Foreign Perspectives

Let’s suppose our hypothetical time traveller was by chance able to make a really concrete prediction about what was going to happen say, next Tuesday, and it didn’t happen.

That would prove that he wasn’t from the future after all, wouldn’t it?

It’s not quite so simple as that. If he predicted that World War 3 was going to happen next Tuesday then you’re definitely dealing with a hoaxer. Major events like that which would have a considerable lead-up to them would be fairly definitive evidence that it was a hoaxer that you were talking to. On the other hand, if World War 3 was actually going to happen next Tuesday then chances are that you’d know about it too: such things rarely happen without a lot of preceeding events pointing to them happening well in advance of the event itself.

But what about more minor things? Sports results are a big iffy. For example, if you were to place large bets on the basis of what your “time traveller” said then that could by itself affect the outcome of the game.

And, that’s the problem really. Large scale events would have lots of preceeding smaller events leading up to them and thereby be largely predictable by many people whereas smaller scale events could be influenced by the very fact of the time traveller telling you about them.