The Time Traveler's Gambit

Tempus edax rerum.

First, a major caveat: per virtually all mainstream and peer-reviewed contemporary understandings of physics, humans have almost certainly never and almost certainly never will be able to travel through time. To be sure, some disagree, and General Relativity demonstrates that objects moving at speeds closer to the speed of light relative to other, slower-moving objects can and do experience temporal dilation relative to each other, but when I say “closer to the speed of light,” I mean very, very, very fast — speeds at which the human body or indeed most biological life as we know it would probably disintegrate. Extreme differentials of relative gravity likely also produce similar effects, since they, too, can bend light.

Plus, if a human (or any object) were the much faster or heavier of those two, it could only slow its own time down relatively, making it seem to travel into the future rather than the past. As such, the ability to travel back into the past is probably even less likely than the ability to travel forward in time.

This gets complicated, however, and I’m certainly no physicist. Successfully explaining the realities and unrealities of time travel is also actually not the point of this issue of Big Thoughts, despite some admitted misdirection. In fact, as you’ll soon see, this week’s article has more to do with failed explanations than with successful ones.

For now, just rest assured if you ever encounter someone who claims to be a time traveler, the odds are astonishingly high that they’re lying, and the challenges they face are not so much how to survive warp speed travel or black hole gravitation, but how to convince you, an intelligent person, that they’re telling the truth when they’re not. If time travel is difficult to understand and/or to prove, this only makes it that much more difficult to fake in a way that actually convinces people. And yet…

Enter John Titor.

In early November 2000, a yet-unidentified figure, writing under the username TimeTravel_0, began posting on internet message boards, positing that a time machine could be built and describing the various components it would need in order to function, such as four cesium clocks, magnetic housing units for dual singularities, an electron injection manifold, and other highly-technical items.

A short time later, this same figure, now using his alleged true name, John Titor, posted in other online forums, claiming not only that such a machine could exist, but that it did exist (or would exist, anyway) after CERN in Switzerland developed it, and later when General Electric built it for the U.S. military in the early 2030s, enabling John Titor — himself a time traveler and soldier — to travel back from 2036 to several points in the relatively recent past, before ultimately returning to 2036 and to MacDill Air Force Base, located near Tampa, Florida (a location that did and does still exist today) with computer elements that the military would, by then, require. Specifically, he claimed that the US military of the future needed a working IBM 5100 computer from the year 1975, and that the 177th Temporal Reconnaissance Unit of the US Air Force had sent him on a mission to retrieve it.

The IBM 5100, image by Sandstein - own work, CC BY-SA 3.0

The reason Titor gave for this was that the military required a device fully programmed with APL and BASIC languages in order to debug problems it was having in 2036 with various legacy computer systems. To support his claims, he recited various hitherto-unpublished specifications of the 5100, details that no one other than an experienced IBM computer scientist would likely have known.

Whoever Titor was, he posted online prolifically, often speaking of his family, some of whom he was supposedly visiting during this stopover in late 2000 and early 2001, on his way back to 2036 from 1975. He claimed to be traveling through time using the aforementioned time machine itself, which had been developed at CERN and later constructed and installed by GE in the back of a red 1966 Corvette (he may have been on a military mission, then, but the 177th clearly had a sense of style). He even provided a few small, grainy images to support his claims, such as this one showing the beam of a standard laser pointer bending over the gravity created by the machine:

And it’s here, with this strange image, that I think it’s important to pause and reflect on just how many elements of this story mirror a lot of modern conspiracy theories. For instance, Titor’s story is complex. It’s got enough detail to suggest it could actually happen, and yet it doesn’t contain enough detail to delegitimize it scientifically. Consider, for instance, that he’s describing technology that even now, in 2021, doesn’t yet exist, and we’ll have to wait until the early 2030s to confirm or deny that it actually does.

But it also contains an element perhaps even more common in, and crucial to, modern conspiracies: plausible deniability.

A natural question for any time traveler from the future would be about what will happen to our world between now and the time from which the traveler has come. It turns out that many others on the message boards where Titor was writing asked questions just like that, along the lines of “What will happen between our time (2000-2001) and yours (2036) in the world? And in the United States?” And John Titor had a ton of answers.

I won’t bore you with the minutiae, which is plentiful, but here are a few details: The US would experience a drawn-out civil war, emerging as a new country still referred to as the United States, but governed very differently and with its capital now located in Omaha, Nebraska; a pandemic would ravage the Earth — not COVID-19, but Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease, an often-contagious neurological that Titor warned would spread through infected beef cattle; World War III would occur, with great violence, though it would be very brief; and so forth.

Titor’s plausible deniability regarding these claims grew mainly from his insistence that the Everett-Wheeler interpretation of quantum physics was correct, meaning that interference in any event(s) in the past would cause a new timeline to split off at that point, carrying reality in a separate direction, while leaving the original timeline intact. In other words, per Titor, we might well not see any of his predictions come to pass, but that didn’t mean that he was wrong about them.

To give a sense of how common tactic is in another, more high-profile and more contemporary conspiracy theory, consider QAnon, an almost-wacky collection of lore based on the online message board postings (check) of an impossible-to-confirm figure (check) affiliated with the US military (check) who is aware of a vast cabal of Democratic legislators, wealthy celebrities, and billionaires who seek to control the United States and who offer blood sacrifices to Satan and abuse children (often at the same time).

(It’s important to note, by the way, that the notion of a blood libel in conspiratorial thought is very old, with similar claims having been made, patently falsely, about European Jewish populations; the QAnon spin is a little different, and John Titor never brought it up, but the echoes throughout QAnon are tragic and even dangerous.)

For believers of QAnon, the anonymous online poster who routinely makes wild predictions that virtually never come true (again, check) is known only as Q, and while he or she may not be a time traveler like John Titor, Q also has a defensive structure involving plausible deniability. In Q’s case, if the predictions never come to pass, it’s because that we, the readers of Q’s posts, have misinterpreted them in some fatal way, and the correct response to their non-occurrence is for us to keep reading, to divine those tea leaves further, to keep “doing our own research”, as Q adherents often like to say.

On March 16 of this year, The Atlantic published an article by Tim Harford called “What Conspiracy Theorists Don’t Believe,” in which he explored the notion that while many conspiracy theories themselves require bizarre and far-reaching claims to be adhered to by their respective congregants, it’s what they don’t believe that draws them to such irrational ideas in the first place. He discusses the psychologists Leonid Rozenblit and Frank Keil and their notion of “the illusion of explanatory depth”, which refers to the way our confidence in complex and irrational beliefs can begin to shatter when we’re forced to explain those beliefs out loud. Even posing a few rhetorical questions about John Titor, for instance, can begin to expose the obvious flaws in his story.

Regarding the photo showing the laser bending over the time machine: Wouldn’t a gravitational force strong enough to bend a beam of light also pull the entire car, its occupant(s), all of their surroundings, and even possibly the whole Earth into its black-hole like field? And if the gravity field depicted in the photo is safely contained within the size of that bent beam, how can it possibly also pull the entire Corvette through time? And finally, why does someone from 2036 have such terrible camera technology that the best they can do is produce a grainy, highly-pixelated photo like the one presented here as evidence? None of these questions can be easily rationalized away, and yet the photo’s presentation as evidence persisted.

So what didn’t the followers of John Titor believe that enabled them to toss these obvious doubts — and so many others — aside in the first place? At least part of the answer may lie in the very nature of his soon-to-become-false predictions about the future.

As an example, Titor often wrote about the incidents that occurred in 1993 in Waco, Texas when the FBI and other government officials confronted the Branch Davidian sect, eventually firing on their compound, which eventually burned to the ground. The event became focal for many on the very-far right in the US as an example of government overreach, violation of rights to religious freedom, and excessive force used by the US against its own citizens. Some domestic terrorists would later come to claim that it provided an impetus for their own violent and destructive behavior, along with other, somewhat analogous incidents like those in Ruby Ridge, Idaho in 1992 and at the Bundy Ranch in 2014 near Bunkerville, Nevada. Titor may not have been a terrorist himself, but he attracted many readers and commenters online who believed that a coming civil war of sorts would soon be necessary to restore full “order and rights” (Titor’s own wording) to the United States, regardless of Titor’s specific predictions. As such, John Titor provided a version of the future that appealed strongly to many forum members on the right in 2000 and 2001, when he was posting, and sometimes strong desire alone can wash away the doubts.

I spent a bit of time earlier trying not so much to explain, but just to give a very, very basic outline of details of Titor’s time machine along with some bits here and there about quantum physics, about which I’m certainly no expert. But the fact that I can’t explain how his alleged time machine works, and yet I still have grave reservations about believing that it’s real, is really the point of this week’s newsletter. “Confirmation bias” or “motivated reasoning”, the act of seeking out evidence that seems to prove what we want to be true rather than what is true, is a natural feature of human behavior, but if we’re not careful about it, it can also be quite dangerous. If you need proof of that, just find any image online of the violent, even murderous mob that attacked the US Capitol on January 6 of this year, and see how many emblems and flags and clothing and tattoos are adorned with the capital letter “Q”.

Stefani Reynolds/Bloomberg via Getty Images

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Next week on Big Thoughts: “Cicada 3301: What happens when a game’s designers lose control of the game?”