
Searching the Internet for evidence of time travelers - ColinWright
http://arxiv.org/abs/1312.7128
======
Udo
This is interesting, but these methods don't strike me as really viable. The
Twitter outreach was specifically targeted at the cooperation of Twitter-using
time travelers, and while Pope Francis might or might not be historically
significant enough to warrant prescient mentioning, I'm _sure_ comet ISON is
not. The assumption is also (and maybe it has to be) that time travelers would
blurp out important prescient information - however, I don't think that holds
true if they were either well disciplined or engaged in historical research -
which would mean they know little more (if anything) about our immediate
future than we do.

I'm obviously not advocating time travelers are present (I would think with
the certain prospect of leaving your time line in order to create another one,
the proposition of time travel seems akin to a one-way change in universes
that doesn't sound very inviting), but it's definitely fun to speculate about.
Realistically, one would also have to take into account the fact that, by mere
virtue of being present, a time traveler _will_ change the course of history
in the long run.

A more thorough effort could center on large-scale automated data mining for
prescient terms on the internet. Of course, there would be many false
positives, but as a side effect we could learn more about the epidemiology of
ideas even if we don't discover time travelers. It seems to me that a
disciplined time traveler would not purposefully drop historically significant
hints - however, if they are from a future and culture close enough to our
own, they might still reveal themselves inadvertently through idiosyncratic
phrases and reference to concepts that are from the future. Hand-picked
phrases are not enough to discover this, it would have to be large-scale AI-
supported text mining.

~~~
lucaspiller
> Twitter-using time travelers

If I were a time traveller I probably wouldn't use any of the social networks
that are popular for non-time-travellers. Firstly managing so many social
network accounts to keep up with the latest fashions would be a right pain
(imagine having to change your profile picture on all of them...), but also
their 'timeline' view would be completely different to my relative timeline.

I'd assume the network format would be distributed, running on something akin
to a phone that you keep on you at all times. Whenever you make a post it
records your relative 'life time', or just increments an id, so posts are
always ordered in your relative timeframe. When you meet someone it would sync
up with their account - I'm not quite sure how that would work though. The
issue is you could post something about them publicly that hasn't happened yet
in their timeframe (that could be embarrassing). Private messages are even
worse...

(N.b. I should probably patent this idea for when time travel is invented)

~~~
andyjohnson0
Nice idea. Although the user-base of time travellers might be a bit limited. I
would suggest broadening your product to include the soon-to-be emerging high
relativistic speed and FTL travel sectors. Part of the process of friending
someone could be to indicate how your respective light-cones intersect, for
example.

If your network is ad-supported then there might be extra complications in
temporally localising the ad content so that it doesn't induce the wrong kind
of causality violations. You might want to give that some thought, now or in
the future.

Disclosure: I'm not a VC in this timeline.

------
awjr
Isn't the issue here that they are describing the methods through which they
are trying to determine time travel. In effect, telling anyone in the future
exactly what not to do.

Let's also assume that somebody had a reason to travel into the past, say to
kill Hitler. Our timeline would record that an Austrian artist was murdered in
the 1920s. We would not consider this historically significant.

I think time travel is inherently very difficult to detect. Even if a time
traveller 'dropped' tech. This tech would be recoverable by popping back in
time and recovering it.

~~~
venomsnake
And have you thought about how many potential hitlers were pruned in the WW2
... every one that died in the conflict could be much worse than him. So maybe
Hitler was a historical fuse. A maniac just 20 years later could have
destroyed humanity. Dead serious here, assume that nuclear weapons were
available from day1.

So maybe there was time travel manipulation to ensure WWII so that humanity
could survive.

~~~
arethuza
Perhaps the WW2 in our timeline is the least worst outcome.... :-|

e.g. What if the Normandy landings had failed? The Nazis would still have been
defeated by the Soviets but the whole of Europe north of the Alps could have
been occupied by the Soviets, perhaps making a far worse later nuclear
conflict much more likely.

------
jsonmez
This makes no sense... here is why:

"Hey Bob, you idiot! Someone found you by a stupid tweet you made. Then they
posted a research paper online and now everyone knows about time travelers. Go
back and fix it."

"Done"

The very act of publishing the results of this study could have caused the
results to be changed, thus showing a non-positive match...

~~~
kitcar
That would be a great (yet unsatisfying) twist for the end of a low budget
sci-fi movie.

------
andyjohnson0
I'm not sure why time travellers from the future would bother to leave
prescient messages on the net. What's the motivation? Something like graffiti
artists tagging difficult locations?

What I _can_ see them (hypothetically) doing is manipulating present-day
financial markets by exploiting their knowledge of future events (e.g. sudden
commodity shortages or unexpected mineral discoveries) to increase their
wealth. Even small manipulations would produce large downstream gains due to
compound interest.

So perhaps market data is a place to look for abnormalities - particularly in
existing systems that look for signs of insider trading, or investment
accounts/trusts that are untouched over very long periods of time. Of course,
such data is usually protected and inaccessible anyway.

~~~
infruset
Yes, I would probably go back to 2009 and mine bitcoins (or fill captchas for
5 BTC a piece..) with a CPU..

~~~
andyjohnson0
Good point. All the early bitcoin miners are clearly suspect. And Satoshi
Nakamoto's sudden appearance and then disappearance now makes total sense.

~~~
arethuza
Combining time travel and computation has _interesting_ results:

[http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/project.archive/general.artic...](http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/project.archive/general.articles/1991/TempComp.html)

~~~
danielweber
Totally serious question: If I go back to 1990, can I distribute a current
version of emacs? The toolchain to build the current source tree won't exist
for a while.

~~~
andyjohnson0
Why not? Any computer program is just a very large number. Even thought the
emacs build process that calculates the large number corresponding to the
current version of emacs hadn't been performed in 1990, the number itself
"existed" back then as the outcome of any number of other possible
computations.

On the other hand, you might have problems with dll dependencies.

~~~
raverbashing
Or maybe Emacs can't run in a home machine of 1990

Remember? Eight Megs And Constantly Swapping

~~~
andyjohnson0
I assume @danielweber was asking whether it was possible _in principle_ \- as
in, can information exist before it is created.

My remark about dlls was an attempt at humour, not a comment on
practicalities.

------
Vaskivo
On a tangentially related note, the tabletop roleplaying game Continuum has,
IMO, the most interesting description of time travel and a time travellers
community.

The premise is simple. What is the most logical thing for the first time
traveller to do? He would travel to the future to get his hands on the most
advanced time machine possible. In the end, the best is the human mind. They
time (and space) travel with a simple thought.

It has a single "timeline", i.e. changing something in the past doesn't "split
the timeline" but creates a paradox, that translates to "frag" on all people
related to the changed action. This makes people want to correct these
paradoxes.

Example, I go back in time and kill Hitler. It frags a LOT of people. The good
guys want to correct the frag. They could go back in my timeline and prevent
me from doing it, fragging me. If they don't want to frag me, they could
switch Hitler with a Robot or something. I don't get fragged because still I
shot something I though was Hitler, yet Hitler remains alive.

~~~
precisioncoder
Wouldn't we as well need a counterpart to "frag" such as "pop" for all the
people saved/born due to the change? Then if the "good guys" corrected the
original "frags" those "popped" people would be re-"fragged" which would cause
a split group of "good guys" to attempt to "correct" the previously
"corrected" history?

~~~
Vaskivo
Not really. It's cosmology is weird.

The universe is kind of a mutable thing full of "sentient force" (it's time
travellers). When a paradox is formed, it's defense mechanism kicks in to
eliminate the paradox. That defense mechanism is the good guys (the
continuum).

Frag is associated with what you KNOW. Information is usefull but very
dangerous. Imagine this, I go to Auschwitz and see all that horror. I decide
to kill Hitler and succeed. I just fragged myself, because I know I killed
Hitler (therefore, the Holocaust never happened) yet I saw/know what happened
if he were alive. Frag is like being "out of sync" with the universe. If I
don't feel frag, it means the good guys intervened, and nullified my action.
Of course, as punishment they would probably frag me in another way.

Why do they prevent the killing of Hitler? Because they and their frieds may
have/will have seen the consequences of Hitler's actions so it's in their
interest to prevent the paradox.

Practically, it doesn't matter what really happened, just that it happened as
remembered by the coninuum, and that the consequences remain the same. Another
example, by some means, JFK's father is sterile. He can't concieve JFK This is
a problem as JFK is known to exist. The continuum may stealthily inseminate
JFK's mother for him to be born. In the grand scheme, it may be even
impossible to know if JFK's was always sterile or if some outside force made
him sterile. The universe must BE as it is remembered.

Higher level continuum members start realizing that, in fact, free will does
not exist. You just have to do what you have to do, and have fu doing it.
(This is also the main focus of disagreement with the bad guys.)

~~~
krisgee
I like the book's example of simple frag with the beer.

So the setup is that you and your time travelling buddy are watching the big
Sportsball match on TV in both of your relative presents.

You want a beer so you go to the fridge and there isn't any. So you jump
Downstream a couple of minutes, grab a brew and jumps up. Uh oh, don't drink
and Span because you just fragged your friend as you are both drinking the
same beer.

Your friend is naturally peeved and tells you to fix it. So, what you do is:

* Buy a pack of the same brand of beer and put it in the fridge

* Put a note on one of the bottles telling yourself and your friend not to touch it

* Span (Jump) Upstream a few hours so it's cold then jump back to just after you took the beer from the fridge yourself and put the new beer (the one that was cooling in the present -> future) in so your friend can grab it when he wants a beer.

* You also have to not run into yourself so you jump back up to after the point where you left for the future so as punisment you miss the big sportspile. However all is well because you friend just fills you in regularly and you both enjoy your tasty beverages.

------
jlgaddis
Heh, reminds me of John Titor, the time traveler from the future who was
working on the Year 2038 problem:
[http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread61544/pg1](http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread61544/pg1)

~~~
alan_cx
I never thought I'd see ATS referenced on HN...

------
praptak
I'm about to go back in time. If I succeed, the silicon transistor gets
invented in 1954 and Christmas goes to happen in the winter (northern
hemisphere).

~~~
snorkel
Wait ... how did you do that?!

~~~
praptak
How could I know? It was the me from the other timeline.

I don't know why HN shows comments from the alternate timelines, I'd file a
bug for that if they had a bugtracker.

------
DanBC
There's a relevant Mitchell and Web scetch. Someone travels back in time and
meets Faraday. Faraday asks a bunch of questions, none of which can be
answered because the traveller is just an everyday person who has little clue
about how things work.

~~~
rwmj
There's a slightly silly-but-entertaining film in which an aircraft carrier
goes back in time. The spoiler of the film is that one man who is left behind
in time becomes absurdly rich by becoming a pioneering "inventor".

So we should look for absurdly rich people who have made dozens of inventions.

[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080736/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080736/)

~~~
frankydp
This is a great lazy Friday night film.

~~~
rwmj
Right. Just make sure you _don 't_ read my spoiler comment first :-(

------
Strilanc
Looks like an Ig Nobel prize winner to me.

> Although these negative results do not disprove time travel, given the great
> reach of the Internet, this search is perhaps the most comprehensive to
> date.

------
8ig8
PDF of paper in case it wasn't obvious:

[http://arxiv.org/pdf/1312.7128v1.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/1312.7128v1.pdf)

------
venomsnake
There is no such thing as time travel. There is only teleportation. Because
you have to have 4(or 10) fixed coordinates to move. Just time travel means
you will be in vacuum, rock or middle of a star the moment you arrive.

Since we already found the higgs I think the next line of research should be
what exactly gives a particle "the where".

~~~
ElongatedTowel
That point is often brought up. But we don't really know how a time-machine
could potentially work, so why is teleportation a necessity? If you want to
travel to the future you would abuse time delation. While all means to do so
pose certain problems none of them involve teleportation. If traveling to the
past would work in a similar way the time-machine would move trough every
moment until it reaches its destination. If it never has to leave earth or its
orbit to do so it would always be affected by gravity and as such end up where
you want it to.

------
GenKali
Ever so slightly disappointed at the complete lack of mention of Steins;Gate
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steins;Gate](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steins;Gate))
in the paper. Interesting read all the same :)

~~~
Nursie
And no John Titor!

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Titor](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Titor)

------
mathattack
With a cursory look, I couldn't figure out if this was serious. Assuming it
is, I'm convinced that Time Travel doesn't exist because casinos and sports
betting exist, and casinos would go broke if time travel existed. (Unless you
altered time so much travelling in time that you altered everything in the
future)

~~~
delinka
If we consider that multiple "time lines" can exist in parallel (multiverses
perhaps?), and if we consider that changing an event is the equivalent of
making a new decision and branching into a new multiverse, then it stands to
reason that at least one universe still exists where casinos and sports
betting have not gone broke. And it must be this one.

~~~
mathattack
This seems less likely than time travel is impossible, no?

------
lazyjones
If time travel is possible at all, we'd eventually discover and use it. I
wonder if this means that we'll destroy our civilization before becoming able
to use time travel (seems more likely than time travel being impossible to
achieve within thousands of years from now).

~~~
lukifer
One could also posit an Anthropic Principle of time travel: the fact that we
still exist means that our universe is among the tiny subset of potential
multiverses in which time travel is not discovered, or whose use is
sufficiently constrained so as to not result in destruction or paradox.

~~~
pavel_lishin
Larry Niven phrased it thusly:

> _If the universe of discourse permits the possibility of time travel and of
> changing the past, then no time machine will be invented in that universe._

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niven's_laws](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niven's_laws)

------
Ensorceled
If you are interested in time travel: I saw the movie "About Time" last night
and it was both awesome _and_ romantic. Perfect date movie for the geek/non-
geek couple.

And now at least this discussion thread is not completely useless :-)

~~~
bushido
Well if you're _really_ interested in time travel fiction, nothing beats
Doctor Who.

~~~
Ensorceled
True, very true. But my girlfriend has a negative interest in watching Doctor
Who but loved About Time.

------
bbwharris
The only famous person that I can suspect of being a time traveler is Warren
Buffet. It would make so much sense.

------
onion2k
Perhaps Twitter is run by a cabal of evil time travellers who have created
technology to check whether tweets reveal temporal anomalies and delete them
automatically to cover their tracks and protect the status of an elite class
in the distant future. What if all communications technology has been built
around this capability; everything routed through a network of 'security
agencies' that ostensibly protect the function of the current government but
really work to design a future that benefits a rarified few.

That'd be cool.

~~~
dionyziz
I work for Twitter and can confirm that.

------
toddh
They were of course found the first time the study ran but the time travelers
just kept going back in time and cleaning up traces of themselves until the
tests stopped finding the evidence.

------
znowi
We could try to analyze the tremendous amount of visual data collected -
photographs, video, CCTV footage. Discern abnormalities in appearance,
clothes, possible gadgets used, movement, behavior. Given the abundance of
recording devices today, chances are they got caught on tape or had their
picture taken somewhere.

Of course there's always a possibility of false positives (e.g. Lady Gaga),
but I think it may worth a shot :)

------
Houshalter
Well great. Now time travelers _can 't_ make prescient tweets because if they
do it will reveal them.

~~~
justsee
I expect time travelers will agree on a responsible prescience disclosure
system which uses something like
[http://www.proofofexistence.com/about](http://www.proofofexistence.com/about).

------
threeseed
I've never understood this logic. If say time travel is invented in year 3000.
Then surely by 3050 it would be affordable for a certain segment of society.
And be 3070 available for a mass market. And by 3100 available in watch form.

So shouldn't we expect there to be millions/billions of people interfering
with the past. A significant percentage of which would be deliberately aiming
to manipulate, destroy, communicate, affect and do all the things we expect
people wouldn't.

Clearly it means either two things. 1: time travel is not possible. 2: going
back in time forks the universe/space-time (About Time is a recent movie that
proposes this).

~~~
graylights
It's been 60 years since nuclear power was invented, so in 10 years it'll be
available for mass market? I'd also like my watch form plane.

What if it's so energy intensive that a future dyson sphere can only power it
once a year. It doesn't matter how cheap the machine is, if the resources are
expensive.

~~~
ElongatedTowel
That poses the question whether a civilization that is advanced enough to
build a dyson sphere would be able to build a second one somewhere else. The
species would have enough time to collect energy and improve the machine until
no reachable sun would be usable. And though we don't carry nuclear reactors
in our watches (I guess smartphone would be more reasonable these days) we
might carry fusion reactors in the year 38000.

------
logfromblammo
Wouldn't it be more useful to examine the stock and options markets for
evidence of time travel? If I had a time machine, I would almost certainly try
to use it for personal profit with maximum secrecy, rather than giving myself
away by blathering about the future over Twitter.

Also, the study does not rule out Back to the Future style time travel,
Terminator style travel, or Primer style traveler isolation protocols. Nor
does it rule out multiple universe theories, such that future events become
unpredictable to a past-traveler within a very short period of time due to the
butterfly effect.

------
fauigerzigerk
I think it's rather unlikely that we will find time travellers among us, for
two reasons:

We don't seem to be anywhere close to inventing time travel. If time travel is
invented, say, 10000 years from now, our moment in time might not be
interesting enough to travel to.

All the funny paradoxes caused by time travel suggest that time travellers
could fork a new branch in the multiverse, but that would not change the
future they were coming from and they would never be able to return to that
future. Hence, the interest in travelling back in time might not be that
great, even if it were possible.

------
binarymax
This only covers time travelers from the future. If one were to use similar
methods to find time travelers from the past, we'd probably find millions of
candidates :)

~~~
raverbashing
I believe finding time travellers from the past is trivial, especially those
who travelled at a speed of 1s/s (or adimensional 1)

~~~
pbhjpbhj
How does the measurement even work? 1s/s in what frame of reference?

~~~
rpenguin13
It probably doesn't really work.

------
ksk
I've always wondered about this. Now, what if, in "reality" after every unit
planck-time the universe forks itself N times based on all the things that
could have happened but didn't? And if you went back in time, you go back to
that particular fork and so that there is no way to ever detect your time
travel? I realize this a fairly naive idea..

------
Tarang
Quite interesting with the methods used, alas the conclusion:

> Unfortunately, as of this writing, no prescient tweets or emails were
> received. Given the additional exposure that the public listing of this
> manuscript gains, we will continue to search, on occasion, for active tweets
> and emails involving potential time travel.

------
bachback
I thought this kind of stuff goes to [http://vixra.org/](http://vixra.org/)

------
gesman
The core assumption here is that there is only one physical reality "spread"
along the timeline.

Another representation of universe is that there are infinite number of
parallel, simultaneous parallel realities all simultaneously existing in the
present moment. There is no past and future.

Dodge that!

------
cs02rm0
Of course the search didn't find anything. They already know what will be
(was?) looked for...

------
gozmike
The Doctor already made sure that efforts such as these would be doomed to
failure:
[http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Bad_Wolf_virus](http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Bad_Wolf_virus)

------
babs474
This paper was fascinating when I read it tomorrow. Unfortunately, I had to
warn my former future self about their compelling results and prevent myself
from posting all those really fun tweets.

------
3rd3
The NSA probably has enough data at hand for answering this question.

~~~
XorNot
This is actually something that's more reasonable. Presumably time travellers
wouldn't advertise their presence heavily (can you say immediate and massive
possible security hazard?) but one way to track them would be to look for net-
traffic patterns which matched a person who was trying to localize the day and
time, or who searched for things well in advance of them becoming known,
general trends, or even being put up on the internet at all.

~~~
chime
Like this: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Benoit_double-
murder_and_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Benoit_double-
murder_and_suicide#Wikipedia_controversy)

------
xradionut
I'm sorry the Rothschild's have the monopoly on time travel for the next few
millennium.

------
Irishsteve
Citation bait == link bait

------
sciguy77
When I go back in time I'll be sure to setup a Myspace page.

------
aquanext
Temporal Prime Directive

------
htuao
If we had time travelers, they would have been already comeback in the past
and meet us from the future. It is useless to look for them. Wait for them and
do something else.

------
sathishmanohar
What if there is no internet in the future?

------
panzi
Well, Guido van Rossum has a time machine.

------
alimoeeny
this is HN not reddit/r/wtf !

------
wslh
Sorry, I use a VPN to the future ;-)

------
wslh
Satoshi is a time traveller...

------
joyeuse6701
ah this idea... Stein's gate anyone?

------
waqasx
whats up with cornell's favicon?

