Is time travel real? According to Hollywood, we’ll know nine months from now, when a young Michael J. Fox steps out of a specially converted automobile and grabs a sports almanac and a hoverboard.
According to Internet folklore, other time travelers have already lived through 2015. The best-known of them, John Titor, described this year as a turning point in human history.
John Titor is one of the Internet’s most persistent mysteries
Titor is one of the Internet’s most persistent mysteries. Claiming to be a soldier from the year 2036, he frequented online forums from November 2, 2000 to March 21, 2001 to discuss time travel. He answered any question asked of him; these numbered in the hundreds.
Titor said his grandfather had helped to build and program one of the first portable computers, the IBM 5100, which had the unusual ability to translate between various computer languages. Titor claimed he’d been sent back to 1975 to talk to his grandfather and obtain one of these machines in order to help fix a Y2K-type problem that would occur in 2038. He had stopped over in 2000–01, on the way back, to visit his family, including his two-year-old self.
Proof was there
So far, this sounds like a funny story, but Titor made some effort to demonstrate that it was real. He posted photographs and professionally drawn schematic diagrams of his “dual singularity engine”. He referred to hidden functions in the IBM 5100 that only the designers knew about. He predicted several things that did indeed happen a few months or a few years later: an experiment at CERN (2001), the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq (2002–05), a problem with the space shuttle (2003), the first taikonaut (2003), communications resembling Skype (2003) and YouTube (2005), and, according to one interpretation, a missing skyscraper in New York City (2001).
The Year 2038 problem is very real. For example, setting the date on some Android phones to later than 3:14 a.m. on January 19, 2038 will make them inoperable. (Do not try this yourself!)
In his time, Titor said, society was still recovering from a world war that had killed nearly three billion people. The survivors had come together in a post-consumerist, post-narcissist society, focusing on the family, community, reading and talking face to face. “We time travel to solve problems,” he wrote. “A great deal of effort is going into repairing the environment and infrastructure.”
The world war, he said, had taken place in 2015
The nuclear war, he said, had taken place in 2015, following ten years of civil unrest and an urban-vs.-rural conflict in the United States. This is where Titor’s story starts, um, teetering in a big way. Interestingly, though, he said the war was ultimately caused by the US government lying, eroding the constitution and intruding on people’s privacy.
Titor explains the discrepancy by saying that time is not linear; it branches off like a tree. His future is not necessarily our future. He would not be able to return to the exact same “worldline” he’d left, though he could still influence it. He compared it to standing between two mirrors and seeing a near-infinite number of reflections of yourself; when you move, the reflections move, too.
Titor also refused to disclose any information (for example, from future sports almanacs) that would allow someone to personally profit or to stop something from happening.
This was very clever. It meant that, although his story could not be proven, it could not be disproven either. This aura of mystery earned his story a huge following.
Who was John Titor?
For years, people have tried to figure out who John Titor might really be. In 2003, Larry Haber, a Florida lawyer, registered a John Titor Foundation on behalf of Titor’s family, whom he has never met in person. A man named Oliver Williams, intrigued by the story, collected Titor’s writings from various forums and published them at johntitor.com for others to study. In this fascinating interview, recorded a year ago, both deny being or knowing Titor, but say the story has followed them for more than a decade.
The definitive collection of Titorisms fills a 174-page book, John Titor: A Time Traveler’s Tale, self-published by the John Titor Foundation and annotated by Titor’s mother, who is known only by her first name, Kay. The paperback sold out years ago; copies in new condition are now selling for more than $978 each.
Of course, someone who paid very close attention to developments in science and politics could probably have made the same predictions as Titor in 2000, and the anonymity of the early Internet made it easy to hide behind short, vague answers. This is much more a story of that era, of people’s credulity, and of interesting thoughts about destiny and free will.
As we learned from the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot and crop circles, the longer a hoax is perpetrated, the more intriguing it is. It doesn’t matter that these things aren’t real; the search for them was more interesting anyway. Still, the amount of effort that went into those hoaxes was tiny compared to what was needed to tell such a lengthy, consistent story about John Titor.
Perhaps the author was a science-fiction writer testing a premise — though if he was, John Titor really ought to be a huge Hollywood franchise by now. And if he wasn’t, why did he go to such lengths? It’s strange to say this, but the possibility that makes the most sense is that Titor may have been a time traveler after all.
