
Best Practices for Time Travelers (2003) - swatkat
http://idlewords.com/2003/09/best_practices_for_time_travelers.htm
======
officialjunk
A few links are broken in that article. Here's an archive which contains the
pictures referenced:
[http://web.archive.org/web/20070202095050/http://www.anomali...](http://web.archive.org/web/20070202095050/http://www.anomalies.net/time_travel/john.html)

~~~
to3m
I assume the war destroyed all the decent smartphones then, along with the
vaping devices. Those photos look worse than ones taken on my Moto G.

~~~
zeven7
The civil war in Titor's time line started in 2004, well before the first
iPhone. I'd imagine the war altered his timeline enough that modern smart
phones with nice cameras were not invented.

~~~
arjie
Ha ha, hilarious. But the Nikon DSC 995 existed in 2001 and took vastly better
digital photographs than that. Not only did the technology exist but I was
using one in India around that time.

I suppose the one thing hoaxes can't really compensate for is the fact that
technology moves so fast.

------
pmiller2
If you really want to be believed, just show up to Stephen Hawking's time
traveler party he held in 2009[0].

[0]:
[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/picturegalleries/howabouttha...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/picturegalleries/howaboutthat/10488058/Professor-
Hawking-fan-tries-to-prove-time-travel-by-creating-invitations-for-party-
thats-already-happened.html)

------
di
More about John Titor:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Titor](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Titor)

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mirimir
OK, I must point to

[http://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-
content/uploads/Robert-A.-Hei...](http://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-
content/uploads/Robert-A.-Heinlein-All-You-Zombies.pdf)

~~~
joshschreuder
Predestination, starring Ethan Hawke, is a great adaptation of Heinlein's
story too.

~~~
nickpsecurity
It was a great movie. Slow for about the first half doing a lot of character
development, then moving quick into all kinds of territory, and then
mindbending finish. I didn't know it was adapted from Heinlein. Darnit.
Scratch it off my list of "original" movies to put it on "risky but good."

Also, worth mentioning that the actor playing "John" had one of best
presentations I've ever seen. Smart that they picked at "tomboy" for it as
that fit most of the movie really well. Also, showed John's more
straightforward acting took more talent than one would figure at first.

EDIT: "All You Zombies." Extra obvious now. Wish I read it sooner. :)

------
lux
Hahaha this is great! What I love about the John Titor story is how you kind
of want to believe in it against your better judgement. The desire to be in on
something larger than life, I suppose.

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thinkloop
There is no such thing as time, or time travel. There are only positions of
particles. To go back in time by 1 minute, all particles in the universe have
to be moved/changed back to their previous position. This is not time travel,
but universe manipulation except for one subject. If there were parallel
universes with every possible outcome and you traveled to one, this would also
not be time travel, but a moving to a place that looks like another place
where particles were at a certain position. Time is just a way to label
snapshots of particle positions in the universe.

~~~
SomeStupidPoint
Your position is inconsistent: the arrangement of particles changing is time,
so your explanation of there not being time... asserts that time happens!

Putting the universe back as it was except for you _is_ time travel. You've
traveled your state to a different time (previous state) of the universe.

Your semantic game sounds very clever, but is actually just inconsistent and
borderline ignorant of what people mean by those terms.

~~~
YCode
I think what he means is that time exists in the way that distance or speed
exists. It's not a physical force like gravity or magnetism that acts upon the
universe, it's just a method for us to understand and quantify what happens
around us.

Traveling back in time subsequently doesn't make sense because the "past" is
simply what we call previous configurations of matter.

You can't go back to those configurations (read: "go back in time") because
they don't exist anymore.

Now, I'm not a physicist so I have no idea if he's correct, but semantically
it makes sense and it's something I've wondered about for a while.

~~~
SomeStupidPoint
> Traveling back in time subsequently doesn't make sense because the "past" is
> simply what we call previous configurations of matter.

So? If my future goes from the world as it is now to the world as it was in
2000, in what sense am I _not_ in 2000?

I mean, you guys seem to be under the impression that there's a single
universal clock I cant reset... There's not. In whatever sense it _ever_ was
2000, rewinding all the clocks would make it 2000 _again_. There's no clock
besides those local ones, so if you reset them all, you're in the past (in
whatever sense there was ever a past).

I just find it particularly silly to have said there's no time when you keep
commenting on time happening.

(Also, does traveling a foot to the left not make sense because there's no
distance, just past states Ive been in? Cause _you_ said time was like
distance, and you're right: both exist or neither exist in exactly the same
sense.)

~~~
YCode
Unlike distance, time is unidirectional. Yes, if you could roll back all
matter, energy and every other force in the universe you could "go back in
time" but the point is that time is a concept and not a force of nature.

It seems like you're being obtuse about the distinction.

~~~
SomeStupidPoint
Your position is just semantic games: traveling to a past state of the
universe and living there is time travel -- you translated your state in to a
past configuration of the universe. You're just sitting there whining how what
both scientists and lay people would accept as time travel (living in the
past) isnt Real Time Travel, because it's not some fictionalized Platonic
ideal you've constructed and insist is the One True Meaning.

Amature science people are the worst: a little knowledge keeps you from seeing
the picture.

~~~
YCode
Your patronizing tone aside I see what you mean. Yes, that would be "time
travel". Again, it just seems like you're being antagonistic here and now
putting words in my mouth in a vain attempt to prove your own superiority.

The only claim I was making was to clarify what OP meant about time not being
a phenomena like gravity and to passively ask if there was any evidence of
time as a physical (rather than purely conceptual) force.

Sorry if my amateur curiosity offended your professional (?) understanding of
such things.

~~~
SomeStupidPoint
Im mostly replying to say that you're correct I was needlessly antagonistic,
and that Im sorry for that.

To try and answer your point a bit more directly: time isn't a force, just
like distance isn't a force. A force is something that induces action. If you
experience a force, you're induced to act. (Some debate about if gravity is a
genuine force, but that's getting messy.)

Time is what a clock does, and distance is what a ruler does. On the one hand,
both time and distance are mathematical fiction to parameterize aspects of the
universal state. On the other hand, Im 2m tall and my clock is making a
periodic tick noise. So, time and distance really are aspects of phenomena,
rather than phenomena in their own right, and as such are fiction. However,
the aspects of phenomena they refer to have so far turned out to be pretty
useful and appear in most phenomena we've encountered, and we think this is
because both emerge from aspects of the fundamental phenomenon interacting
with itself to create the other phenomena. (This is why we're trying to unify
QM and GR, and why the approach is based on entanglement and information
cascades.)

My point was that there's no fundamental difference between time and distance,
they're either both there or both not there in exactly the same sense, we can
travel through both in the same sense (if not same freedom), but only very
rarely do people get insistent that distance doesnt exist, and usually only
when making a highly technical point. Never have I had someone not understand
what I mean by moving a foot to the left, even if they ultimately don't
believe that distance exists. This comment was like that: insisting we talk in
the highly technical language of distance not existing, but refusing to make
the standard and well understood lift of "move a foot to the left" to that
language. There's a very straightforward notion of travel, even if we're
talking about around a parameter space. It's that partial use of technical
machinery that frustrated me -- if you're going to have a technical
discussion, don't play obtuse and refuse to make reasonable translations if
other people's statements. My comment about people who know a little was
mostly just venting frustration that people who are new to the highly
technical aspects often can't (and don't even realize they should) make those
lifts, then end up stridently talking about how the unlifted claim makes no
senae in their freshly learned framework. To be fair, I was worse about that
than most, and should learn to be extra patient.

My snarky comment was snarky, but had a point: time is one of the open
questions in modern physics, and unless you really want to get in to the heavy
stuff, less is more. About the best view to have in your head is "there's no
time but what your (and everyone else's) pocket watch says". Your watch
needn't agree with mine, though. (And indeed, your head is a slightly
different age than your feet, from all the standing, sitting, etc in a gravity
well.)

To summarize, Id say that time and distance are meta-phenomena: they're
consistently behaved, widespread features of phenomena we discover, but we
have good reason to expect that it's an emergent feature of a deeper
phenomenon.

Again, sorry for my earlier replies, and I hope I havent put you off asking
questions!

------
hunterjrj
Should add (2003) to the title

~~~
coderdude
Were you disappointed that this wasn't bleeding edge advice for time
travelers?

~~~
david-given
"What do we want?"

"Time travel!"

"When do we want it?"

"That's irrelevant!"

------
rwmj
I thought John Titor was an innovative bit of science fiction writing. Did we
ever work out who was behind him?

~~~
mikkom
There was some speculation

[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/11945420/Who-was-
Joh...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/11945420/Who-was-John-Titor-
the-time-traveller-who-came-from-2036-to-warn-us-of-a-nuclear-war.html)

------
sandworm101
[http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/ciencia/time_travel/johnti...](http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/ciencia/time_travel/johntitor03.htm)

Interesting fiction. I'm not physicist, but anything pumping out enough
gravity to bend a laser beam 45* over a couple feet (see pic in link) should
also collapse that car into a sphere. I also laugh at seeing that while the
laser seems bent, all the other light passing through the same area seems
unperturbed.

------
sgt101
William Gibson's book "The Peripheral" is a fantastic take on this (and many
other things).

------
stock_toaster
El Psy Kongroo.

~~~
AznHisoka
that anime is the only reason i know about John Titor

~~~
voltagex_
For anyone else wondering, this is a reference to a password used in an anime
called "Steins:Gate". No idea how it relates to John Titor.

~~~
eslaught
Steins;Gate[1] contains references to John Titor[2]. I actually thought they
had made him up until I looked on Wikipedia and discovered he was a real
("real") conspiracy theory.

An English version of the game is now up on Steam. Highly recommended.
[http://store.steampowered.com/app/412830/](http://store.steampowered.com/app/412830/)

[1]: Edit: the game. Not sure about the anime.

[2]: Edit: In the game at least this is more in depth than just a password.
Saying more would require spoilers.

~~~
voltagex_
Thoroughly offtopic, would you recommend Steins Gate? I haven't watched any
anime for a while but enjoyed Ergo Proxy and Eden of the East.

~~~
PeCaN
The visual novel is really fantastic, though fairly slow-moving if you're not
used to the medium. (Visual novels in general tend to be very detailed and
very slow-paced. Some, like Higurashi, use this to great effect, but it can
also annoy people not used to them.)

If you're not sure about reading it, the anime is also really good. It's
obviously much less detailed than the visual novel (compressing ~40 hours of
visual novel into TV format is hard) and omits some sizable plot points, but
it's still great. The first half is fairly slow set up before it hits like a
truck.

~~~
eslaught
What would you recommend to try next for someone who liked Steins;Gate (the
visual novel)?

~~~
PeCaN
For visual novels? Probably Root Double, Ever17, and Umineko. All have really
great character development like Steins;Gate and are pretty thoughtful. Root
Double has well-done sci-fi elements as well.

~~~
itchyjunk
I haven't read the visual novel for either one but i've enjoyed the anime
immensely. So I would recommend you give Haruhi Suzumiya [0] a shot.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haruhi_Suzumiya](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haruhi_Suzumiya)

------
sakopov
Does anybody know if the forum archives with John Titor's posts are still
floating around somewhere? I remember reading some of his stuff a few years
after he disappeared and it made for quite an entertaining read. This guy had
his story figures out to the very bone. Everything down to the sci-fi tech. He
had every nook and cranny covered.

------
spullara
I stopped reading when he said that the clocks would tip over at 2^32 seconds
after 1970 (136 years), but it is really 2^31 since it uses a signed 32-bit
int (68 years).

~~~
idlewords
Fixed. You can finish reading.

~~~
flashman
Only 4.155×10⁸ seconds late :)

------
zenithcobra
the earth spins around the sun. the sun spins around the milky way. so if one
where to time travel wouldn't they just pop into a space where we are now but
where the earth hasn't reached yet?

~~~
matt_kantor
Relativity tells us that there is no preferred reference frame. Earth is just
as "special" as the center of the galaxy.

------
ianbertolacci
This would be a really good title for a book on HPC best practices...

