John Titor was he ever outed ?

Spike_UK said:
Maybe that was because he warned us it was going to happen :eek:
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And therin lies the paradox. If he came back to warn us, then it happened in the future in which he lived. If it never happened, it would not have existed in that future and so he would not have felt the need to come back to warn us about something that never happened.

If, say, you created a time machine so that you could go back in time to kill Hitler. Once Hitler was dead, the very reason that you invented a time machine would cease to exists, and because of this, you would not have created that time machine in the first place.

The other theory is that time is immutable, that is it cannot be altered. So by creating a time machine and going back in time, you would achieve nothing. Hitler never died by an assassin's hand, so every attempt you made would be condemned to failure. This theory suggests that while the creation of a time machine may have been accomplished, there would be no proof of such a device, as there would never be any evidence of a time traveller influencing the past. This answers those who say "time travel must be impossible, as if someone had invented it, we'd know about them coming back here". Well, we wouldn't if they could not affect time.

The third option is one of parralell universes, in which someone comes back from the future to kill Hitler and their future splits from ours and they head off into a future without Hitler. However, this still falls down from agrument 1. If Hitler could be destroyed, the rasion d'etre for creating the time machine would never exist and so it would never be invented.
 
Tefal said:
but then he wouldn't have come back.

Surly if they had time travel they would just go back and shoot what ever president/dictator started it, and claim to be aliens/future people etc to change things, also why take a pc to the future when you could comeback with a super computer so we would be more advanced in the future so you could bring a more advanced computer back so we would be more advanced in the future so you could bring a more advanced computer back so we would be more advanced in the future so you could bring a more advanced computer back so we would be more advanced in the future so you could bring a more advanced computer back so we would be more advanced in the future so you could bring a more advanced computer back so we would be more advanced in the future, so your computers wouldn't need the old computer?
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Isn't that a time paradox though?
Using something from the future to change the future, would surely stop the thing from the future existing in the firstplace.
 
The fact is if you travelled back through time just your presence would EVERYTHING, just a person seeing you would change their course of direction which could lead to them maybe being killed by a car when they shouldn't have been or vice versa. Of course you could also go for the whole fate thing and say that no matter what you do things are inevitable and thats just the way it is.
 
Well if he removes the computer then takes it to the future for a temporary period he has violated the laws of conservation, as he has effectively destroyed energy for that time period.
 
Tefal said:
Well if he removes the computer then takes it to the future for a temporary period he has violated the laws of conservation, as he has effectively destroyed energy for that time period.
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I think that's a bit of a leap considering there isn't even a set method of timetravel :p. It may be that the method still somehow preserves the balance. Also movement through space and movement through time are probably not particularly distinct in that respect.

To extend it a bit there are some crazy 'proven' theories about spacetime. From what I remember of The Fabric of the Cosmos, every observer has their own view of spacetime, depending on the speed at which they're moving. If you move at the same speed relative to another person, you are both experiencing the same 'view' of spacetime (I believe these are sometimes called frames of reference? The term was never mentioned in that book). When you move at a different speed relative to the other person, you actually have a different view of time. If you were moving at 700mph away from someone, to you a planet millions of light years away would be some developed utopia existing at that very moment, while to the other person they may still be living in caves. I'm not sure I've got the time scales right but that's the gist of it.

that makes no sense I know
 
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He did state, at one point, a get out clause.

He basically said that when anyone time travelled, they arrived in a diffrent "world line" which is vaugely similer to their own. He said that if his predictions didn't come true, it's not that he was wrong, just that he came from a diffrent "world line" and maybe ours would be diffrent. He also said that when he travelled back to where he came from, he wouldn't arrive in the same world line as the one he left, but one almost identical. Thus employing the parallel universe idea.

This turned out to be the case, if it was true (which I doubt). I'm kind of surprised people didn't pick up on this at the time. He effectively said "if I'm wrong, I'm from a diffrent future, so it doesn't matter". Employing a huge get out clause making himself unfalsifiable.
 
Titor was a mad man, had he not seen Back to the Future? You can't just go changing things willy-nilly and expect to get away with it.
I expect he faded away after accidentally splitting up his parents before he was born, or something like that.
 
jonislost said:
The fact is if you travelled back through time just your presence would EVERYTHING, just a person seeing you would change their course of direction which could lead to them maybe being killed by a car when they shouldn't have been or vice versa. Of course you could also go for the whole fate thing and say that no matter what you do things are inevitable and thats just the way it is.
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No it wouldn't. If, in 30 years, I am still alive, and someone from 2037 came back in time and spoke to me, it would change nothing as I would be still alive in 2037. He couldn't introduce anything that wasn't already attributed to me.

He could, potentially, tell me something from the future that hadn't been invented yet, but unless I was credited with it in his time, then someone else must have been more succesful than me at, at least, marketing the invention.

One interesting speculation is that, sometimes we discover notes from a nobody which seem to suggest that they actually invented something before the person who is normally associated with the invention. Now, maybe they did invent it, but were unsucessful in marketing or didn't fully realise the potential of their invention. Or maybe they had a time traveller visit and say "hey, buddy, want to make a mint? Well, here's how you make a light bulb!"

However, the sheer fact that they have the ability but never produced a feasible production unit shows that, even if they were visited by a time traveller, history wasn't changed.


Unless, of course, the "famous" inventor was the one visited by the traveller... but why? After all, you would hardly consider it important to travel back in time to tell Thomas Newcomen how to build the atmospheric steam engine as you would assume that he already knew, seeing as he'd already invented it by then.
 
Woody__ said:
He did state, at one point, a get out clause.

He basically said that when anyone time travelled, they arrived in a diffrent "world line" which is vaugely similer to their own. He said that if his predictions didn't come true, it's not that he was wrong, just that he came from a diffrent "world line" and maybe ours would be diffrent. He also said that when he travelled back to where he came from, he wouldn't arrive in the same world line as the one he left, but one almost identical. Thus employing the parallel universe idea.
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So he was a Slider? :D
 
Now, if it were possible, wouldn't you just travel back and make a £1000 deposit into a high interest bank account and then bugger off 'back' to your own time and invest in a Time Machine GT-R?
 
jamiemoles said:
Possibly the most interesting of his predictions was that the Olympics scheduled to run in China would never happen.

Guess we will soon know if he was real or not...

:D
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Thats a bit of a weird one. He said that there would be no more Olympics after 2004. But we had the Winter Olympics on 2006 so he was wrong after that happened...
 
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