So, in the late 90's I went to a goth convention in New Orleans, where my wife met a time traveller named "Butterfly". I saw her talking to a weird looking guy, and swung by to see if she needed help, but she had that "oh this is going to be a great story" look on her face and kind of shooed me away. Later, she told me he had claimed to be from the future. He made some predictions:
- there would be a war in Iraq, but it was not actually as big as the one that happened later
- after the Big War, there was a disease that forced everyone to live belowground
- he had a computer chip in his hand
- he had a son in the future named Gandalf
This all seemed pretty wacky, if harmless. My wife enjoyed relating it all in our Yahoo Groups email group. Then, in the next few years:
- the implanting of computer chips in pets became commonplace
- we started hearing about new viruses every few years
- we went to war in Iraq
- Lord of the Rings movies came out, which made it more likely someone would name their son "Gandalf"
So, I asked my wife, "what else did that guy say would happen?"
She said, "I don't remember it all now, but I put a really detailed list in my email to the Yahoo Group."
So, we look in the Yahoo Groups history, and...that month was missing from the history.
Oh, well. If he had said anything more significant than a global pandemic and WW3, I assume I would have remembered it.
Weirdly, I met someone in Ojai, California in 2010 who also claimed to be a time traveler named "Butterfly". He was a weird looking dude who also claimed he had a computer chip in his hand. I only spoke with him for a moment but it was a very surreal conversation.
Well that would have been a little over a decade after I saw him, if it was the same guy. Of course, that would be according to _my_ personal timeline. Perhaps from his point of view it happened earlier...
He needed a ride from Libbey Bowl (a big park in the center of town) to some other location in Ojai (which is a small enough town that giving a stranger a ride isn't completely weird). My buddy and I drove him to the place he wanted to be dropped off while he talked for a bit about being a time traveler. He was wearing a ton of different bracelets, and when we commented on that he gave us each a bracelet (in the same style as those yellow Livestrong bracelets people wore in the 2000s). Both bracelets were identical black bracelets with red symbols, that looked kind of like they were off of Led Zepplin IV.
I'm not sure how old he was. I've never been very good at estimating people's ages, but I'd guess maybe in his 30s or 40s?
The only year in the past 140 years that there have been at least 5 babies with the given name Gandalf in the US is 1970.
Iraq had been at war 12 of the 20 years between 1980 and 2000. Not exactly a genius level prediction.
Implantable tracking chips in pets were invented in the mid 80's and have been a commercial thing since 1990.
We've had "new" viruses every few years especially since international travel has been a thing. The vast majority of these are just new strains of existing well known viruses. With genetic analysis, we are of course much better at tracking and identifying these things. And certainly going underground in a confined space with a bunch of other humans is the exact opposite of what you'd want to do to avoid a widespread human contagion.
Haha! Point taken. But, contextually, he was weird looking for that particular convention. Hair was kind of unkempt, beard a bit scraggly. Not homeless-looking or anything, but a bit more frazzled than the typical going-to-a-goth-convention person.
Gratitude for conveying this message, what an intriguing character, and an intriguing lack of logged data. May all have peace and stillness in heart and mind
Well it was an Austin goth group, and somewhere around the year 2000, but more detail than that I cannot recall. Wait, does that mean _my_ memory has been wiped as well?! Oh, wait, no, I just have a poor memory. Sorry...
Amusing how books have to achieve a certain vintage before names from them become acceptable. I wonder if, in the year 3000, it will be acceptable to name a child Arwen and not have it thought of as weird. Or perhaps there needs to arise a cult around LoTR before that becomes acceptable. If Scientology enters the mainstream, perhaps children will be called Xenu completely normally. Maybe the name Jesus will be treated like the name Nimrod.
Then again, there is powerful normalcy-bias here. A name is acceptable if it is very similar to established names and if there is variance it's rarely among the established power class. So perhaps we'll need a massive disruption. The Scientologists will have to kill a large number of people and subjugate us to have names no longer just be James and Jennifer.
Or maybe we'll need a modern well-loved person to call their child Eliohann.
I met a lady named "Arwen" once. I asked her about it and she just said "My parents were total LoTR hippies." But while it stood out to me at the time, it didn't strike me as name that was ridiculous or anything. Just distinctive.
Now Frodo... that would just seem weird. Or Gandalf for that matter.
Steins;Gate, a Japanese light novel and anime, includes John Titor in the story in an awesome way. It also includes some bit of hacker culture that I think is more real than the typical American movie "hacker". I recommend it!
Edit: As pointed out in the comments, this was originally a visual novel! There are many ways to enjoy this story.
Stiens;Gate is the only time traveller story that I know that establishes rules for time travel early on and actually sticks to these rules till the end.
> Stiens;Gate is the only time traveller story that I know that establishes rules for time travel early on and actually sticks to these rules till the end.
There's also Primer, but Stein's gate is better than that movie.
I wouldn't really call it better, they operate on different scales. Primer is much less bombastic and doggedly grounded to reality, which is really an anomaly in sci-fi media. Failure of the protagonists in Primer does not mean a World War 3 will happen or the planet will be destroyed, the biggest stake in the movie is one of the characters getting shot at their birthday party by an ex.
Personally I find this much more refreshing than the usual the-world-will-collapse scenarios. It's easily one of my favorite films, just because of how different it is than it's ilk, I've yet to find something like it again.
One of the main characters (Aaron) fled the country and is seen with the people in the warehouse presumably making a bigger version of the machine for unknown reasons.
The other one (Abe) stayed back and kept on trying to travel to the past and messing around with the machine so that his (and Aaron's) past selves will eventually give up assuming that the machine doesn't work. But this seems to have been thwarted by one of the future-Aaron's as he has sent a recording detailing the whole scenario to some unknown recipient (this recording serves as the narration of the movie).
> OK. So they're planning an invasion of the past?
No, you can only go back to the point where you start the time machine. Secondly, its Aaron, so its probably his private corporation running the new machine. Aaron is the one who is manipulating the stock market and in it for the profit.
Its the "success" story for Aaron, he rebuilds a bigger time machine, but with the power of a corporation / large money backing him now (probably funded from repeatedly winning in the stock market). Aaron cannot stop the original experiment or otherwise travel to the past, but he can make money in the future.
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There are roughly 3 machines you need to be aware of.
1. Machine #1 is what the movie is mostly about.
2. Partway through the movie, Machine#2 (failsafe) is revealed. The main character turned on the failsafe simultaneously with Machine #1, so if the time-travel got too confusing, he could always go back to the beginning and turn off Machine #1, cancelling the entire experiment.
3. The other main character, reset Machine #2. Instead of sending you back to the beginning, it now sends you to Day2 or so, preventing the change of the early days.
4. The conclusion, where Machine #3 is revealed. There was no leadup to machine#3, its just a bit of closure for the greedy Aaron.
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The movie goes off the rails and really stops making sense. I've put a lot of effort into trying to understand what they were going for... and ultimately came to the conclusion that Stein;s Gate is just a better thought out time travel plot.
I give Primer credit for being a relatively consistent time-travel movie with more thought put into it than the average time-travel timeline. But the ending is still in the "audience's hands", and still leaves ambiguity for the audience to figure out on their own.
A lot of actions in the middle of the movie don't seem to have any relevance to other events. The father (Thomas Granger) randomly coming in through the time machine but unconscious for example. While it is clear that Thomas Granger is from "some future timeline", such an interpretation naturally conflicts with the Primer theory thus far (which has no "multiple timeline", everything should be consistent)
There is also an Aaron clone running around, but it isn't really clear from what time the time-clone is from.
I don't think their intentions are clear. It's more that a powerful organisation or government now has control of it and is planning something large scale, beyond what we'd seen in the film before.
It isn't explained, which is my main fault with Primer. Primer leads you in with a crystal clear beginning that makes sense, but goes off the rails by the 2nd half.
A lot of people are tricked by the crystal clear beginning and assume that the end makes sense, but the movie goes into ambiguous mode about half-way through. Its audience interpretation, as opposed to a singular answer. (Contrast with something like Inception, which doesn't really have more than one interpretation).
Some people like ambiguous movies. I don't, which is why I kind of prefer Stein's Gate, where all actions are clear.
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Either way, its clear that the powerful organization is Aaron's goons. Aaron was the guy who played the stock market with the time machine, so its obvious that Aaron used the time-machine for ill-gotten gains at that point... and is using the money to fund a bigger time machine.
Also, the German netflix show 'Dark' does time travel in a much more satisfying way than the vast majority. Watch it in German with subtitles, the dub is weird.
Dark suffers from the same ambiguity as Lost though, where you given the writers the benefit of the doubt that there's an overarching rational sequence of events, but it's also equally likely that the writers are just making it up as they go along.
Just a heads up, the video is blocked everywhere except USA/Canada. Here's a link to the trailer if anyone is interested[0]. It's a fantastic movie by the way, a definite watch if you're interested in hard sci-fi.
"The Man Who Folded Himself"[0] is one of the best time travel books. It won both the Nebula and the Hugo. While it has consistent rules about time travel, figuring out what exactly those rules are is half the fun of the book.
Of all time travel stories I know, the one with the most consistent and logical view on time travel isn't Steins;Gate, but Murai Nikki (Future Diary).
IMHO, Steins;Gate hasn't clarified what time travel really represents. When one travels from one world line to another, does the previous world line still exist? Is time travel a travel between parallel universes, a complete rewrite of history in the _same_ world, or something else?
In the first Steins;Gate anime, it seems that time travel means a rewrite of history (i.e. the conventional type of time travel in science fictions), but in Steins;Gate 0, time travel seems more like jumping between parallel universes.
Two things I usually note when recommending Steins;Gate.
Either the sub or the dub is well worth watching, but the dub is one of my favorites. In particular, it shines with Okarin's mile-a-minute pseudo-scientific conspiracy rants.
If you like the premise and the characters, but are frustrated at the slow pace, hang in there. The plot does eventually kick into gear, and it doesn't waste any of the character development or world building.
The anime is good, but the original visual novel is much more detailed and offers several endings. 11/10 would recommend; it's the only time I can say a video game brought me close to tears. The Steins;Gate visual novel was the perfect gateway drug into otaku culture for me the first time I played it, especially since it included a glossary of terms related to anime/manga that grew as the story continued.
I'd suggest going with the visual novel anyways, since it has a bit more meat (like multiple endings) even if the anime is a pretty faithful telling. It's also on so many different platforms (including iOS), so it's pretty accessible.
It makes the art _far_ more generic and a fair number of the internal monologue lines that make the main character more interesting have been cut. There are some explanatory lines (for things that originally aren't visually portrayed) cut that I don't think come across as well in the animation.
It's not _bad_, but I don't see any reason to go with it over the original.
It was a visual novel (the game on the PS3 [EDIT: +Xbox 360]), then it was an anime, and very recently, there is now a game, Steins;Gate Elite (PS4/Xbox One/Switch) based on the anime.
What time travel might look like from the other side [1].
I remember a great short story I read about the first time traveler. They decided the first visit would be the Shakespeare. Shakespeare has no problems accepting that he's being visited by a time traveler, and asks what gifts the traveler brings.
The traveler is a bit confused, so Shakespeare explains that the early ones all bring gifts. The traveler has brought some gives, including a nicely bound volume of Shakespeare's plays. Shakespeare looks at it, comments on the nice binding, says something about maybe he can sell it, then decides probably not, and tosses it on a pile of other such volumes brought by other time travelers.
The first time traveler is now getting pretty confused, and says something like "but I'm the first time traveler!", to which Shakespeare answer "but not the first to arrive". This is something often overlooked in time travel stories--just because you are the first to leave for a given destination doesn't mean you are the first to arrive.
Shakespeare mentions that he's frequently bothered by time travelers, but at least doesn't have it as bad as Jesus--that guy can barely do anything without a time traveler showing up. Shakespeare explains he knows because a time traveler thought it would be interesting to take Shakespeare to meet Jesus once. All the great figures of history are frequently visited.
Somewhere in there Shakespeare provides some drink and tries to calm down the inexperienced time traveler, who is freaking out over all this. Shakespeare is an old hand at dealing with newbie time traveler freak outs.
Then a bunch of other time travelers arrive, but not to see Shakespeare. They are reporters from the first time traveler's future, there to interview him about his historic visit to Shakespeare.
> Then a bunch of other time travelers arrive, but not to see Shakespeare. They are reporters from the first time traveler's future, there to interview him about his historic visit to Shakespeare.
It looks like someone has republished it as a stand-alone story on Kindle [1]. That says 19 pages, which seems longer than the story I remember. I wonder if it was expanded from the original short story in Asimov's?
It's also in this anthology of science fiction humor stories [2].
It turns out I mentioned the story here on HN in 2014 [1], which is probably where that person saw it. As with the present thread, I didn't remember the name of the story and got the time frame wrong. Also as in the present thread people quickly found the name and where/when it was originally published.
And in that thread, someone also linked to the "everybody kills Hitler" story that I linked to (although they linked to it at its original site, which is still up, instead of linking to a republication link I did).
All I can say is that I probably read it in an issue of "Analog". I went through all my saved copies, which are a few years worth from the '80s and '90s then a nearly complete run from around 2000 to 2010 or so. (I then switched to a digital subscription--but I'm sure I read this story on paper so it is before that).
Looking through the short story titles in all those issues, and at the stories themselves whenever the title seemed like one that might be right, turned up nothing. :-(
It's possible that it is even older. I have a vague memory of bringing up that story in a discussion with someone at college, so it could have been something I read in the '70s. Back then I had a subscription to "Galaxy" science fiction magazine, and frequently picked up "Analog", "Asimov's", and "The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction" at the newsstand, and any one of those could be where I found it.
Reminds me of a story where it turned out that the entire Passover crowd where Pontius Pilate asks who should be pardoned are time travellers that have been told to do what everyone else does.
There's a Russian spoof of "Terminator" which has Arnold going back to kill Judas. With the iconic lever-action shotgun (not consistent, I know). But Christ keeps bringing him back to life, to satisfy his father's will.
That would put an interesting twist on Matthew 27:25, "All the people answered, 'His blood [i.e., responsibility for his death] be on us and on our children [i.e., descendants]!'"
In April of 2004 I attended a multimedia performance at George Mason University called "Time Traveler Zero Zero - A Story of John Titor." It was directed by Kirby Malone and is still one of the more interesting theatrical productions I've ever seen.
But how do we know no one showed up? Someone could have showed up, stuck him in a time machine and took him to the real party then zapped him back to his time not a second later. :conspiracy:
How does time travel work with the Earth spinning, the Earth orbiting the Sun and Solar System orbiting around the center of the Milky Way? By the time you finish reading this comment you've moved thousands of miles with respect to the galactic center. Or am I missing something?
If you can move in time, it seems plausible you could also move in space.
According to John Titor:
> [T]his problem is actually the most difficult part of time travel. [...] Inside the displacement unit are a series of very sensitive clocks and gravity sensors. This system is called the VGL (variable gravity lock). [...B]efore the unit "leaves" a worldline, it takes a base reading of the local gravity and adjusts the Tipler sinusoid to 'lock' into that position. Although the temporal physics of this statement are wrong, in effect, it holds you to the 'Earth'. During travel, it periodically checks to see that the field has not varied. If it does, it stops and reverses course or drops out at that point.
I like this question. It broke my mental model of time travel because I like to think of time as tied to space, maybe. If you want to rewind a thread of time, you can't really stay in the same place and poof, like Christopher Reeve laying in bed. Because the old hotel isn't in that place anymore, at some physical-historical-galactic-geography level.
Maybe it's not meant to work that way though; maybe you can uncouple time and meditate, and your other-conscious travels but in some other way than normal physical travel with forward time, or something like that.
I think that's a cool idea for a story. It also addresses the question of "if time travel were possible, wouldn't we have seen some time travellers by now?" Perhaps somewhere out there in space is a graveyard of time travellers who ended up landing in the empty void that the Earth once occupied in the time they were travelling to.
> A method for employing sinusoidal oscillations of electrical bombardment on the surface of one Kerr type singularity in close proximity to a second Kerr type singularity in such a method to take advantage of the Lense-Thirring effect, to simulate the effect of two point masses on nearly radial orbits in a 2+1 dimensional anti-de Sitter space resulting in creation of circular timelike geodesics conforming to the van Stockum under the Van Den Broeck modification of the Alcubierre geometry (Van Den Broeck 1999) permitting topology change from one spacelike boundary to the other in accordance with Geroch's theorem (Geroch 1967) which results in a method for the formation of G{umlaut over ( )}odel-type geodesically complete spacetime envelopes complete with closed timelike curves.
As I recall, he did fairly well overall. But there were still some errors in the presentation. He provided several pictures, in 1990s-grade postage-stamp quality, which could cover over a lot of issues. One of them was of him shooting a "laser pointer" in his time machine powered by a black hole, and the beam being visibly quite bent. The low resolution covered over the fact this was kinda obviously one of those strings of little lights wrapped in a tube with enough plausibility to believe if you want to. But if the laser pointer's light is getting "bent" like that, all of the light ought to be getting bent, not just the laser pointer, and you ought to be getting immense visual artifacts due to the fact that your picture is itself being taken with light that is bending like crazy (see stuff like [1]). Not to mention the implied gravity field at such bending rates is beyond anything atomic matter can take. But even if we handwave that away, there really isn't a way to handwave away the fact that if the light from your laser pointer is getting bent, all the light ought to be getting bent, to massive effect on the resulting picture.
Still. Valiant effort. Better than most I've seen. Most of them are basically "Hi, I'm from $INTEGER years in the future and it turns out that you all are exactly right about everything and all the fashionable social concerns of your day/culture/sub-culture are in fact exactly correct! In the future, everybody who didn't (eat vegan / believe in BitCoin / get concerned about the landfill crisis / accept pholostigon theory) is dead because (they where all executed by super ethical governments for the crime of eating animals / died in pauper's prisons / literally buried in garbage / of the great Pholostigon War of 1773)! Ask me anything about how right your current social fashions are!" Not that Titor didn't more than dabble in that himself, though.
John Titor made poor predictions. He also said that his timeline could have been different than this one, as a way to justify prediction failures.
He said an organizarion pays him a paycheck then said he lives in a society based on bartering. There are contradictions in his posts.
The Mad Cow disease epidemic never happened, neither did the civil war he predicted, or any if the other stuff.
He also talked about using ancient IBM computers to fix some software bug from the future. Why on earth would you use that rather than a more power efficient/powerful computer?
To me it seems that in the future they for some reason need to access files that can only be opened on that computer.
If time travel is indeed possible and relatively common, it might be a better business decision to just send someone back in time to fetch a working version of that computer than try to recreate one from archived documentation (if any of it survived).
If there is something special about that computer it can surely just be executed in an emulator running on any future computer that is more powerful and uses less power, like a Raspberry Pi or its future equivalent.
This would still require having the original documentation on how the computer operated. Not to mention, some software (notably some retro console games) rely on quirks or flaws in the silicon itself, and don't actually run on a "perfect" emulator.
If time travel is common and either of these issues is raised then sending someone back to bring the real computer might be the easiest option.
I think the US government missed a trick by not making the logo for the United States Space Force [1] the logo of John Titor's military insignia [2]. (Although I do appreciate the Star Trek looking seal nevertheless.)
4chan has investigated that and discovered that John Titor is actually Donald Trump who choose the alias after his uncle John Trump - an MIT professor - who obtained the blueprints of the time machine from Nikola Tesla: https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/214/676/8aa...
It's the choice of Steins Gate. The spread of the truth is a necessary measure to bring the actions of The Organization and SERN to light. El Psy Kongroo.
Sign of the times. Upon reading the title, I figured the discussion would all be about closed time-like curves and causality violation and what not. But, here I am surprised to see HN commenters as open as a UFO subreddit. No complaints here though.
The way he didn't mention crypto currency that must have effected their future economy already sounds sketchy. See they still using paper bills everywhere?
To believe that time travel is possible is to believe that the universe keeps all the snapshots of every moment in some backup storage. From the economic viewpoint, it is very unwise. I don't think the universe is that dumb.
I enjoyed the anime more, but I also watched it first, and I think that tarnished my experience. If I were going back I'd definitely do it in the reverse order.
> A Hollywood live-action adaption of the game Steins;Gate is in the works.
> Anime News Network reports the big reveal came during the live concert celebrating the 10th anniversary of the series. During the Science ADV Live S;G 1010th Anniversary, a teaser video was played revealing a live-action recreation of the game is being made by Hollywood for television.
“My “time” machine is a stationary mass, temporal displacement unit manufactured by General Electric. The unit is powered by two, top-spin, dual-positive singularities that produce a standard, off-set Tipler sinusoid.”
Some people want to increase the unhinged fearmongering over the virus by any means necessary. They’re running out of plausible rumors to do it with so now they’re upvoting end times prophecies instead. Of course that’s the only reason this is being upvoted right now. My question is why aren’t they being shadowbanned for inflaming the hysteria. The astonishing thing is that 99% of these people spent the past ten years aggressively trashing anyone who showed genuine interest in alarming events pointed out by Alex Jones etc, bullying them and rendering them pariahs in their social groups. Now that it’s their turn to be treated this way, their behavior is instead being allowed and encouraged for some reason, and they somehow don’t see the hypocrisy in their pointless cultivating of this panicked conspiracy theorist mindset.
I think about JT from time to time (no pun intended). It looks like things are starting to go the way he described, but about a 10 year time shift difference. Thankfully no CJD outbreaks but with its latency who knows.
Actually, prion diseases are still a worry. Deer up around here are infected, and it's a big hunting area (Utah/Colorado), eating a deer w/ prions, I think can cause CJD.... but IIRC there's a long incubation period (years), and no cure. So you're just fucked.
God help us if that's secretly gonna start killing a lot of people. I cringe everytime my wife's family offers venison for dinner....
Waco like events that get worse, according to him. He said the “civil war” starts in 2005, which would be 2015.
The occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge was Jan 2nd 2016 (starting slightly earlier in 2015). If there’s an event that might closely mark a start of a civil war that ramps up, that’s high on my list.
- there would be a war in Iraq, but it was not actually as big as the one that happened later
- after the Big War, there was a disease that forced everyone to live belowground
- he had a computer chip in his hand
- he had a son in the future named Gandalf
This all seemed pretty wacky, if harmless. My wife enjoyed relating it all in our Yahoo Groups email group. Then, in the next few years:
- the implanting of computer chips in pets became commonplace
- we started hearing about new viruses every few years
- we went to war in Iraq
- Lord of the Rings movies came out, which made it more likely someone would name their son "Gandalf"
So, I asked my wife, "what else did that guy say would happen?"
She said, "I don't remember it all now, but I put a really detailed list in my email to the Yahoo Group."
So, we look in the Yahoo Groups history, and...that month was missing from the history.
Oh, well. If he had said anything more significant than a global pandemic and WW3, I assume I would have remembered it.