Time Travel - John Titor story?

[cbdo2007]

Just listening to some back episodes of Coast 2 Coast about John Titor, the time traveler from 2036. The story is practically impossible to debunk because of how he describes time travel, and you would think if it was a hoax he would have reappeared at some point to continue the joke. Any other semi-reputable time travel stories out there? Would love to discuss.

[trotsky]

1. Ha, I remember that one.

I believe he had stated we'd be well into a civil war by now, with nuclear obliteration coming up any day now?

Just checked, yeah, a new civil war in the US was supposed to start in 2005, and Russia's going to bomb us in 2015, destroying the cities and leaving good country folk like Mr. Titor to rebuild.

As far as being impossible to debunk, where's the civil war that we should have been fighting for 8 years now/

[cbdo2007]

2. There are different universes (dimensions) so his future isn't going to

be the same as our future. Like he said, in his future Y2K was a big deal but in ours it didn't do anything. He said you can't go back and change things in the past because when you go back to the "past" you are in a different reality than you came from so changes would only occur in the universe where you make the change, not in your universe when you go back to your future.

His posts are all available online and he uses this logic throughout, so either he knew it would be impossible to debunk so that's why he used this interpretation of how "time travel" could theoretically work during his hoax or it is the truth. Either way, you can't point to what he says happened in his future as a way of debunking his story because he admits readily that they won't match up. He says the only good reason to go back in time is to get items from the past (such as the IBM he went back ton 1975 to get) but changing things in hopes of changing the future would be futile.

[trotsky]

3. Yes of course that's the excuse given.

Needless to say, there hasn't been a civil war raging for a few years, and I'll put money down that Russia isn't going to nuke us in two years to stop an out-of-control US government. The Olympics have been going on without a hitch since "Titor" posted they would cease, too. So the imagined future that the Titor character comes from will never happen to us, and his warnings are bunkum and useless. Or just a plain old hoax.

I'm opting for the simpler explanation here. Of course, you do realize the burden of proof is on the Titor disciples to prove his claims were true. If you can just wave your arms and dismiss any of his incorrect predictions by saying that our timeline changed, then you've got yourself a lovely little non-falsifiable claim, and that's a game not worth playing.

[DetlefK]

7. His claim is falsifiable and false.

There are two basic approaches, to the dilemma of changing the past via time-travel:

1. "It happens, because it happened." (That's a famous sentence from a Sci-Fi-series.) Whatever you do, you can't change past. In the end, your actions will always lead to the future as you know it. Even your means of sabotage will accidentally lead to the future you tried to prevent.

2. The other theory is, that there are multiple manifolds/parallel universes, like a river spreading out into more and more channels. Each channel is a possible composition of events and attributes. But only one of these channels is reality.
You travel back in time and your action causes a universe that was virtual to become real and the future that was destined to become reality turns into a virtual future (a dead-end so to speak).



The problem with his argument is: What exactly has he done, how has he changed the present so the future as he knows it, won't come true?
Has he fathered a child? (And is its name John Connor?)
Did he save someone who was supposed to die?
Did he kill someone?
Has he delivered an outstanding idea or technology that changed the course of society as a whole?
Did he change the lives of one important or many ordinary persons?

The answer is No.
His actions were mere background-noise in the big scheme of things.
Accordingly, we now live in a present that was always supposed to be.
Accordingly, he's a quack.



There is one counter-argument to my reasoning, but that can be discarded:
Did his mere presence induce probability-fluctuations on classical and/or quantum-levels (the butterfly that causes a storm) that build up from a fractal level into changes of a magnitude that affect the history of a sizable part of earth?
Extremely unlikely, because blowing some air, flushing some water or kicking a can that flies into a car and causes a scratch only has an event-horizon of a finite size (order of magnitude: miles) far smaller than the system it is supposed to influence (order of magnitude: thousands of miles). This random influence is again droned out by the random noise of the millions and billions of people and trillions of random events around him.

[Ron Obvious]

4. What's the date of the episode?

Sounds interesting. I don't think I've ever heard that one, but I used to a big fan of the show when I worked nights. I have something called the Art Bell Coast to Coast Dreamland Ultimate Classic Collection on my hard drive, but it doesn't appear to be in there.

[SheilaT]

5. As I recall, this "John Titor" guy showed

up some time ago. I want to say the late 90's. I know he's been discussed in years past here on DU.

The real indication that he's not a genuine time traveller is that he simply doesn't have any basic facts of our history correct. I'm thinking he got here before 9/11, and didn't mention it.

The whole John Titor thing is obviously a badly-written science fiction time travel novel, but presented as if it's real. As someone who absolutely loves a good time-travel story, John Titor's is hilariously bad.

[frogmarch]

6. on October 31, 2012

John Titor posted on his Facebook page "Obama won." How would Titor know that unless he'd been to the future, huh? Huh? Huh?

Edited to add and and a link to Titor's Fb page:

https://www.facebook.com/johntitortv?fref=ts

[muriel_volestrangler]

8. "you would think if it was a hoax he would have reappeared at some point to continue the joke"

Not necessarily. The hoaxer(s) may have decided there wasn't any money to be made in it after all, or that, if they were doing it for laughs, there were better things to do with their lives.

Without knowing how exactly he phrased things, I see some summaries:

2004: Civil war would erupt in the U.S., pitting militias and other armed citizen against something he called the American Federal Empire.
2014: Civil War II ends when Russia attacks the U.S. WWIII begins. The U.S. loses, and is reduced to ruins along with China and the EU.
2036: America is rebuilt and back on its feet, though considerably diminished. Then Mad Cow becomes pandemic, affecting virtually every beef-eater on the planet. Despite all these setbacks, the U.S. is in possession of time travel technology. In fact, time travel would become a reality in 2001, right after CERN's larger facility began operating.

http://swallowingthecamel.blogspot.co.uk/2010/05/5-unconvincing-paranormal-cases.html

and:

Conversations between Titor and posters on Art Bell Post to Post continue for the next few months. Titor talks of imminent problems across the world beginning in 2004 – the cancellation of the Olympics, the splitting of the United States into warring factions, an epidemic of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, and a series of Russian nuclear strikes in 2015 that devastate all major U.S. cities along with the European Union and China.

Titor talks about his life as well, including living in Florida as a child, his service in the second American Civil War as a member of the Fighting Diamondbacks in 2013, and the communal/agricultural nature of life in 2036.

Titor admits he lives in a parallel timeline, one that varies 1-2% from ours. Enough to be slightly different, but not diverge from the major societal events.

http://io9.com/5869362/the-man-who-told-the-internet-hed-come-from-the-future

"Major societal events" are already quite different. If you think that what he/they claimed is "practically impossible to debunk", then you're basically saying that all it requires is internal consistency, and relation to what actually happens is irrelevant. Though I would maintain that a society that can travel in time, and build machines to control it, would not need to retrieve old machines to fix a software problem, and so his story was inconsistent from the moment he started it. I wouldn't rate it as semi-reputable science fiction.

The concept of travelling back in time has to rethink the whole idea of what space is. If an object travels back in time, where is it in space in the period between the 2 end points? What happens to the forces of gravity, electromagnetism etc. on the object, and what happens to its inertia? If you travel back in time 6 months, do you find yourself on the opposite side of the Sun from Earth? A bit behind the solar system in its orbit round the galactic centre?

[drm604]

9. His reason for coming back in time is ridiculous.

He says that he was sent from 2036 to 1975 (stopping off at 2000 for personal reasons) to get an antique computer needed to debug some legacy software.

They have the technology to build time machines, but they desperately need to run buggy software from 1975? That's not even good science fiction!

[SheilaT]

10. Oooo, good point.

I'm sufficiently ignorant about technology that I miss that sort of thing.

I also LOVE good s-f time travel novels, and I'm currently trying to write one myself. Perhaps I'll have to have my manuscript looked at by someone who could catch that sort of thing.

Thanks.

[red dog 1]

11. According to the website set up for this character,

He first started posting on a public forum November 2, 2000 .
On March 21, 2001, he said he'd be leaving and not returning until 2036.
After that he was never heard from again.
The fact that none of his predictions came true makes me think it's bogus.

For those who want to find out more about him go to the website set up
http://www.johntitor.com/

As far as the Coast To Coast AM Radio show, it's usually worth listening to, and the show's website is truly awesome, with hundreds of past guests listed, and articles & more....It's a great website:
http://www.coasttocoastam.com/

My favorite regular guests are Richard C. Hoagland, who wrote "The Monuments of Mars" and the show's regular reporter, named Linda Moulton Howe, a former Miss Idaho who does good investigative work in the area of UFOs, Crop Circles and more;
Her website is:
http://www.earthfiles.com/

Next Tuesday, March 5, Neil deGrasse Tyson will be on "Coast" to discuss "Restoring the Space Program"...That should be a good show.

Coast To Coast AM comes on nightly at 10 PM in all time zones, and is on over 500 radio stations, so it's not hard to pick up regardless of where you live.
Also, there is a station finder at the show's website.

[cbdo2007]

13. It would be impossible for his predictions to come true....

because he hasnt' seen our future, he's only seen his.

They explain this many times in the discussion about how time travel works - there are many different planes of time and each time you go back or forth you are never in the exact same one that you were in previously.

So he prefaced everything by saying, "this is what happened in MY future but it probably isn't what is going to happen in yours". It was after 2000 when he was saying "in our time, the Y2K thing was a huge deal that caused a civil war...." so why would he say that it was a big deal to them after it wasn't a big deal to us?

[red dog 1]

14. Good question!

Why WOULD Titor say that Y2K was a big deal to them after it was no big deal to us?

[Taverner]

15. I think its one of the most ingenious hoaxes ever concocted

This one has an immediate answer to EVERYTHING

Predictions not come true? Alt universe

What was so amazing, to me at least, is that John Titor never came back to perpetuate the hoax...