What if we could find time travelers through a clever series of Twitter posts?
Robert J. Nemiroff and Teresa Wilson at Michigan Technological University’s Department of Physics constructed a unique experiment searching social networks for time travelers, combing Google and Twitter for “prescient” content that only a time traveler could post. We are fascinated by stories and ideas about the mysteries of time, so this is the kind of scientific research we love to read about.
In September 2013, they made a public post asking any time travelers to respond via a Twitter hashtag—posting either #ICanChangeThePast2 or #ICannotChangeThePast2 on the social network in August 2013. They hoped to generate responses one month before the original post, proving the existence of time travel. Here’s more about the Twitter hashtags:
A message incorporating the hashtagged term
"#ICannotChangeThePast2" would indicate that time travel to the past is possible but that the time traveler believes that they do not have the ability to alter the authors’ past. A universe where the past cannot be changed is termed as having a “fixed history”, where history can be regarded as a single timeline. Such universes may uphold the Novikov Self–Consistency Conjecture… Conversely, a message incorporating the hashtagged term “#ICanChangeThePast2" would indicate that time travel to the past is possible and that the time traveler can demonstrate the ability to alter the authors’ past.”
Facebook would not work for this experiment, since users have the ability to back–date posts. Sadly, no time travelers actively responded to the post and the scientists found no evidence of prescient content scattered around the Internet.
However, the story has generated a mountain of press coverage for the experiment, so there is still time for time travelers to respond to the hashtag request. As you can see by visiting both the “#ICanChangeThePast2" or “#ICannotChangeThePast2", lots of Twitter writers have used the hashtag.
Can you spot any time travelers among these posts? I recommend starting with “#ICannotChangeThePast2", the place for time travelers to post if they are not able to change the past…
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.”
You can download a free copy of Searching the Internet for Evidence of Time Travelers at this link.
If a butterfly’s wings making ripples on the water in the Pacific Ocean just off Japan could trigger a hurricane hitting California… then it makes sense that future humans will guard and control the ability to time travel like no other miracle of physics. The tiniest “wrong” change in history could mean the end of the world. I find myself drawn to those who believe that the “Greys” whom people occasionally encounter at remote farmhouses and on lonely deserted highways are in fact not extraterrestrial but simply time travellers from a future Earth. The strange foreheads and eyes, etc., are simply logical evolutionary directions our technology seems to be pushing us in even now. And when it becomes necessary for future time travellers to come back for some healthy DNA extraction, etc., the humans contacted out on the bayous are always least likely to have much of a social “footprint” and hardly likely to have their anal probe stories believed. Time Travel will be a secret not to be tweeted about.
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Your Thoughts
Do you think that time travel is:
All a hoax
Human visitors from our future
Visits from more highly developed alien societies, studying us as we study insects
This is unlikely though, as the slightest thing could mean that information couldn't be send back to the first universe where info was sent back.