John Titor: Time Traveler or Hoax?
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Hello dear followers and fellow Steemians! This is a different topic from what i usually have been writing for the past month. However, I had been wanting to write about this since i joined steemit! I really love all kinds of time-travel stories and John Titor's appearance in the early 2000's is no exception! So lets get started with it, I hope you enjoy it!
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People over the world debate the exact date when it all started, but we are almost certain it started on November 2, 2000 with a user by the name of TimeTravel_0, who would later become known as John Titor.
He started posting messages on a public forum saying he was a time traveler from the year 2036. One of the first things he published where photos from his time machine and the schematics of the machine.
John Titor's Time Machine
Schematics of Titor's Time Machine
He posted on the forums for weeks talking about everything: the possibilities of time travel, the characteristics of a time traveling machine and the theory behind the inner workings of his machine. On January 21st he changed his name from TimeTravel_0 to John Titor and he presented himself as a North American Soldier that had come from the future of 2036 to the past. His mission was to travel to 1975 to find IBM computers from that year with the objective of modifying the code of some ancient programs that were still in use in 2036. It is presumed that the computer he was looking for in 1975 was an IBM 5100.
Photo of an IBM 5100
According to his story, he was chosen for the mission because he was the grandson of one of the original members of the creators of the computer. When he was asked why they couldn't just use an IBM 5100 that had survived until 2036, he revealed something pretty dark: the war had destroyed most of the technology of the world.
Titor's Military Insignia
John told the users of the forum that he was stopping by on the year 2000 to collect some valuable items and give some warnings about the dangers that where coming in the future to those who would listen to him. (A list of his predictions can be found at the end of the article.)
He also described that his time machine consisted of a stationary mass system and that it was powered by dual fast spinning singularities, these singularities produced a triple standard sinusoid that allowed time travel and only time travel, his machine was not capable of traveling through space, only time. This time travel theory was apparently created by "Frank J. Tipler", he proposed that when a wide and dense object spinned close to the speed of light, a window could be created where another object orbiting around it could travel backward or forward in time. This theory has not been refuted yet for the simple fact that there's no man-made object that can resist such speeds without disintegrating.
John Titor's Warnings
John Titor claimed that in 2036 many of the premises behind the major theories of theoretical physics had been confirmed, including the existence of many universes. With this in mind he claimed that his warnings could in someway or another change the fundamental events that he knew about in the future and that his very presence was already changing some of them.
Among his predictions you can find:
A civil war in the United States by 2004, which he claimed to have joined by 2013 as a child soldier. He claimed that one of the sides was supported by Russia and they used nuclear bombs to support them. These Russian bombings started a short world war that completely destroyed China and Europe.
He claimed that during the world war in 2015, the United States would be governed by a president of color.
He claimed that CERN would be able to generate small black holes in the first decade of the millennium, this discovery was the first step towards the creation of the time machine.
He said that before 2030 a new epidemic would wipe out a huge portion of the human population.
During his months on the forums, he tried to predict other things and answered various questions to users, too many to put in an article so i will be leaving a link down below to the web archive of some of his forum posts. This way you'll be able to read his messages and the reactions of the users back in the 2000s about his posts!
What do you guys think of Titor's story? Was he a real time-traveler or was he just trying to fool people over the internet? Even after so many years, the conversation about John Titor is still going on and he has a lot of loyal followers that to this day still believe everything he said was true.
Thanks for reading this far down! I hope you enjoyed the read :-D, Help me improve my articles by leaving a comment with suggestions and if you liked it please upvote, reesteem and follow me! You can also check out my other recent posts!
The Picture of the Clocks was sourced from Pixabay, a royalty free image source!
The picture of the IBM 5100 was sourced from its Wikipedia Article
The John Titor related pictures where taken from his posts on the internet.
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What a great post!
Despite the well-researched references to Tipler and Kerr, I disbelieve "John Titor" about his assertion of having traveled from 2036 to 1975 and then to the year 2000. Besides the general rule of being skeptical about extraordinary claims that are unsupported by extraordinary evidence, one specific detail was decisive in my choice to disbelieve.
The detail is given in this @lunaticpandora quote. "[H]is time machine consisted of a stationary mass system … powered by dual fast spinning singularities [which] produced a triple standard sinusoid that allowed time travel and only time travel, his machine was not capable of traveling through space, only time."
If this were true, after departing the future and upon arriving in the past, "Titor" would have emerged in vacuum and fairly rapidly died.
Why? Because the Earth is not stationary. Far from it. Not only does the Earth move around the Sun — the Sun, the Earth, and the rest of the Solar System all orbit the galactic center at about 220 kilometers per second, which is more than 492 thousand miles per hour. They also demonstrate an additional motion of some 13.4 km/sec, or almost 29,975 mph, toward a point known as the "solar apex," in the sky region denoted by the constellation Hercules, southwest of the position currently occupied by the star Vega.
There are a lot of hours in the putative transit spans involved in this claim — 61 years, then 25 years, and perhaps another 35 years after that, if "Titor" successfully returned to his own day during either of the two "windows" he mentioned. And every one of those hours took the Solar System, where Earth orbits the Sun, roughly 500 thousand miles away from where the Solar System was when that hour began. And that isn't even counting the Earth's motion along its orbit around the Sun, which is about 29.7222 km/sec, or about 66,500 mph.
It follows from these facts that, if a time machine is incapable of moving through space, it is useless for visiting Earth in prior years, because that Earth would be, spatially, extremely distant from the point of emergence. Using a time machine like that, you'd need to have a long-range spaceship handy when you emerge. If "Titor" mentioned using such a spaceship, I must have missed it.
He did mention the following: "The hard part of traveling through time is not the bending of gravity but the plotting of your course and holding to the basic 'position' in your environment. This is done through a system called VGL (variable gravity lock). Basically, the unit takes a reading of the local gravity and samples it during the 'trip' in pulses. If the gravity is too far off, the unit stops or reverses itself to the last sample period where the readings were correct. If there is some sort of failure, the unit shuts down and drops out to where ever you may be."
That's fabulously plausible except for one thing: It completely contradicts the statement that the time machine cannot move through space. A device that could use "variable gravity lock" to "hold" a position relative to some environment is perforce a device that can move through space. And, if it were to fail, dropping out "where ever you may be," then vacuum is again where you emerge.
Even if the device could select an arrival time when Earth occupied the same point in its orbit, and even if the device could lock itself somehow to galactic rotational motion, the solar apical motion (on the order of 30 thousand miles per hour) would still suffice to make "Titor" emerge from his "triple sinusoid" into a vacuum incredibly distant from the Earth of his arrival time.
If I'm wrong about all this? If "Titor" did what he claimed? Some of the calamities on his native timeline were averted — or perhaps only postponed. Here in the USA of our timeline, we didn't start a civil war in 2005, but partisan polarization seems way worse now than it was then. I hope no civil war is coming!
On a more serious worry, "Titor" said Earth's polar ice is not a major concern in 2036, a claim in some ways more extraordinary than time travel. He tried to support his claim by arguing that, if enough Arctic ice melted, sea level would go down. That's ridiculous. Any tech-savvy and history-aware chrononaut soldier of 2036 would know more about global warming than that.
Evaluating time travel claims is fun and informative, and might not be a waste of time. Time travel may well be possible. But this guy didn't do it.
Amazing answer! As I said I'm not really sure he time traveled either but I would love to believe it, so let's play around a bit. If your main issue is space causing earth to leave titor behind because it would be impossible to arrive at the same moment in time without moving at least a bit causing him to be extremely displaced because earth rotates at insane speeds, what if the machine calculated the travel around this margin of error making titor travel a few milliseconds behind his target perhaps to arrive at the intended time and place without being displaced?
No, my main issue isn't the Earth's rotation, it's that the entire Solar System to which Earth is gravitationally bound moves hundreds of thousands of miles every hour. If "Titor" went back in time 61 years, from 2036 to 1975, using a time machine that could not move in space, well, using round numbers, Earth would be more than 267 billion miles away from him when he emerged. That's a lot more than "at least a bit." By contrast, Pluto never gets even 8 billion miles away from the Sun.
Loved it!
I'd never heard of the guy but I reckon he's just an eccentric who enjoys roleplaying.
It'd be interesting if you could apply your skills into interpreting what the hell is going on with CERN. I watched a documentary on that. It's the big black box innit? What's it do? Why? Future possibilities?
Also, if you could maybe do a series on John Titor analysing each of his predictions in turn. See where he's got it right and wrong. He didn't say the first lady was actually the first queen did he (obama's 'wife')?
Really interesting and easy to read.
Cheers
Anji x
Thanks for the suggestion, I can see myself wilting a bit more about titor, why not? thanks for talking the time top read it :-D
It's my pleasure :D
Looking forward to reading more about titor
cheers
Anji x
Yeah I'm going to go with fake :). I noticed you highlighted the predictions that are easily refuted. Or could they be interpreted in a way that still makes it consistent o.O
Are you trying to imply that i have some sort of internal bias that caused myself to sabotage the credibility of my article? lol I'll do a post later all about his predictions I guess.
That is one intriguing subject to say at least. Is it true? How can we really know? Or test it for the matter of a fact? I actually love to read about these kinds of stuff. What do you think about those photos which pop on the videos where people don't fit in the time by dressing up for the age far beyond the one taken in the picture? or holding what it seems to be an Iphone where not even the phone was invented?
Is it all a hoax? I guess only time will tell. Until we can prove something we can only wonder what the truth is. Hopefully, somebody will clear it up for us one day. :)
My head tell me it's fake but my heart wants to believe. I do hope in the future we are able to time travel to the past. I bet when we discover time travel we will travel into the past and allow ourselves to get captured into those photos you mention... and the reason? it's just a prank bro, we did it to have fun reading the reactions and theories from the people in the past lol.
hahaha who knows maybe you are right? Maybe somebody out there is laughing a bit from a our conversation and saying "hey, me with an iPhone in my hand taking pictures the Indian tribes was a good one." lol
Only time will tell my friend. Who knows. :)
Exactly! Only time will tell... hehehe.
The notion of a time traveler is so prevalent in fiction but I could see how dangerous it is because of the butterfly effect it could do.
Time travel can be a dangerous endeavor indeed or it could not be... depending on what theory of time id's correct.... or maybe the true theory of time has not been created yet, it's a path full of hardships to create and understand a time traveling machine.
I believe he is just a guy who did a fun prank, my problem with his theory is the same one as @custone's. That being said I love daydreaming about the time travel and once I was high with a few friends of mine we decided to make the experiment if time travel available to us will be invented during our lifetime. We agreed that we would travel back to time to that day, about a hour later and inform ourselves.
Being high as we were, we forgot that we have ordered food. When the food delivery guy rang the bell, for a few moments atmosphere was very eerie.
Being high as we were at the time, few months later none of us could remember which date that was so it is hard to believe any of us will remember it if the time travel is invented in lets say 20 years, so theory has not yet been disproved. :D
I also love daydreaming about time travel! That's an amazing story with you and your friends, I did the same with a few friends in high school! but what if time travel is real but we are not allowed to intervene?
That could explain the photos with people out of their time with different clothes and items from their era, maybe they got caught in photos by accident or being caught in a photo is not enough to change a timeline...
If we weren't allowed to intervene, in a way it wouldn't be available to us. It would probably be heavily restricted in a similar way possessing materials for creating nuclear power plant is today.
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