Back to the future: Scientists search the internet for evidence of time travelers

Back to the Future, hashtag style

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If you were to ask 100 people to pick the single greatest superhero power or sci-fi technology, time travel would almost certainly win. And believe it or not, time travel isn’t entirely outside the realm of reality — for some unified theories of the universe, such as general relativity, traveling in time is actually fairly easy. That’s why two American researchers have started searching the internet for evidence of time travelers.

One of the axioms of time travel is that, if retrograde (backwards) time travel is possible, it’s likely that a time traveler from the future has traveled back to our timeline. Putting aside the paradoxes that might occur from retrograde time travel (what if you kill your grandfather so that you were never born?), the theory is that we should be able to pick out these time travelers because they have prescient knowledge of the future. Robert Nemiroff and Teresa Wilson at the Michigan Technological University reason that, if we (or some alien race) learn how to time travel in the future, and they passed through our timeline, they should’ve left some trace on the internet — a prescient blog post, tweet, or search that gives away that they know too much. [Research paper: arXiv:1312.7128 - "Searching the Internet for evidence of time travelers"]

To hunt for time travelers on the internet, Nemiroff and Wilson devised three ingenious search schemes. The first involved searching Google and Twitter (hashtags) for mentions of comet ISON and Pop Francis from the last seven years. Both terms were coined very recently (Pope Francis is the first pope to be called Francis, and there hasn’t been another comet called ISON), and so any mentions before their arrival in 2013 could be considered a sign of prescience. The second plan involved the researchers looking through a log of searches on NASA’s website, to see if a time traveler had searched for “comet ISON” before it had been discovered. The third, and by far the most cooky, method was a simple plea from the researchers, asking a time traveler to send them a direct message that was transmitted before the original plea.

The tenth Doctor regenerates in Doctor Who

Sadly, none of these searches turned up any time travelers — or more accurately, they didn’t find any information that had been sent back in time from the future. Depending on your point of view, this is either depressing or not at all surprising. For a start, while traveling forward ni time should be fairly straight forward, traveling back in time may not actually be possible. On the other hand, given how impossibly large the universe is, and presumably how many intelligent civilizations there are out there, you would think that someone, somewhere would’ve passed through Earth’s timeline. It is a bit worrying that, even though the universe has trillions of years ahead of it, no one has worked out how to travel back in time.

Or who knows. Maybe time travelers are just very, very careful not to draw attention to themselves, lest they trigger a disastrous butterfly effect. Or maybe, unlike Doctor Who, who seems to have a rather unhealthy obsession with humanity [See: Doctor Who’s time-traveling TARDIS could theoretically exist, says new study], time travelers just haven’t found a reason to visit Earth yet. Maybe, in the grand scale of things, we humans are rather boring.

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  • Osymandias

    ‘Maybe, in the grand scale of things, we humans are rather boring.’

    Not surprising at all!

    • Dozerman

      …but but we have hollywood.

      • Heimdall222

        …and Bollywood.

        • Dozerman


  • BillBasham

    Tautologically, we are in an Everett branch where time travel hasn’t been discovered, since the discovery of time travel causes so many causality issues that the branch retroactively terminates.

    You can’t imagine how many branches I terminated before I could get this post to take…

    • Sebastian Anthony


      I am just waiting for someone to hack the ExtremeTech database to leave a comment ‘from the future’.

      (It was also very tempting to create a fake post on ET about time travelers and timestamp it 2006…)

      • BillBasham

        I was a little nervous about trying to hoax a time traveler post. After all, your article didn’t say *what* Nemiroff and Wilson would do to any time traveler they discovered…

        I think that today I believe that everything is static – all possibilities and all times are a static structure, and our perception of time is just some pulse of consciousness traversing a single path through the near-infinitely branched structure.

        • Dozerman

          The following is wrong and is more of a laymen’s way of visualizing than anything else.

          As wrong as I know I probably am, I view time as our universe copying itself recursively with changes between the copy and the original being based on the laws of physics (ie. The copy with two things being close together copies itself with them even closer together; gravity). Each copy is static and remains forever as that slice of time, and continues copying itself indefinately. If I were to go back twelve slices, I would change that twelveth slice and and alternate timeline would emerge, because each slice continues copying itself indefinitely with variations building up over the course of that other timeline.

          Of course, for that to be true, the multiverse would have to have time…

          • Dave_Mowers

            If everything we see is a form of energy and it is slowing down over time which is what makes time appear to exist then the form the energy exists in, from our perspective, is a solidification based on speed of travel or lessening thereof thereby becoming that which we can touch or solid in nature.

            If this is true then the only way to go back in time is to speed up to a point whereby you are no longer solid but a freer form of energy in which case you;

            A. Cannot see anything anyway.
            B. Must counter all the force that originally drove you to your current state which would be all the energy of the Big Bang.

            Therefore, it is unlikely that anything could be gleaned from doing so albeit impossible to achieve anyhow.

          • James Huckabone


          • Dave_Mowers

            You do not understand that everything is energy and it is all traveling from a point of origin therefore to arrive back at that point you must become energy traveling faster than you were to achieve time travel therefore as “energy” you cannot see anything anyway and must counter all of the force of creation which is presently driving you forward?

          • Defiant

            You said the “following is wrong” but nothing followed.

          • Dozerman

            What do you mean? There’s an entire paragraph worth of pseudoscience following that statement.

          • James Huckabone

            I am really loving these comments.

          • Dozerman

            I have no clue why I wrote that, honestly.

          • James Huckabone

            You synced.

          • Dozerman

            I wut?

          • James Huckabone

            Knowledge was pushed to you through the same conduit which gives access to memory. Aka God was whispering in your ear.

        • James Huckabone

          I’m a big fan of your theory of the day. Personally, I see existence as a VHS tape.

          • greybirdtoo

            …not and 8-trac tape? ;-)

  • Sipho Mfungi

    Perhaps the time travellers don’t use English in their blog posts.

    • Sebastian Anthony

      Oh, come now, English isn’t just the lingua franca of Earth — it’s the lingua GALACTICA!

      • BillBasham

        Ooh – excellent attempt to smoke out any possible french time travelers…

      • massau

        or we just all get brain implants that translate it for you, even for your own vision it gets masked. so you can hear an alien talk english to you and he hears his languish from you.

    • Defiant

      Perhaps they don’t use blogs!

  • mori bund

    You pathetic 21st century people with your archaic technology will never find me!

    • BillBasham

      You 23rd century people went down in the history books as overwhelmingly smug…

      • Jewy McJew

        Tell me about it. I am glad the Morlocks ate most of them!

        • Defiant

          The MORLOCKS!? Pteeeeew! Those b@st@rds killed my wife!

          • James Huckabone

            And took-ur jobs.

      • Dave_Mowers

        Even about the topic as every single natural resource is being obliterated by humans at a pace so intense in that the longer we continue this way no technology will exist in 300 years of any kind.

        They will teach from textbooks in grade school that the ‘industrialons’ ruined our heritage with their personal greed. That they wasted humanity on personal freedom and took away any chance to travel the stars or colonize neighboring planets. Occasionally, during Summer nights, the teachers will lead the children out of the cave system they live in wearing oxygen masks and show them the wasteland left behind to teach them the value of all things conserved for future generations.Then they will unpack their insect sandwiches and eat while observing the outside world for the two hours a night man can be on the surface since deforestation collapsed all weathering ending the water cycle and rendering the surface too hot to be on during the day.

  • Jeff Vahrenkamp

    traveling forward in time is quite simple, I find myself doing it pretty much all the time.

  • chojin999

    “The Taylor Trail:

    A series of 14 sequential human footprints on the same platform with at least 134 dinosaur tracks.”

  • chojin999

    Time Travelers Footprints Found

    Thursday, September 8, 2011 18:00

    Imprint of a shoe sole embedded in one billion year old solid granite

    Footprints through time

    The probability of time travel existing is high, and once time travel is achieved then it exists throughout time.

    Knowing that traveling through time is possible and that the
    universe is already billions of years old, it’s conceivable that some
    other civilization has already manipulated time and perhaps even found
    ways to travel though it. It’s even quite possible that humans someday
    create ways to travel backwards and forwards in time. If that’s true,
    then time travel already exists.

    Inconvenient artifacts

    Impossible artifacts litter many of the abandoned, forgotten
    basements of the world’s greatest natural history museums. In the dim,
    dusty corners—stuck away with the other embarrassments of archaelogy—lie
    some of the keys to the greatest mysteries of Mankind.

    Strange and unlikely artifacts found, studied and discarded are more
    common than most people know. Thousands of things have been discovered
    that argue against the natural order that scientists have deemed as the
    official record of the rise of humanity.

    Lost super-civilizations, ancient astronauts…or time travelers?

    What is one to make of a machined screw found embedded in a lump of
    coal estimated to be 60 million years old? How did the screw get there?
    Who dropped it in a swamp bed that became a coal bed tens of millions of
    years later?

    There can only be three possible answers:

    Non-humans visiting the planet accidentally dropped it, or,

    The science of the history and origins of Mankind is completely
    wrong and the human race existed many tens or hundreds of millions of
    years ago and had very advanced societies that all collapsed into
    barbarism, or,

    Time travelers from the future surveying the prehistoric
    past accidentally lost a screw. Sixty million years later coal miners
    discovered it.

    One could make an argument that the discovery of the screw was an
    elaborate hoax, yet that would fly in the face of the actual documented
    facts. And the screw is not the only anomalous object discovered in
    “impossible” places. Bells, jewelry, machined alloys, remnants of
    unknown languages dug up in rock quarries, these and other artifacts
    have been tripped over by workmen, miners and excavators for hundreds of

    With so many artifacts, fossils and discoveries made that are
    obviously out of place with the time line accepted by orthodox science,
    the objects lend credence to the hypothesis that the existence of these
    objects is due to time travelers that unintentionally left traces of
    their passage.

    Time travelers win out simply by the process of elimination. The
    footprints that span the eons are all definitely human, especially the
    barefoot prints. Virtually all exo-biologists agree that real visitors
    from the stars will be truly alien in physical characteristics and
    appearance. Therefore, although some may be humanoid and bi-pedal, it is
    against all odds that ancient astronauts exploring the Earth millions
    of years ago would have left human-like traces behind.

    As for the idea that super-civilizations account for the ancient
    artifacts? Well, while it’s true that evidence exists—both physical and
    written—that one or more truly advanced human civilizations may have
    preceded ours, those civilizations would have existed 25,000 to 100,000
    years ago. No human civilization could have existed several millions or
    several tens of millions of years ago. None certainly existed 260
    million years ago.

    The bootprints, sandal prints and barefoot prints can only be
    accounted for by members of time expeditions exploring the far reaches
    of the distant past.”

    • chojin999

      Time traveler’s shoe print left in solid granite

      Beyond impossible artifacts, the best evidence for the existence of
      time travel and time travelers are the human footprints left behind–from
      a time when almost everyone can agree no humans could have existed

      James Snyder lives at the base of a mountain in the Cleveland
      National Forest. Snyder lived a relatively uneventful life until, in
      2002, he discovered a fossilized footprint on the mountain above his
      property. The print had been embeded in the granite, rock estimated to
      be about one billion years old.

      “I go out of my way to make a slip trail where nobody else has been
      and I was actually looking for gold,” Snyder explained about his
      accidental discovery of the time traveler’s shoe print.

      Human tracks next to dinosaur tracks

      Other ancient tracks left behind by other time travelers

      H.W. Harkness, M.D, is quoted by the Proceedings of the California
      Academy of Science from August 1882. The proceedings describe Harkness’s
      discovery and mentions that he found six sets of human tracks, each
      with from one to 17 footprints of apparently shoe-soled feet.

      The tracks were apparently made by more than one person. Over the
      years many experienced trackers noted the fossilized tracks. All agreed
      the footprints were mande by humans.

      The stride was close to that of a normal-sized man, approximately two feet–sometimes as much as three feet.

      The professor believed the tracks were made during the Pliocene
      period. He estimated the date to be as far back as 1.8 million years.

      Dr. Harkness remarked, “If the impressions were those of any unshod
      animal, be it mammalian, biped, quadruped, or bird, they might differ in
      size, but would all be of the same pattern, which is not the case. Such
      a difference in shape becomes, however, quite intelligible if we
      suppose the footprints [were] made by men.”

      Footprint from the beginning of the Permian Period about 300 million years ago

      Amazing footprints discovered in Kentucky were reported January 20,
      1938 by the New York Times from an Associated Press story datelined
      Berea, Kentucky:

      “Discovery of footprints in sandstone, so human in appearance that
      they might have been made by one of the earliest ancestors of man, was
      announced here today by Dr. Wilbur G. Burroughs, head of the Department
      of Geology at Berea College.

      ‘The tracks, ten in all,’ Dr. Burroughs said, ‘are about 150 feet
      above the bottom of the Pottsville formation of the upper carboniferous

      “The Upper Carboniferous—or Pennsylvanian—spanned from 310 to 290 million years ago, the beginning of the Permian Period.”

      One paleontologist described a print found in Triassic rock. It
      appeared to be the fossilized leather sole of a shoe, about size 13,
      which showed a double line of sewed stitches, one line close to the
      outside edge and the other parallel at a distance of about a third of an
      inch. The edges of the sole were rounded off smoothly as if cut, and
      the right side of the heel seems to be more worn than the left [Victoria Institute, 1948]

      The State Geologist of Kentucky performed extensive tests on
      footprints found near Berea. The prints were discovered when the
      overburden from a sandstone formation was removed in logging operations
      about 1930. One series of prints found included some arranged in a
      normal walking stride. Microscopic studies showed that the grain counts
      were greater in the soles than in the adjacent sandstone, showing
      greater compression within the print areas.

      A shoeprint was discovered in a coal seam in Fisher Canyon,
      Pershing County, Nevada. The imprint of the sole is so clear that traces
      of sewed thread are visible. The age of the coal is estimated to be
      more than 15,000,000 years.

      A barefoot, human footprint: 290 million years old

      New Mexico footprints 290 million years old

      Paleontologist Jerry MacDonald found a wide variety of fossilized
      tracks in 1987. The ancient tracks were made by a variety of animals and
      birds, located in a Permian strata.

      Among the various fossilized tracks MacDonald discovered undeniable
      prints of a naked human foot impossibly located in the Permian strata.

      The Permian strata dates from 290 to 248 million years ago—many
      millions of years before animals, birds, dinosaurs, and man existed.

      In July 1992, the Smithsonian Magazine ran an article on MacDonald’s tracks, “Petrified Footprints: A Puzzling Parade of Permian Beasts.”

      Smithsonian admitted the mystery and acknowledged “what
      paleontologists like to call, ‘problematica.’” It described what
      appeared to be human footprints. Humans “evolved long after the Permian
      period, yet these tracks are clearly Permian.”

      Does time travel really exist?

      The probability of time travel existing is unknown; the
      possibilities are endless. As has been pointed out, if time travel is
      ever accomplished then it exists throughout time.

      We are a young race orbiting a third generation star on the
      outskirts of our galaxy. To declare that time travel is impossible—or
      that almost anything is impossible—would be shutting the doors on reason
      and imagination. It would also be the height of arrogance.

      In a sense we are all already time travelers, like flotsam drifting
      with the current of a river. When we learn how to swim upstream and
      downstream then we will have the answer to the question.

      And perhaps someday it will be our children’s children that steps
      into the past of 260 million years ago and leaves a fossilized record of
      their adventure for all to see.”

      • twinkiedooter

        Not time travelers footprints. It is a footprint from someone who was alive then. It’s really foolish of us humans to think we are the first humans to inhabit this planet. We were here a long, long time ago and keep wrecking the earth and coming back. How can you explain gears found in ancient rocks otherwise? The Bible is a fake book invented by the latest comers to this earth. Floods, etc. were great trials in their time to get rid of the excess populace and have us start all over again. Who is to say we were not here a million years ago?

    • erniebastion

      There are two other possible explanations. We as a civilization have a screw loose or we are just plain screwed. In addition, I generally when not feeling too screwy, tend towards the theory that there were advanced civilizations in the distant past that either were decimated in natural mass extinction events or were decimated by their own hand in man-made extinction events. There is too much evidence adhering to this theory. A little research will show why this theory has the most validity over time travelers or space aliens although logic dictates that either of these possibilities are possibly concurrent probabilities.

  • Skywalker

    “even though the universe has trillions of years ahead of it”
    Well, it has only billions behind (according to the most consensual theories), so it is unlikely to have trillions ahead.

    • Sebastian Anthony
      • Skywalker

        That’s interesting indeed, and the wikipedia link at the end is even more. But I think we’ll agree this is all theory, and there are many theories.
        For example the big rip, in 20 billion years or so. Or all the things they didn’t imagine yet. Seriously, they have no idea, they are just messing with the validity range of our poor earthly physics models to guess random results. Or, if we see the glass half-full, we could say they have a value, but with a hell of a relative error range. :D

        But I keep my point, given that we have only 10^10 years behind us, it is mathematically very unlikely that we have 10^(10^120) years ahead…
        (Not unrelated : )

        • VirtualMark

          A fair point – we don’t know if the laws of physics will remain constant forever. But I wouldn’t say that we “guess random results”, when you study the science you’ll see that everything is calculated and tested and tested again.

          • Skywalker

            Tested on earth (or not too far away… the farther we go, the least confident we can be about what we think we measure) and today.

            When I mentioned the validity range of our physics, I didn’t mean in time (we will probably never know that) as much as in space… We can’t accurately predict the speed of an object past the solar system (, and yet we try to evaluate as precisely as possible what correcting factor we need to add to our model to fit what we observe. Careful, the future of the universe depends on it ! :D

            (And I meant “arbitrary”, rather than “random”, sorry. When two
            conflicting theories differ in their results by a ratio of 10^(10^120), depending on the precise value of one human-defined constant, while both relying of what we know of astrophysics, I can’t help but compare
            it with 2 weeks weather forecasts, turning out as accurate as a dice roll)

          • Defiant

            Except for Global Warming “science,” where they just make up a theory and insist it’s true without any testing at all! The “data” comes from the same place as Global Warming…from their heads!

          • erniebastion

            Right like the weather on the planet has only been keeping written observations and written meteorological records for only the past 150-200 years. They then say of highs and lows or snowfall or rain or wind that “It has never been this that or the other thing before since we started keeping records” and then expect us to not take into consideration all the history of the planet’s weather which empirical evidence tells us has been to both extremes many times. Evidence of at least 5 Ice Ages and then “greenhouse” times which were very, very hot.

          • Dave_Mowers

            Hmmm…if, as you say, they base their calculations on previous averages and they are often wrong, then the “science” behind their method is clearly incorrect.

            I wonder if the “scientists” have got other things wrong?

  • Meadock
    • Defiant

      Isn’t that like reading about a search for a method of communicating with Dolphins…and posting a website for Doctor Doolittle?

  • David K.

    This is so stupid. I really hope my tax dollars aren’t paying for this.

    • Defiant

      Sorry David. We all know they ARE! Or, at least they would be if they weren’t all spent on entitlements and illegal aliens. OH MY GOSH! THE GOO BACKS!!!

      • Dave_Mowers

        Are you talking about the 37 trillion dollars of taxpayer monies given away to the rich to save the economy?

  • VirtualMark

    I can think of a few possibilities:

    1) Time travellers are not stupid, and know not to leave messages about the future scattered about internet forums.

    2) Time travel is impossible – if you travel back in time, you change history. No matter how small the changes, your presence is enough to change the future that you came from. You might walk through a city and queue in a shop, making someone else 30 seconds late for a bus that they then miss. They were going home to see their partner and a child would have been conceived that day, that child would have had future children and grandchildren etc. The seemingly innocent visit to the past has a massive effect on the future.

    3) Time travel means space travel – the Earth is orbiting the Sun at about 67,000 mph, the Sun orbit’s the galactic centre, the Milky Way is also moving etc. So if you travelled back in time you’d probably end up in empty space.

    • massau

      maybe a 4th idea
      time travel is possible but not in the same universe, (the elevator that can only go up). So you can travel back in time and kill you grand parent. But in that universe you would have never existed in the future, because that future wasn’t yours in the first place, you came from another universe so no paradox.

      also isn’t there a problem whit balance of energy? if i had a bar of gold got 1 second back in time gave it to myself tell him to do the same and travel 1 second to the future. than i would get an almost infinitive number of gold bars out of thin air. maybe it works whit the 4th idea.

      6th idea you can only travel back in time till a point where you invented the time machine and never before that.

      • VirtualMark

        Yeah the parallel universe theories are interesting, although I find the idea of duplicate me’s a bit hard to imagine.

        As for the balance of energy that’s definitely a problem, as matter/energy would just be created out of thin air if we arrived in the past.

        The 6th idea – this guy has been working on it for a few years, and as you said the idea is that it’d create a loop of time but only from when the machine is turned on:

        Of course this would answer the question of why we’ve not been overrun by tourists from the future. Surely if time travel was possible there would be billions of years worth of humans coming back to visit.

        • massau

          a 7th idea would be that you are not allowed to travel back before a certain point in time. you are not allowed to visit humans before they discovered a certain tech.

          an 8th idea if we discover time travel can’t we make a time travel computer that send the answer back in time so it would have infinite computing power. we could go into a virtual reality and never mess whit the real past. live the life like you always wanted and live forever.
          (you probably get a “give me something random” button and when you die there you quit the program)
          this idea also fits in the time loop idea and could be energy neutral. (if every bit is a 01 for one and 10 for a 0 than you can flip them both without energy change)

          • seansd

            8th idea used by Stephen Baxter as plot device for forcing Xeelee from the Milky Way

          • Cole

            If the universe is truly similar to a hologram as has been conceptualized, then one could theoretically visit any point in “time” as all the data that is our existence (and every alternate reality) would be forever stored. I would think that in such a scenario, time travel would still change any past time line you visited, yet it is inconsequential. Everything that exists would simply be equivocal to stored data and every time line would have already played out infinitely in every way imaginable.

  • Scott Jackson

    This is beyond moronic. They’re looking for mentioning of coins termed in 2013 before 2013 as a sign of time travel? 2013 came and passed and time travel wasn’t invented, so why would a future time traveler go back in time to talk about events in a year when time travel didn’t even exist? If a time traveler has posted anything on the internet, it will probably be about something we have never heard of hundreds of years in the future and we won’t know its from the future, we will just think its a crazy person.

    • Skywalker

      That’s indeed the only reason I can imagine one of them talking about 2013 events : he isn’t trying to hide, he is making his point in a verifiable way.

      • Scott Jackson

        That’s a bit of a stretch as is this whole research project in general. Yea if a time traveler comes back, they are going to talk about two esoteric things like Pop Francis and the comet ISON. This is like trying to find a needle in a trillion haystacks. It’s a complete waste of time. Even if they devised a better way to search I think it would still be a waste of time because traveling back in time is not possible. It makes for interesting science fiction, that’s about it.

  • Adam__Baum

    And if they came back to the 1920′s or the1830′s.. then what?

  • Funky3K

    What if backwards travel is easy, but we can only observe the timeline, and not modify it. Like, we can observe our grandfather, but can’t actually kill him. Almost like a universal paradox failsafe. And since in the future, previous incidents have not happened, the universe doesn’t need a failsafe for such a thing, because it won’t affect anything… besides the fact that you’ll get arrested for murder and put in jail, many years away from your family. Hm, when used like that… is years now a unit of length, rather than time?

  • Avatar1337

    …or maybe time travel back in time creates another timeline which isn’t part of our.

    • eonvee375

      agreed, time is a 2 dimensional not uni dimensionalm and everytime you go somewhere (or sometime ^^lol) in that 2d X Y grid you are ALWAYS in an another branch of the future or past as theres indefinite possibilities of any moment (that way avoiding paradoxes like in the movies)

  • seansd

    leaves out the reality that time travelers already know about their search from future history and therefor how to avoid it before they came back in time

    • pixelstuff

      Exactly along the lines of what I was thinking. Why would someone from the future stoop to the level of posting future information on twitter. I mean, unless the traveler was hiding out or for some reason trying to permanently live in the past, I can’t imagine them wanting to use social networking to talk about the future.

      • Defiant

        Hey, maybe they just have a sense of humor! I mean, what about the theory that UFOs are just teenage aliens on a joyride in their parents “cars!?”

  • javaper

    What if the very act of time travel alters your timeline and deletes your presence from ever existing thereby erasing you in the moment of arrival.

  • Dozerman

    Would have been funny if some PHP/Javascript error caused an error in the timestamp of a certain comment.

    I’ve actually gone back to old articles before and posted a “prophetic” post. Even got a reply from some scared kid asking “how did you know”. I think it was on ET…

  • kzin53

    Might I suggest as a candidate, hiding in plain sight while alive, Isaac Asimov?

  • Acolyte GLP

    They should Google ” The CHANI Project” :)

  • Acolyte GLP

    They should read the CHANI Project :)

  • jqpabc123

    The slightest interaction with the past could lead to temporal anomalies. Have any been observed? Have we ever woken up one day to find Vladimir Putin has been somehow replaced by Jonathan Goldsmith (look it up)?

    The fact that such anomalies haven’t been widely observed in our own time suggests that time travel isn’t likely to be possible.

  • Evan R

    I’m not sure that boring is the right word. More like, mostly harmless.

    • Dave_Mowers

      …”mostly harmless” to what? Certainly not to earth and other animals.

      • Evan R

        I suggest you read a book written by Douglas Adams.

  • lol

    No self-respecting time traveler would use Twitter or Google.

  • Sideeous

    God can time travel forwards, backwards, sideways, and with one hand tied behind his back and blind-folded… :)

    • Defiant

      Oh my gosh! So did Billy! My childhood imaginary friend!

  • James Riendeau

    Or maybe you can only observe the past and any attempts to interact with it ripple the surface, but ultimately leave no trace. I like to fantasize that the moment of death is the moment the consciousness is allowed to move freely on the space-time continuum. I’m thinking of forming my own cult around the premise. :-D It’s nice to know academia still employs a goodly number of the insane as well as the genius.

  • norton the original

    Was this before or after al gore invented the internet??

  • Jerad Finck

    Any time traveler would have already seen this article. Plus, I haven’t visited myself yet.

  • Peter Wood

    Ok if retrograde time travel is not possible, why would anyone want to go forward unless they are escaping something. I mean, that would mean you couldn’t go back, right?

  • Nir Lahav
  • Dave_Mowers

    The Ouroborian Chapter remains hidden because they already knew about this study and after each quest, and random blog posts chatting with you ancients, a special team of cleaners goes back and deletes any posts, or murders any people, whom could reveal their presence!

    You archaeons are always so simple-minded Aha, Ha, Ha, Ha, Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha…..the serpents of time are invincible!

    • BillBasham

      I’ve been taking screen shots of this thread as it morphs in response to the Ouroborian Chapter’s manipulations, and it’s veryyyyy

      • Dave_Mowers

        Basham, William….let’s see here…yep you’re in the database files. These posts were removed this morning according to entry but I like playing time games to mess with people.

        • BillBasham

          Actually I was one of the ones murdered, mid-post in fact, but luckily an earlier me forward time travelled to prevent my

          • Dave_Mowers

            iTravelers have gotten so cheap I guess everyone is playing time games anymore.

          • BillBasham

            You wi

          • Dave_Mowers

            Stating the obvious when you know I am from the future is some kind of ancient’s wisdom to catch me letting my guard down!

            Touche’ Basham, Bill….touche’

  • CAFR1

    Most do not realize the impact of changing any timeline, even in the slightest aspect of a simple change in what one says..

    It impacts all of the future in a ripple effect. An entity that can time place its being at will has to see the outcome of his intervention up-front “before” doing so. The possibilities of outcome are so vast it requires the ability in “timelessness” before the action is taken to instantly see the outcome out of quadrillions of possibilities.

    In terms of our technology at present, if you took the computing power of every supper computer in existence today, linked them all together, they would not even come close to a speck of vision of the possibility of outcome.

    The good point of a “timeless being” (entity), it can see in the state of timelessness instantly the outcome of any intervention, good or bad. So, in-line with the terms of creation (or the creator) only positive outcomes are allowed when intervention is called for to protect the earth or humanity.

    The “gift” of life we all share is no accident and believe me when I say: “The outcome of our past, present, and future is watched over by timeless beings. For any timeless being to intervene it requires in so many words the approval of the essence realm of the creator.”

    You see everything that is here, time itself is a check-mark on the blackboard of the creator’s score sheet. So what is allowed on this level is only allowed “if” the outcome is a positive. And again, a timeless being will see the outcome before intervention is taken.

    Bottom line? We all take for granite the degree in which we are all protected.

    In reality does anyone think our planet would have survived the chaos of the universe or man’s stupidity in self destructive nature if time intervention had not been constantly watching and intervening? Without intervention, the equal would be an ice-cubes chance in hell.

    So smile and know you are loved. Enjoy the gift given, appreciate every day, and look forward to a magnificent future. The outcome of which has been protected and moved on by forces we can only barely comprehend.

    On a last note, time is a perceived thing. We gauge it from our own perception of seconds, minutes, hours, days, years, centuries, millenniums, etc. We look backwards, forward, or note the present. In creation, the creator’s world of existence, time balances out to a zero.

    The expression “I am the alpha and omega” the beginning and the end, man took the meaning of in his own perspective. In reality the expression means “I am that I am” all time and existence as one. Gives a great outcome when the forces of a positive outcome are applied within the intent of endless possibilities.

    Again, smile, your timeless guardian angels are hard at work in your behalf (even if you did not know it). Gives new meaning to the expression: “Life is a beach”

    The destroyer, that equal force to the creator since the beginning that always has the intent to go back into nothingness, which in its small successes gives new meaning to the expresion: “Life is a B**ch” has one problem: When truly successful nothing exists, not even a check mark on the blackboard. So that leaves the score: Creator 100 / Destroyer 0. All that is here including time itself is a check-mark on the creator’s scoreboard :) Think about it.. we all have a better advantage, in spite of ourselves then we thought..


  • Dave_Mowers

    If time-viewing is possible and required massive amounts of energy to bend space-time so that one could look into the past wouldn’t those in the past also see a disturbance?

    Could this explain UFO’s?

    • Defiant

      Boy, you’re a QUICK one!

    • adamrussell

      It might explain David Bowie.

  • John Titor

    I hope the study wasn’t publicly funded.
    What self-respecting time traveller would use Google or Twitter or care about popes or insignificant comets? Did they check for 1990s Kardashian references too?
    What a bunch of drek. These “scientists” should be defrocked and sent back to work at the comic book store they came from.
    Time IS NOT linear.

    • Defiant

      If time is not linear there’s no such thing as time travel…or memories…or anticipation…or history…or lineage…or clocks…

  • paulrevere

    Maybe they should search for Pope Francis vs Pop Francis :} Or better yet Mcfly

  • Defiant

    If they did find evidence of time travel…I’m afraid the Doctor would be by to set it right anyway…


    Do you guys really think its possible to find proof of time travel? I thought any proof that someone from the future was in our present time would alter the universe?

  • Richard Vermeulen

    There is so much to learn and so little time! We are killing God’s earth and ourselves and yet we could benefit so much if we would WANT TO as a world people.

  • Gus Mueller

    These people get paid for this? There used to be talk on the old Art Bell show about a time traveler named John Titor who came back in time in search of obsolete computer equipment, which of course is BS. Why would anyone look on the internet for something they know doesn’t exist yet? (These are called “googlenopes”. Fuck you Gene Weingarten of the Washington Post. You suck dead donkey dick.) I want to get paid to do what they do.

    • Dave_Mowers

      Astrophysicists get paid to create imaginative mathematical models designed to confirm their philosophical speculations.


    I have a time machine…what’s the big deal?

  • Rick Carufel

    I believe the problem of time paradoxes is naturally resolved with the theory of the multiverse. The time traveler actually does not move along his own timeline but moves to a nearly identical parallel timeline. Thereby paradoxes are prevented from happening.

  • twinkiedooter

    The one time traveler not mentioned is John Titor. I still think he was/is real regardless of what other folks say about him. The silly modified car was just a ploy to throw us off and be able to say “see, I told you he was a fake”.

  • Martin Watt

    If they did time travel what make it certain they would have the ability to access the internet? Why would a basic little comet or a Pope interest them.

  • erniebastion

    Or maybe the time traveler’s “prime directive” is to remain secret at any cost and being intelligent and advanced, they are not as careless as our esteemed scientists assume they would be in leaving signs of their existence.

  • Tim

    It’d be a lot safer to develop a way to look back and forward in time, not actually travel there – something that prevents any manipulation of non-present events. It’d still be a powerful tool – you could make trillions on the stock market and gain a better understanding of history.

  • Tim

    Here’s a thought: You might travel through time, but since the Earth, Sun, Milky Way, etc. are all rapidly moving through space, you might time travel to the spot in the universe you would have been at at that particular time, meaning you’d probably flash freeze in the middle of nowhere, light years away from wherever the Earth was/will be at that particular time, or reappear in the middle of a star and vaporize.

    • Tim

      Meaning, if you want to safely travel through time, you’d also have to travel a huge distance – if you go ten years back in time, you have to travel to the spot in space you would have been at back then.

      • Dave_Mowers

        The confusion lies in what “Time Travel” is thought to mean from a physics viewpoint. It means warping space and time to arrive back at an earlier point in history so that it must be a inter-dimensional arrangement which finds all “times” paralleled as they all happened at once so that they are all happening as we speak at the same time.

  • edna smiles

    There are no time travelers because of the Apocalypse of 2020. Duh.

    –An Alien

    • Dave_Mowers

      I recently watched a show about the “apocalypse” and was surprised to find out the word translates as “revelation” so that the Bible section titled “Revelation” was originally titled “Apocalypse” which then means that this story of destruction and renewal is a mere copy of the Sumerian, Phoenician, Egyptian, Grecian, Scandinavian myths about creation.

      “Creation” or the acts that lead to it are “Revealed.”

  • NoNaMe

    The time travellers WERE found.
    But then they just went back to remove their trace, and now we think we never found them.

  • Marineaks

    I am a time traveler. I come from 4:14 p.m. EST.

  • D Darty

    Wouldn’t said time travelers figure out that they were being investigated and just correct their mistake(s) on a return journey? Sabotage their own attempt at leaving a data trail?

  • Mr. Ed

    So this entire experiment is predicated on the assumption that a) somebody in the upcoming billions (or “trillions”) of years ends up in our exact decade (or two), and b) once here, they decide to fire up the interwebs and search for a pope or a comet? Seriously? If I travelled from the year 3000 back to now, you know they’d either search for “p0rn” or “how do I get out of this moron-infested time period?”

  • mary

    I have seen a time traveler in our bedroom while my husband and I watched tv. As soon as I saw him squatting by the door, he put his finger over his lips and signaled me to be quiet. Then he vanished.