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John Titor, Time Traveler?

  
 
FinderWolf
20:33 / 03.06.04
Has everyone heard heard the strange story of John Titor", a poster on various fringe message boards several years back who claimed to be a time traveler from 2036? Pretty cool story, even if it's a hoax -- he "predicted" a few things which could have been researched as up and coming developments (mostly breakthroughs in high level physics and science) and told quite an interesting tale. Even if it was a hoax, it's fun and interesting reading.

He seems more intent on putting forth a message of brotherhood and community and political awareness as to where the world (esp. the US) is heading than anything else... he doesn't have much of a motivation beyond getting his message out, it seems. He wants us all to be less selfish and consider the idea that Western stability might not last...

John Titor website
 
 
spake
21:32 / 03.06.04
Wow. I just finished reading a whole line of entries on that website. While I admit to being largely skeptical (my knowledge of physics is appalling anyway), it does make for interesting reading given the current political climate in the states and other westernised countries at present.

There seems to be some fiction to his truth, and some truth to his fiction. Come 2005 we'll soon know if he was lying or not.
 
 
Tamayyurt
23:55 / 03.06.04
This is really cool. What happens in 2005?
 
 
[siddhartha]
04:36 / 04.06.04
I can't say that I know too much about this either, but I'm slightly skeptical for one sole reason - after reading all of his posts, I haven't really learned anything new, apart from the fact that we should all strive to be one big happy family.

This applies especially to the physics of time travel - he doesn't introduce anything new, no new concepts. Of course, this is a sweeping generalization, and I may be wrong. But it seems to me his waying of explaining time travel is by saying that it has already been calculated to be possible - "the basic math to alter worldlines exists right now" - and then goes on to 'explain' time travel using concepts that we already know, but can't use, like Tippler cylinders, Kerr black holes, and so on. That, and this 'variable gravity lock' he keeps referring to, but doesn't seem to elaborate much on.

The problems with implementing these theories (hence we don't really have time travel, do we?) he simply sweeps away by saying:

"For those asking how come a microsingularity doesn't swallow the Earth or want to know details about the size, stability, mass, temperature and resulting Hawking radiation from such a thing, those details I must keep to myself."

Maybe if he had explained all those things about stability and Hawking radiation, then I might have believed him.
 
 
[siddhartha]
05:10 / 04.06.04
Some interesting links (note the anti-Titor slant):

@ Wikipedia
Tackling John Titor
Titor is a Liar @ anomalies.net
Dr Robert Brown's reply.
 
 
captain yossarian
12:22 / 04.06.04
i only found THIS:

"TIME-TRAVELER" BUSTED FOR INSIDER TRADING

Weekly World News / Wednesday March 19, 2003
By CHAD KULTGEN

NEW YORK -- Federal investigators have arrested an enigmatic Wall Street wiz on insider-trading charges -- and incredibly, he claims to be a time-traveler from the year 2256!
Sources at the Security and Exchange Commission confirm that 44-year-old Andrew Carlssin offered the bizarre explanation for his uncanny success in the stock market after being led off in handcuffs on January 28.
"We don't believe this guy's story -- he's either a lunatic or a pathological liar," says an SEC insider.
Officials are quite confident the "time-traveler's" claims are bogus. Yet the SEC source admits,
"No one can find any record of any Andrew Carlssin existing anywhere before December 2002."
"But the fact is, with an initial investment of only $800, in two weeks' time he had a portfolio valued at over $350 million. Every trade he made capitalized on unexpected business developments, which simply can't be pure luck.
"The only way he could pull it off is with illegal inside information. He's going to sit in a jail cell on Rikers Island until he agrees to give up his sources."
The past year of nose-diving stock prices has left most investors crying in their beer. So when Carlssin made a flurry of 126 high-risk trades and came out the winner every time, it raised the eyebrows of Wall Street watchdogs. "If a company's stock rose due to a merger or technological breakthrough that was supposed to be secret, Mr. Carlssin somehow knew about it in advance," says the SEC source close to the hush-hush, ongoing investigation.
When investigators hauled Carlssin in for questioning, they got more than they bargained for: A mind-boggling four-hour confession.

Carlssin declared that he had traveled back in time from over 200 years in the future, when it is common knowledge that our era experienced one of the worst stock plunges in history. Yet anyone armed with knowledge of the handful of stocks destined to go through the roof could make a fortune.

"It was just too tempting to resist," Carlssin allegedly said in his videotaped confession. "I had planned to make it look natural, you know, lose a little here and there so it doesn't look too perfect. But I just got caught in the moment." In a bid for leniency, Carlssin has reportedly offered to divulge "historical facts" such as the whereabouts of Osama Bin Laden and a cure for AIDS.
All he wants is to be allowed to return to the future in his "time craft." However, he refuses to reveal the location of the machine or discuss how it works, supposedly out of fear the technology could "fall into the wrong hands."

Weekly World News will continue to follow this story as it unfolds. Keep watching for further developments.
"
 
 
FinderWolf
12:35 / 04.06.04
Yeah, I've heard about the Andrew Carlssin story -- but there was never any follow-up to it.

In 2004/2005, Titor claims, there's a civil war in the U.S. between the cities and the country (because the govt begins taking away people's Constitutional rights left and right in the name of security and if you live in the country, you're more able to get away from the govt's radar so they can't constantly interfere with your life, lock you up, etc.). The civil war comes about because of a huge dispute between states rights and the federal gov't.

This is the one most eerie prediction of "Titor"'s, I think -- he wrote those posts in 2000 and Jan. 2001 BEFORE Sept. 11th. When someone asked him 'how will we know who the 'enemy' is [in the U.S.]?', he replied 'They will be the one detaining people indefinitely without due process. The gov't bets that people value security more than freedom, but that is where they were wrong.' (I'm doing a paraphrase here but a pretty accurate one, from my memory of the post)

Everything else he wrote, scientific and future political events, could be fiction, the work of a young creative mind with too much time on their hands, bent on sending a warning message to the world so that people will be more reflective about their place in the world and think more of the community and what values we want our world to be about.

BUT, how could someone in 2000/the first months of 2001 have predicted that within just a few years, the US gov't would start tearing away Constitutional rights under the name of 'security'? Indefinite detainees being held without due process? I mean, sure, it's a dark scenario we've seen in works of science fiction, but he predicts the erosion starts around 2002/03/04, and he's right on the money in that respect.

To me, and I've read practically all his posts, that's the scariest prediction cause it's dead-on, and the world was a very different place in late 2000/first months of 2001. We thought "yeah, GWB is a moron," but the world was pretty stable and safe. The climate here in the US hadn't swung to conservative, paranoid and insanely patriotic a la the McCarthy Hearings/Red Scare of the 1950s.
 
 
FinderWolf
12:40 / 04.06.04
from Dr. Robert Brown's reply, above:

>> Seriously, I could go on and on and on. I haven't even gotten to the raw thermodynamics of it all. That suitcase would require a small lake to cool in operation, for example. And then the culture capable of these miracles of technology that indicate total mastery of materials science, quantum mechanics, gravity, superconductors, a society that has in its possession a star drive (for the goddamn thing would clearly work as such as easily as a "time machine" -- arbitrary translation in four space is arbitrary translation in four space and they have to play all sorts of games to NOT go off into space FTL) then is sending somebody back to our time to get an IBM 5100, a piece of **** computer that is an embarrassment to IBM to this day, because it is somehow capable of some translation chore that appears to be beyond them and is related to the Unix non-problem of a 4 byte unsigned int counter for its current time?
>
> This is so clearly a joke that I still cannot believe anybody at all fell for it. It's not even a good joke (believe me, I programmed briefly on the 5100 and I know:-).
> HOW IS ANYONE TAKING THIS REMOTELY SERIOUSLY??

His whole article (which is much longer than the above) seems to pretty clearly debunk all Titor's physics. Dr. Robert Brown is apparently an accomplished physicist.
 
 
Cheap. Easy. Cruel.
14:07 / 04.06.04
I read through Dr. Brown's rebuttal and plugged some numbers into my calculator as I was doing so. He is dead-on. There is absolutely no way that Titor, or any one else, could contain even one black hole in something that size of a suitcase, much less carry it in the back of a pick-up truck. Now, it could be, since he is from the future, that they have technology beyond our understanding. In bizzarro crack-pot land. It just doesn't hold up from a physics standpoint. It would be great if it did, I would love to speak to a future human; but I just cannot buy it without solid physics.
 
 
Bear
14:37 / 04.06.04
I remember reading this sometime last year, great read. Liked the stuff about him needing an old PC? Can't seem to find it on that page anymore - but it was some of his old posts on another message board.
 
 
Bear
14:39 / 04.06.04
Found it now - IBM 5100.
 
 
FinderWolf
15:23 / 04.06.04
Plus, look at the source of the Andrew Carlssin thing - the Weekly World News. I think I remember this might have been run in by Yahoo (they have like a 'Fringe' news section) once but I never heard about it again. I don't put much stock in the Andrew Carlssin thing... unless and until I hear some interesting follow-up.
 
 
grant
15:40 / 04.06.04
As someone actually sitting in the Weekly World News newsroom *right now*, I can assure you that their story was loosely based on my story for the Sun about Titor himself about a year or so ago.
 
 
FinderWolf
13:52 / 07.06.04
Grant, do you really work for the Weekly World News? Seriously?
 
 
grant
18:12 / 07.06.04
I work for Sun (the American one with Nostradamus and UFOs, not the London one with the Tories and topless ladies). Currently, we share the same editor-in-chief and managing editor. We've been sharing a newsroom for a few years, though.
 
 
lekvar
23:55 / 07.06.04
< threadrot > grant, you are now my hero. < /threadrot >
 
 
spake
00:12 / 09.06.04
Under closer inspection there seems to be entire threads on other weblogs about this guy and his claims to be a time traveller. A lot of people seem to be upset that this may have been a hoax, and Titor certainly seems to have a lot of detractors.

Reading all this has only presented me with more questions unfortunately, for example - why come back in time and post all the details on the net? what purpose does it serve if you can only give limited generalistic information about whats going on, with no real legitimate proof to back it up?? why? WHY!? damn it!

More importantly, this simply points to that continuing problem with the internet - that basically there is no way to verify that the information your viewing is legitimate or even substantially accurate. At least Titor in that respect acknowledges this problem and tries to convince people to get back to basics - like reading books and practicing your arithmetic just like the people of the post-apocalyptic future. What a revolutionary idea.
 
 
Mister Six, whom all the girls
13:06 / 23.06.04
"More importantly, this simply points to that continuing problem with the internet - that basically there is no way to verify that the information your viewing is legitimate or even substantially accurate."

... not to be snide, but is that comment exclusive to the internet?

As with any grand fantasy, it requires a leap over logic to be even a possible truth. The story is a great one and some people will want to believe it. In this case, since his message is (from these posts) a positive one, where's the harm?
 
  
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