry Potter. Maybe
Speaker 1: it was someone who got mugged. I'm sure it was
Speaker 1: something magical, all right. Well, what about other evidence besides
Speaker 1: things like the traces people have left behind on maybe
Speaker 1: online searches, what about actual physical sightings, because we've had
Speaker 1: a few, a few examples of people who at least
Speaker 1: jokingly have suggested that we've got evidence of time travelers
Speaker 1: amongst us because of things we've captured on film, yeah,
Speaker 1: or or audio or in photographs. Because right, we've been
Speaker 1: talking entirely about text up until now. Really, so so
Speaker 1: what about documentation of people using non contemporary language or
Speaker 1: dialect or you know, clothing technology, other objects like that.
Speaker 1: So you're thinking specifically of the Charlie Chaplin film Premier Spectacular. Yes,
Speaker 1: I thought you were referring to the Nicolas Cage vampire
Speaker 1: from The nore Uncanny. Yeah, we're talking about the s Kuss.
Speaker 1: So there's a video online, you can find it on
Speaker 1: YouTube that shows some footage from I think it's actually
Speaker 1: the film premiere of The Circus, but maybe it's from
Speaker 1: the movie itself, but anyway, it shows a person walking
Speaker 1: along a sidewalk and appears to be holding a cell
Speaker 1: phone or other type of mobile device up to her face.
Speaker 1: For all the world, I mean this was from and
Speaker 1: this looks exactly like what you would expect someone walking
Speaker 1: and talking on a cell phone to look like. Right,
Speaker 1: And and maybe a few years ago, we would have
Speaker 1: been suspicious because it's such a large device. But now
Speaker 1: that we're now seeing the iPhone six plus and other
Speaker 1: enormous fablets coming out, I think it's back to being realistic. Um,
Speaker 1: but you know, not to burst everyone's bubble. But it
Speaker 1: appears upon really close examination that this may have been
Speaker 1: a hearing aid like device. Yeah, the first kind of
Speaker 1: new fangled electric hearing aids were starting to be patented
Speaker 1: in the early nineteen twenties. I think that's the first
Speaker 1: one that I saw. Siemens had a model that was
Speaker 1: very much like what was seen in that. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: or the person might have just had an earache, or
Speaker 1: I mean, we don't know. It could have been any
Speaker 1: number of reasons why they kind of had their hand
Speaker 1: and and an object up to their face while they
Speaker 1: were walking along. Now I like that there's the second hoax. Hoax,
Speaker 1: but second example because I know exactly the photograph you're
Speaker 1: talking about. Yeah, yeah, it's great. There's this very internet
Speaker 1: famous photo you guys might have seen it called the
Speaker 1: time Traveling Hipster, and it's it's an image of a
Speaker 1: man and in large sunglasses and what appears at first
Speaker 1: glance to be a T shirt and a hoodie standing
Speaker 1: in a crowd shot in UM. Upon examination, you realize
Speaker 1: that the glasses actually were contemporary. Okay, that the level
Speaker 1: are before. I think he's got kind of an eraser
Speaker 1: head haircut. Yeah yeah, I sort of like I stepped
Speaker 1: right out of Bonaroo And now, yeah, I mean he's cute,
Speaker 1: like I'd say hi to him. Um. But but but
Speaker 1: his glasses, it turns out, actually were contemporary, although the
Speaker 1: leather side guards on them were a little bit antiquated
Speaker 1: at the time, So maybe he really was a hipster
Speaker 1: of the UM. And his clothing does bear out for
Speaker 1: for common like sweater and cardigan layering that the the
Speaker 1: day's youth would have been wearing. UM. Specifically, the sweaters
Speaker 1: NIT logo was one for a local hockey team UM
Speaker 1: that like players or rink staff would have would have
Speaker 1: been wearing. Yeah, and he also this was a photograph
Speaker 1: that was taken at the opening the reopening of a bridge,
Speaker 1: and one questions while at time traveler would go to
Speaker 1: the opening, I can't miss this. Why would a non
Speaker 1: time traveler go to the opening? Yeah, like like hey, no, no,
Speaker 1: I see he stranded there and he's incredibly bored, his
Speaker 1: time machine stopped working, and he's got to wait until
Speaker 1: they invent something in the nineteen sixties before we can
Speaker 1: go back to his time. It does, it does look
Speaker 1: like in the image that he's that he's holding one
Speaker 1: of the um like early nineteen forties box cameras. UM.
Speaker 1: And and so maybe, you know, maybe he was making
Speaker 1: his own memories to send forward to the future. Perhaps
Speaker 1: he was a photographer for a local publication and the
Speaker 1: reason why he was there was to capture this magic
Speaker 1: moment for all of posterity. At any rate. Um. There
Speaker 1: there are many, many, many other examples that get passed
Speaker 1: around UM and you know, but but like these, they
Speaker 1: can really be debunked without even a whole lot of research. Um.
Speaker 1: Of course, that's a that's a whole lot of work
Speaker 1: for for any given human to sit down and and
Speaker 1: file through. So I was thinking that maybe if we
Speaker 1: want to to really search for time travelers, we could,
Speaker 1: especially as like like AI visual recognition algorithms start improving,
Speaker 1: we could set some robots to the task of searching
Speaker 1: for these extemporaneous visual cues. Yeah. And then of course,
Speaker 1: obviously anything that would be flagged would have to be
Speaker 1: reviewed by humanized to make sure that no then actually
Speaker 1: is a whatever contemporary, contemporary piece of technology or whatever
Speaker 1: happens to be. You know, this is a promotional image
Speaker 1: from a science fiction movie of the time. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: this was. This was a movie that was specifically made
Speaker 1: to look like it came from that era, but was
Speaker 1: in fact made in The funny thing is you would
Speaker 1: never mistake one of those old sci fi movies for
Speaker 1: the present. No no, no, no, no. Um. And I
Speaker 1: was trying to think of how we might do the
Speaker 1: same thing for for audio recordings, and I think it
Speaker 1: might be actually a lot harder. I mean, I know
Speaker 1: that just on this show we've probably done some vocal
Speaker 1: flubs that might sound like something some word from the future. Yeah,
Speaker 1: oh yeah, you know. The other day, I I we
Speaker 1: edited it out, but I was trying to say the
Speaker 1: word focusing, but I said folking, and I was just like,
Speaker 1: I know, folking is going to mean something within twenty years.
Speaker 1: It's not a word now, but it's coming. It's going
Speaker 1: to be big. Whereas everyone's going to watch my brain
Speaker 1: stuff video about the old timey voice and assume that
Speaker 1: I'm from the past. And if someonew managed to land
Speaker 1: in the present. I think both of your time travelers
Speaker 1: to be frank. Like I said, I do travel their time.
Speaker 1: I just do it at a very steady rate. Okay,
Speaker 1: So one last question. If we assume that there are
Speaker 1: time travelers amongst us, but they are good at hiding themselves,
Speaker 1: what could draw them out? I mean, assuming maybe that
Speaker 1: they would have to willingly reveal themselves for us to
Speaker 1: find them. What what could get them to step into
Speaker 1: the into the light that there was a question I
Speaker 1: was thinking when we were looking at Stephen Hawking's party.
Speaker 1: I mean, is the allure of champagne and hanging out
Speaker 1: with Stephen Hawking enough to make somebody from the future
Speaker 1: break radio silence and show up? Well beyond that, I mean,
Speaker 1: how do you how do you make a serious offer
Speaker 1: that someone from the future would actually find tempting? Keeping
Speaker 1: in mind that you have to assume that the future
Speaker 1: is either going to be super awesome where they've got
Speaker 1: pretty much everything they need anyway, I mean, by the
Speaker 1: time you get to a time machine, you probably have
Speaker 1: managed to cover all the regular bases um or it's
Speaker 1: going to be really, you know, just incomprehensible to us.
Speaker 1: So how can we predict what they would want in
Speaker 1: the first place, you know, And how do you provide
Speaker 1: incentives to somebody who might live in a post scarcity world?
Speaker 1: And how would you do that in a way that
Speaker 1: you could back it up without it just coming across
Speaker 1: as a joke. Right, Like, if I end up making
Speaker 1: an advertisement and I offer something that either I clearly
Speaker 1: cannot actually grant, or if I were to do it,
Speaker 1: it would really cause some serious problems. It might be
Speaker 1: big enough to attempt somebody, but everyone would say, well,
Speaker 1: he can't realistically give me that. So here's my offer
Speaker 1: to you future time travelers. I mean, obviously coming in
Speaker 1: at three wasn't good enough. You weren't you weren't gonna
Speaker 1: do that, And it's after four o'clock now, so um,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna have to up the anti Uh. If you
Speaker 1: come through that door in our studio, you get a
Speaker 1: coupon for a free backrup. Now. These are fantastic. My
Speaker 1: wife loves them. I don't give her any other presents
Speaker 1: and she smiles every year when I give these to her. Uh,
Speaker 1: they don't have an expiration date, so you just have
Speaker 1: to come in and tell me. We can set up
Speaker 1: the time and place. I got a better one. Whoa, whoa, whoa, Joe,
Speaker 1: I'm sitting right now. You may not be able to
Speaker 1: make a material appeal to these people. You may not
Speaker 1: even be able to appeal to their sense of I
Speaker 1: don't know, social desire, because maybe in the future they're
Speaker 1: just too cool. But you can appeal to their schadenfreude. So,
Speaker 1: people from the future, if you show up at four
Speaker 1: on what is this October, Jonathan Strickland will do something
Speaker 1: really humiliating. I don't I don't know what it's gonna be,
Speaker 1: but trust Lauren and I to dream up so thing
Speaker 1: really good. Yeah, and I promise I'll do it. The
Speaker 1: minute already flipped. Well, I you know the other one
Speaker 1: we could say, we could appeal to a sense of vanity.
Speaker 1: You could be the time traveler to break world news
Speaker 1: and be in the history books on forward thinking. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the famous audio podcast. You know, we we are right
Speaker 1: up there with like this American life and or the
Speaker 1: very least we know people who are right up there
Speaker 1: with American life. We've listened to this American Life, so
Speaker 1: obviously we're having a lot of fun with this. But
Speaker 1: I mean you kind of have to because we don't
Speaker 1: have any evidence, so they're ever working, right, So I
Speaker 1: mean we are dead serious, y'all, like like future time travelers,
Speaker 1: we will follow through on these promises. I mean, you know,
Speaker 1: maybe we need to get more more rad people like
Speaker 1: Stephen Hawking on this game plan, have like Elon musk
Speaker 1: Er or I don't know, um, maybe Scarlett Johansson or whoever,
Speaker 1: whoever people in the future want to hang out Bill Murray,
Speaker 1: that would be Bill Murray would totally hang out with
Speaker 1: you if you traveled back in time to see what
Speaker 1: what this tells me? But he wouldn't tell anyone about it.
Speaker 1: Our our listeners clearly didn't spread this audio podcast far enough,
Speaker 1: So I blame you get to work. Yes, let's blame
Speaker 1: our listeners. It's a great way to build an audience. No,
Speaker 1: obviously we're all again having fun. But this is this,
Speaker 1: you know, this is one of those things where we
Speaker 1: say this kind of a strike against at least unbridled
Speaker 1: time travel, and maybe maybe that time travel itself is
Speaker 1: in fact possible, but it has one of those limitations
Speaker 1: we talked about earlier. So this was really fun to
Speaker 1: talk about. And uh, we've got we've got a lot
Speaker 1: of other fun topics in mind, some of which have
Speaker 1: been suggested by you guys, our listeners. So if you
Speaker 1: want to suggest any other kind of fun future oriented
Speaker 1: topics let us know. Send us an email all right
Speaker 1: addresses FW thinking at how Stuff Works dot com, or
Speaker 1: drop us a line on Twitter or Google Plus. Our
Speaker 1: handle at both of those is FW thinking. Search for
Speaker 1: us on Facebook. Put f W thinking in that search
Speaker 1: bar will pop right up. Let us know what you
Speaker 1: want to hear, and we will tackle it and we'll
Speaker 1: talk to you again really soon. For more on this
Speaker 1: topic in the future of technology, visit forward thinking dot com,
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