safety not guaranteed...
Posted on 01/11/2014 9:07:43 PM PST by 12th_Monkey
Time travelers, if they exist amongst us, have yet to betray their period-hopping ways online, according to a fun, new study aimed at finding visitors from another time, based on their digital footprints.
Theoretically, the idea of time travel forward in time should be possible according to Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. In fact, scientists have already sent teensy particles called muons forward in time. But sending a large object, such as an entire person, into the future remains in the echelons of science fiction, for now.
Even so, over a summer poker game, Robert Nemiroff, an astrophysicist at Michigan Technological University in Houghton, sparked an amusing discussion with his students by asking: If time travelers were living in our midst, would they leave traces of their presence online?
The researchers chose two recent events — the March 2013 election of Pope Francis to lead the Catholic Church, and the sungrazing Comet ISON, which was first spotted in September 2012 — to search for premature online references to time travelers. Perhaps careless time travelers made mention of Pope Francis or Comet ISON on Twitter or Facebook before they were supposed to know about them, the researchers said.
"The Internet is essentially a vast database, and I thought that if time travelers were here, their existence would have already come out in some other way, maybe by posting winning lottery numbers before they were selected," Nemiroff said in a statement.
Nemiroff and his students combed through results from search engines, such as Google and Bing, and social media sites, including Facebook and Twitter. Ultimately, their hunt came up empty.
"In our limited search we turned up nothing," Nemiroff said in a statement. "I didn't really think we would. But I'm still not aware of anyone undertaking a search like this."
The researchers did find one blog post that mentioned a "Pope Francis" before Jorge Mario Bergoglio, then-Archbishop of Buenos Aires, was elected to lead the Catholic Church, but they think the reference was accidental, rather than a message from a time-traveling visitor.
Nemiroff and his students even created their own special blog post in September 2013 that asked potential time travelers to email or tweet "#ICanChangeThePast2" or "#ICannotChangeThePast2" a month earlier, on or before August 2013. But, they again found no signs of time travel.
Still, Nemiroff, whose research typically covers more serious topics such as gravitational lensing and gamma-ray bursts, said the study, while focused on a seemingly far-out concept, was an enjoyable undertaking.
"I'm always doing stuff on space and time," he said. "This has been a lot of fun."
Nemiroff said the study was conducted during his students' own time, and without the use of any grant funding.
safety not guaranteed...
I can’t go back and tell you that. What I can tell you is that the Pittsburgh Pirates will win the 2014 World Series. Also, Leon will get larger.
I caught Art Bell once many moons ago, freaky $h!t...
” Me, John, big tree! “
Tell me about it. I tried red sun energy and blue energy created from microwaving Jiffy Pop.....that didn’t work at ALL and the fire department wasn’t to happy either.
It must mean that our Civilization did not progress enough and apparently went belly up. So no time travel or anything else!
I can understand the theory behind this. It takes a lot of energy to dismantle a person and transport them via transporter/matter-energy conversion to another location - in space or in time.
You could much more easily use the same concept and add energy variations or matter changes to alter data flows in the internet, sending messages.
Why go back in time and tell your past self not to date someone, when you could send yourself an email with incriminating information that would make you break up with them or avoid them?
It’s a great sci-fi concept.
Obamacare doesn’t cover time travel related injury or disease, so nobody does it.
Trouble is that it's an early prototype....and only works in 2 dimensions...
Here it is printing something out from the past.....
...see ..it's printing out from the slot in the top oif the machine.
What a surprise! It is a wasteland of vapid people looking for some sort of reassurance their lives matter.
Why would anyone traveling in time bother with such drivel?
if I would want to communicate to my teen self to prepare for Yahoo, Apple, IBM, Amazon ect....I’d need a time traveling mailbox.
Kill time waiting for the bank to open
HA!
I am a time traveler. I’ve been posting about it on FR since 2003 then 2020 since next year a week from yesterday last week in 1723. Do I have to post a captioned cat picture to get taken seriously.
LOLOL!!!
I liked this when I saw a photo of a guy with it on a protest sign:
We Want Time Travel!
When Do We Want It?
It Doesn’t Matter!
Every time I time travel I lose my luggage.
Don't we all do this now, day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute, second by second?
-PJ
I am surprised they did not look into those “time traveler” callers who used to call in to the old Art Bell Radio show professing to time travel.
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