Between the years of 2000 and 2001, a man named John Titor caused a stir on the internet. John Titor claimed to be a time traveler from the year 2036. He made numerous posts describing his time machine, many predictions, and why he was time traveling – all with incredible detail. Of course, many of his predictions have already been proven false, including an American Civil War in 2012 and a short World War 3 in 2015, but even with these false predictions, there is a John Titor cult following. Some people remain to believe that he could be the real deal and they have pretty clear evidence.
I, myself, am not so sure. In fact, I read everything he had to say and as convincing as it is (you can read it all here http://www.johntitor.com/), I’m not quite sure if I believe that time travel itself is possible.
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So let’s start with the basics. Albert Einstein, theoretical physicist, came up with the general theory of relativity in 1915. Essentially, without going into too much science babble – there is space and time. Space and time act as two moving parts simultaneously to each other. Along with these two parts, is light. Light is very fast, the fastest thing known to mankind. If a human can move faster than light, MAYBE, he can travel through time.
With this knowledge, scientists have been working like crazy to invent time travel. Now there are many other theories involved with traveling in time and there are many speculations on what could or could not happen, but ever since I was a child, I have stayed up way too many nights trying to figure out if this could be a thing.
Here are my thoughts:
1. If time travel was possible, we would have already met someone from the future. Someone, somewhere, sometime, would have already came back in time, probably in various different time periods, to brag about how they have time traveled. We’re humans and we must brag about our achievements. Maybe, John Titor was the guy to do this, but more on that later.
2. If time travel was possible, we would
never know about it. Think about it, if I had the ability to go back in time and kill Hitler, I would do it. But if I did that, no would know I did it. Why? Because I would kill him before he was famous, before the terrible events that occurred and none of us would remember an event that never happened. Of course then again…what if someone evil is a time traveler and that’s why events like that have occurred. Either way, we would never know.
3. If time travel was possible, we still would never know about it. It’s quite possible that John Titor could be a real time traveler. Just because his predictions weren’t completely correct, doesn’t necessarily mean they didn’t/won’t happen. Hear me out. If you believe in the multiverse theory, then you will understand that there are multiple timelines running side-by-side. If someone time travels, it’s very possible that when traveling back or forward in time, they create a new parallel universe, meaning that changes will occur.
4. If time travel was possible, some things could be changed. Once again, looking at John Titor’s example. If he traveled back in time to 2001, claimed that significant events occurred between 2004 and 2036, but in his time travels, he changed these events. He would be the only one that knew about these events happening. MEANING that he wrote down these events as predictions, before changing them, and none of us will ever know if they did/would occur in the meantime.
5. If time travel was possible, we may be forced to only move backwards. Imagine you’re in a plane, traveling the other side in the world. Ding. You just traveled a few hours back in time. Now imagine you flew to the other side of the world in “faster-than-light” speed. Ding. You just traveled back in time even more so than the first.
So do I think time travel is possible?
I don’t know. I’ve spent many nights growing up discussing these very topics with my father. It typically results in more questions than answers, a slight headache, and a sense of wonderment at the universe.
