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

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.

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.