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There are a lot of people on the internet who claim to have used time travel to visit the future or the past.
Usually these “time travelers” claim to be returning from the future with some sort of warning or series of warnings about something bad happening.
Their claims are often dubious at best.
However, that doesn’t mean that time travel isn’t real. Nor does it mean that there isn’t someone out there who has traveled to our point in time from the future.
“Time travel has captured the public imagination for much of the past century, but little has been done to actually search for time travelers,” wrote a group of physicists from Michigan Technological University in a recent research paper. “Here, three implementations of Internet searches for time travelers are described, all seeking a prescient mention of information not previously available.
“The first search covered prescient content placed on the Internet, highlighted by a comprehensive search for specific terms in tweets on Twitter,” the scientists continued. “The second search examined prescient inquiries submitted to a search engine, highlighted by a comprehensive search for specific search terms submitted to a popular astronomy web site. The third search involved a request for a direct Internet communication, either by email or tweet, pre-dating to the time of the inquiry.”
Basically, they scoured the internet looking for information that would only have been known in advance by a time traveler from the future because that would be easier to verify than information shared by someone from the past.
“Histories of bright comets like Comet ISON are generally well kept by societies and journals around the world, indicating that Comet ISON might remain memorable well into the future,” the researchers wrote. “Conversely, there is little reason for anyone without prescient information to be referring to something as ‘Comet ISON’ before 2012 September. Therefore, discussions or even mentions of ‘Comet ISON’ before 2012 September were searched for as potentially prescient evidence of time travelers from the future.”
Sadly, they did not come up with any proof of time travel, but, they explain, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
“First, it may be physically impossible for time travelers to leave any lasting remnants of their stay in the past, including even non-corporeal informational remnants on the Internet,” they wrote. “Next, it may be physically impossible for us to find such information as that would violate some yet-unknown law of physics, possibly similar to the Chronology Protection Conjecture. Furthermore, time travelers may not want to be found, and may be good at covering their tracks.”
Interestingly, in 2023, scientists were both able to successfully simulate time travel as well as prove “paradox-free” time travel is theoretically possible.