Science presents a wide range of alternatives that, under the right conditions (although not necessarily possible), could allow a person to travel through time. Available data suggest that moving toward the future is much easier than doing so in the opposite direction, but that hasn't stopped certain flesh-and-blood adventurers from claiming they come from a different time. Today we're going to review some of the most important cases.
Want to travel to the future? Easy: Get a ship that can move at "almost" the speed of light (say, 95 percent), and if you travel for about 3.8 months at 0.95 c, a year will have passed on Earth. Not bad for a trip closely supervised by relativity. Now, what about the past? Well... talking about prohibition isn't quite appropriate, but let's say its situation is very complex, and we also find developments like Stephen Hawking's Chronology Protection Conjecture, which indicates that the laws of physics prevent time travel on any practical scale. So, if science doesn't want to help us, what about imagination? Stories about time travel are countless, but what we have here today are events involving real people, or at least, so it is believed. Let's see:
The Moberly-Jourdain Incident
Charlotte Anne Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain were two authors and academics with a very important career at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th. In 1911, they published a book called "An Adventure", using the pseudonyms "Elizabeth Morison" and "Frances Lamont". The text says that during their visit to the Palace of Versailles in August 1901, both got lost among the gardens and ended up in a strange place where they observed people dressed in 18th century fashion, and a woman who according to Moberly was Marie Antoinette. The first idea was that they had had a supernatural experience with ghosts and apparitions, but the other was even more far-fetched: Somehow they had moved to the France of 1789. Their reputation gave them some credibility; however, critics were scathing. Either both had a hallucination, or they made it all up.
Andrew Carlssin
This story reminds me a bit of the first part of "Timecop" or "Back to the Future II", and if we think about it for a moment, it's likely that its creator was inspired by both films. In March 2003, reports began to circulate that a certain Andrew Carlssin had been arrested for multiple violations of the Securities and Exchange Commission regulations. Apparently, Carlssin made 126 very high-risk investments and earned money on all of them, to such an extent that he turned his initial amount of $800 into more than $350 million. Additional details indicated that Carlssin admitted (in a confession that lasted more than four hours) to being a time traveler who came from a period 200 years in the future. In exchange for reducing his sentence and receiving permission to return to his ship, Carlssin promised the cure for AIDS and the exact location of Osama Bin Laden. The Commission's representatives denied the facts but left a kind of warning: If someone makes profits in 126 consecutive transactions, they are going to attract attention, time travel or not.
John Titor
Being honest, anyone can say they come from the future and pass themselves off as a time traveler, but very few pay special attention to detail. Among them stands out John Titor, a man who began posting messages on the Time Travel Institute forums in November 2000 under the name TimeTravel_0, and later continued on the BBS of the controversial host Art Bell. Titor claimed to be an American soldier from the year 2036, sent by his superiors to 1975 to acquire an IBM 5100 computer to debug old programs in his time, and that he was only in the year 2000 for "personal reasons". Titor described his time machine built by General Electric on several occasions (also sharing some schematics), said that the theory of multiple worlds was correct (thus denying the existence of paradoxes), and made several predictions, including a civil war that would divide the United States into five countries, and a brief but lethal nuclear exchange with Russia. None of them came true, but the doubt remained: Was Titor talking about "our" reality, or a parallel world...?
Andrew Basiago
Attention ladies and gentlemen, because this man could become the next president of the United States. Andrew D. Basiago has not only traveled in time (past "and" future), but also teleported to Mars, becoming one of the first ambassadors of humanity on the red planet. In fact, it was there that he met Barack Obama, a space-time traveler like him. Basiago ran as a candidate for president in the 2016 elections, and has already launched his candidacy thinking about 2020. His "Truth Movement" has an official website, and accepts donations. According to the text published there, Basiago took it upon himself to end the conspiracies intended to cover up the missions to Mars and time travel, "for the good of the American people". Another of his missions is "to investigate technological decline" suffered by some software platforms, and he gives as an example Microsoft Word, which after "achieving perfection" in its 2003 version, Microsoft replaced it with the "much inferior" Word 2007. In this last point, I give him that.
Noah
To conclude, one of the most recent and, why not, viral cases. The story of "Noah" began to circulate on the Web in November of last year. It's about a stressed young man who says he traveled to the present using temporal technology invented in 2003, but which will not be revealed to the public until 2028. Noah supposedly suffers from depression and anorexia, two conditions associated with his time travel. I admit his predictions don't go very far (autonomous cars, virtual reality and artificial intelligence will dominate the future, and Trump will be reelected), but his first video clicked in many people's minds. Then there's another one where he appears to be connected to a lie detector. The person in charge of the session indicates that his answers are true; however, we never see the detector, and that's not how it works...
https://www.youtube.com/embed/ag8E-p4v_24Obviously, there are many other "travelers" out there, but personally I'm sticking with the possibilities described by Carl Sagan. Maybe the time machines of the future only allow trips up to the date of their creation, or perhaps those chrono-visitors already walk among us, perfectly camouflaged.
