John Titor: a Time Traveller From The Year 2036?
For some worldly-wise Internet users, the story of John Titor is
nothing new, although there are still numerous people who have yet
to come across this online curiosity which is steadily gaining
status as an urban legend. In the five years since his absence John
Titor has spawned a book, a theatre performance and rumours of a
movie, as well as plenty of webpages attempting to prove or
disprove his claims to be a time-traveller visiting us from the
near future.
Starting on 2 November, 2000 and continuing for a period of about
five months, someone calling themselves Timetravel_0 began posting
to a number of online time travel-related message boards claiming
to be a time-traveller from the year 2036. The first websites
Timetravel_0 posted to include the Art Bell site1 and the Time
Travel Institute site. After a while Timetravel_0 changed his name
to John Titor, although this apparently was not his real
name.
Why Was He Here?
Titor said he had travelled back in time because he was a soldier
from the year 2036 who was recruited to a government time travel
project. He had initially been sent back to 1975 to retrieve an IBM
5100 portable computer which was needed to translate between some
legacy IBM systems and UNIX. He claimed the IBM 5100 was able to do
this due to certain in-built functions that were not documented
when it was manufactured. When Titor left our timeline, some IBM
engineers apparently came forward to verify his claims about the
IBM 5100. After collecting the IBM 5100 Titor then travelled to the
year 2000 because, he said, he wanted to visit his family and his
younger self, and to see the effects of the Millennium Bug. There
is a story that Titor sent faxes to the Art Bell site in 1998
saying the Millennium Bug would cause chaos, but when asked on the
bulletin boards why this had not happened he said he had intervened
to prevent it.
During his stay in 2000/2001 Titor made it clear his objective was
not to convince anyone he was a genuine time-traveller, rather he
was simply posting messages to gauge people's responses to meeting
someone from their future. He was very willing to hold question and
answer sessions as well as give information on his time machine,
share his perspective on our present world, and to make a number of
predictions about the future, including how our present society
will end in 2015 in a brief but devastating global nuclear war. He
also posted a number of pictures of his time machine and scans from
a technical manual showing its schematics. Possibly one of the most
notable (if poorer quality) pictures he posted showed the time
machine warping the light from a laser pen due to its 'gravity
displacement'. For these reasons, as well as any lack of gain or
profit he could make from his assertions, some people have been
willing to accept Titor as a genuine time-traveller.
On 24th March, 2001 Titor said he was going to return to his own
time and, in spite of a number of obvious hoaxers, has not been
heard of since. It is claimed there is a video showing Titor
returning to his own time although it has not yet made its way onto
the Internet.
Titor's time machine
Titor described his time machine as a 'C204 time distortion gravity
displacement machine' built by General Electrics in 2034. It
weighed approximately 500 pounds and was transported in a 1966
Chevrolet Corvette Convertible, which also acted as Titor's vessel
as he travelled through time. The vehicle did not move through
space but remained stationary with the engine switched off. Some
time later the time machine was removed from the Corvette and
placed in a 1987 four wheel drive truck and the Corvette was sold,
which has led to speculation about where it may now be and who
bought it.
According to Titor there were six main components to his time
machine:
Two magnetic housing units for dual micro singularities
An electron injection manifold to alter mass and gravity micro
singularities
A cooling and X-ray venting system
Gravity sensors, or a variable gravity lock (VGL)
Four main caesium clocks
Three main computer units
In his descriptions Titor explained that his time machine was a
stationary mass, temporal displacement unit powered by 'two
top-spin, dual positive singularities', producing a 'standard
off-set Tipler sinusoid2'. Essentially, the time machine was based
on two rotating micro singularities operating similarly to a single
ring singularity spinning at high speed. The mass and gravitational
pull of this micro singularity was manipulated by injecting
electrons onto its surface, replicating the effects of a
Kerr-Newman black hole, thus (it would seem) enabling time
travel.
After Titor fed coordinates into his time machine there would be a
'ramp up' period while an audible alarm sounded as well as a
flashing light, followed by a countdown. Titor would then feel the
pull of up to 2Gs due to the gravity generated by the machine, and
the vehicle would appear to speed up as light was bent around it.
Except for supplies of compressed air, the only source of oxygen
would be an air pocket trapped around the vehicle. Titor estimated
the speed of travel at around ten years per hour, and the time
machine's accuracy of travel at up to sixty years, although he said
this was expected to be improved upon by researchers in his own
time.
According to Titor the nature of time travel and what can be
expected is explained through the Everett-Wheeler model of quantum
physics, or as it is sometimes called, the Many Worlds Theory3,
which Titor stated had been proved to be correct. Simplistically,
this means that every event that can have more than one outcome
will result in every possible outcome, and each possibility is the
origin point of a new parallel universe, or world line. The
relevance of this for time travel Titor explained, is that the
traveller does not enter their own past because their presence
would cause changes which in turn would create an ever-expanding
set of world lines. Instead the time traveller enters a closely
related world line where their presence would not cause this
incalculable level of world lines.
Titor's predictions
Most of what Titor has said of events between 2000 and 2036 centre
on a third World War followed by two decades of ongoing
recuperation. According to Titor, the period of conflict begins at
the time of the American Presidential elections of 2004/5 when the
seeds for a second American civil war are germinated. The nature of
the conflict is described as civil unrest brought on by intrusive
police-state tactics, which leads to an increasing number of Waco
or Ruby Ridge-type events, peaking at approximately one per week.
Eventually urban and rural areas are openly pitched against each
other. Titor claimed that at the age of thirteen he had joined a
shotgun militia to fight on the side of the rural army. By 2008 it
is popularly realised the pre-civil war conditions that existed
within America are lost for good.
By 2015 the civil war is effectively ended when Russia begins a
series of nuclear strikes on most major American cities therefore
eliminating the federal government. Most major urban areas
worldwide are also badly affected through a tit-for-tat series of
nuclear strikes, with a death count of approximately three billion
people. The areas worst affected are Europe, Africa and
Australia.
By 2036 the world has changed considerably. America is now made up
of five states with Nebraska as the capital and consists of
decentralised, tightly-knit rural communities. There is a greater
emphasis on religion, personal interaction (as opposed to mass
media), as well as self-sufficiency with people expected to work
for part of the day in the fields to produce food. Water is still
contaminated with radioactivity and needs to be filtered. In spite
of the war and the efforts to construct this new society from the
remains of the old, technology does not seem to be too badly
affected. Titor mentioned a system of rapid rail travel between
cities, space travel, genetic engineering and of course time
travel.
Besides the American civil conflict and a third World War Titor
made a number of other significant predictions:
America will wage war on Iraq, claiming Iraq has nuclear weapons.
Titor made this statement years before a war with Iraq was
considered. He also claimed no weapons of mass destruction would be
found.
War will erupt between Israel and its Arab neighbours, and weapons
of mass destruction will be used.
Korea, Taiwan and Japan will be annexed by China as the West
becomes unstable.
In the early 2000's CERN will lay the foundations for time travel.
In the autumn of 2001 after Titor had left, CERN released a
statement indicating the creation of mini black holes was
possible.
Mad cow disease will be a health issue in America but it will be
under-played.
Genetically modified food will be used to produce hybrid seeds that
will have detrimental effects on the population's health.
Titor made a number of statements about constitutional and civil
rights in America. He also said the American government will assume
its citizens will prefer security over certain personal
freedoms.
The future will judge the present harshly.
Since the Many Worlds Theory is, according to Titor, accurate, this
has implications for Titor's claim to be a time-traveller and how
his predictions for our future can be evaluated. If Titor is to be
believed we need to accept he is visiting from another
closely-related time line with its subtle differences from our own.
Consequently we can expect some of his predictions for the future
to be false for us, but since according to Titor there is only a
two per cent discrepancy between the two timelines, there is a good
possibility some of his predictions will be fulfilled. Therefore,
as the time approaches for each of his predictions to occur,
eventually the probability of Titor’s claim that he is a time
traveller will increase either towards being true or towards being
false, depending on whether the prediction is fulfilled.
The story of John Titor has been circulating on the Internet for
almost five years, with some people attempting to provide proof
this is simply a prolonged hoax, while others put forward arguments
and evidence to support Titor's claim to be a time-traveller from
the year 2036. The arguments against Titor are, however, quite
damning. For instance, it has been demonstrated that the picture
showing the laser light being bent was faked, and Titor's
explanation of using mini black holes to time travel is
scientifically impossible. Also, if Titor had intervened as he said
to prevent the disasters caused by the Millennium Bug, then by his
own explanation of the Many Worlds Theory of quantum mechanics, our
world line would have diverged radically from his own4. This would
mean his predictions would be all but irrelevant for our world
line5. More fundamentally, it is a given of time travel theory6
that a time machine cannot travel beyond the date it was built.
Therefore, if Titor began time-travelling in 2036 he could not have
travelled any further back than 2034, since according to him the
time machine was first constructed on this date.
For those who want to discover the truth for themselves there are a
number of websites with archives of Titor's messageboard postings.
Perhaps one of the best of these archives is the Abovetopsecret
website. If you scratch around the Internet you will come across
more and more bits of information about John Titor and you will
quickly be able to decide for yourself whether there is any
substance to his claims to be a time-traveller. In the final
analysis, however, perhaps the most fascinating aspect of the story
of John Titor is the fact that this phenomenon, which could so
easily have been ignored, has engaged so many people for so long.
The story is recounted and discussed on many websites and people
have expended a lot of time and energy in support for or against
Titor's claims. It is also remarkable for a story of this nature to
span so many media forms, ranging from a book to a ballet!
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1 The Art Bell website is no longer available.
2 A Tipler Sinusoid is basically a localised Kerr Field, or put
more simply a mini black hole. Cutting through the rhetoric,
Titor's time machine operates by manipulating a mini black hole.
Whether this is possible has been open to debate.
3 The Many Worlds Theory has become integrated into what is known
as M-theory, although this is no clear indication that Titor's
statement that the Many Worlds Theory is correct can be relied
upon. Since Titor's visit theories other than the Many Worlds
Theory have been proposed to avoid such things as the grandfather
paradox of time travel.
4 The only way Titor could know the Millennium Bug would cause
chaos would be if he had experienced it in his own timeline.
Therefore, by preventing this disaster from occurring in our
timeline means events here have altered considerably from his own
timeline. The two world lines have thereby become significantly
different.
5 Our world line would also have diverged more than the two per
cent Titor said was acceptable for him to time travel reliably
between it and his own world line.
6 Respected scientists do study the subject since Einstein's Theory
of Relativity allows for time travel.
pls comments.