At one time or another these people have traveled in time many times, and in time their time-machine technology will become available to the general public, which will result in the singularity.
Science[]
Time travel is possible—or at least a lot of serious physicists say so. It's probably not possible to pull it off in a souped-up Delorean, but there are wormholes, Tipler cylinders, and other Einstein-inspired theories for how it could work. Which raises the question: Why haven't we met any visitors from another time?
It sounds like a silly question, but it's one that many scientists actually take very seriously. Meeting someone from the future would, of course, serve as definitive proof that we can indeed travel through time, and that would be a quite a simple way to solve a huge scientific riddle. So it's no surprise that a handful of enthusiasts and experts have staged experiments in order to attract the time travelers that could be hiding among us.
One of them is Stephen Hawking. The renowned physicist totally believes time travel is a scientific possibility, and even says he knows how to build a time machine. He also famously wondered, "If time travel is possible, where are the tourists from the future?" It's a good question. Here's how we've tried to answer it. He threw a party and invited time travelers, but only sent out the invites after the party to ensure that time travelers exclusively would party with him. After none showed up, he made a face and said that time travel must not be possible after all, revising his opinion based on the mere fact that none of them wanted to party with him.
they just didn't show up because you're a loser, Stephen
According to Einstein's theory of general relativity, a wormhole could act like a bridge through space-time by connecting two distant points with a shortcut. Certain types of wormholes, it's theorized, could allow for time travel in either direction, but there are several major caveats of traveling back in time. Mainly, the simple fact that we'd need a method for creating wormholes, and once created, the wormhole would only allow us to travel as far back as the point in time when it was created.
Another option for time travel involves a phenomenon called time dilation, also based on Einstein's theories of relativity. It refers to the idea that time passes more slowly for a moving clock than it does for a stationary clock. The force of gravity also effects the difference in elapsed time. Thanks to the space program, we've actually been dealing with this effect for many years. This is why the clocks on the International Space Station tick just a little bit more slowly than clocks on Earth do.
A few years before Hawking's party, an ambitious MIT grad student tried a similar but nerdier approach. Instead of keeping the event a secret, Amal Dorai organized a whole convention about time travel and encouraged everybody to spread the world. Dorai wrote on his student website:
We need volunteers to publish the details of the convention in enduring forms, so that the time travelers of future millennia will be aware of the convention. This convention can never be forgotten! We need publicity in MAJOR outlets, not just Internet news. Think New York Times, Washington Post, books, that sort of thing. If you have any strings, please pull them.
The exposure makes pretty good sense. MIT is a famous university that tends to attract media attention anyway. The program was also filled with famous professors talking about time travel. And the premise itself, well, it makes for a pretty fun headline!
It still didn't work. "The convention was a mixed success," Dodai said in an update to the event website. "Unfortunately, we had no confirmed time travelers visit us, yet many time travelers could have attended incognito to avoid endless questions about the future."
In 2014 a pair of physicists published the results of a pretty self-explanatory study, "Searching the Internet for evidence of time travelers." Instead of staging some sort of event and counting on publicity to attract the people of the future, these scientists went on the hunt for evidence of where time travelers had been online. In a sense, they were searching for their digital footprints.
Robert Nemiroff and Teresa Wilson from Michigan Technological University cast their net wide. They searched Twitter. They searched Facebook. They searched Google, Google+, and even Bing. Disgusting, shameful bing.
Evidence[]
All items (19)
