Foreign Perspectives

Seeing as Einsteins theories allow for time travel then sooner or later you might come across one but how would they be able to prove to you that they were from the future?

In fact, in November 2000 the first claimant to the title emerged on the Time Travel Institute forums and continued on until March 2001. Supposedly he had been sent back to retrieve an IBM 5100 computer to sort out the next “Year 2000” computer problem in 2038 but let’s leave the exact reasons aside for now because they’re not relevant to my point here.

In the end he was neither able to prove that he was from the future nor were those that were involved in the discussions really able to disprove it. If you think about it, it would be quite difficult to prove that someone wasn’t from the future whilst you were talking with them. After all, they’re hardly likely to be able to come up with next week’s lottery results: who can remember even last weeks? And, that’s the fundamental problem: any time traveller is likely to have come back tens if not hundreds of years and therefore is very unlikely to have sufficiently detailed knowledge of the time that they find themselves in.

OK, so chances are that you couldn’t prove that someone wasn’t from the future right away, but surely they’d know “stuff”, wouldn’t they? Like how their time machine worked for instance? Well, do you know how your car engine works? In general terms, perhaps, but few people know in real detail unless they’re car mechanics. Of course, that’s the problem with the John Titor chronicles: he couldn’t be caught out on operational details about the time machine because he just didn’t know them.

Don’t forget too that the first real time travellers are likely to be in the test pilot field rather than historians so they’ll probably not know much about the present time unless either it’s far enough in the past to have been taught as history or it’s close enough that they’ve lived through it. I suspect that if either of those apply then the knowledge they’d have about their new time would be fairly sketchy.

So how could you tell? Well, you’d need to ask about major events that were going to happen and then simply wait to see if they did. Unfortunately, most of the time I suspect your time traveller would have long since gone by the time any event that they remembered occured.