December 6, 2018 • 36 mins
If there were a time traveler among us, how would we know? Jonathan takes a look at various strategies to catch that pesky time traveler who may be meddling with your life.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Get in touch with technology with tech Stuff from how
stuff works dot com. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with
How Stuff Works, and iHeart radio and I love all
things tech. And today we're gonna talk about a fun
(00:24):
science fiction e kind of topic. We're gonna talk about
time travel. But I don't really want to focus too
much on the various proposed technological approaches to time travel,
because those are all either pure science fiction or they're
very much hypothetical and based upon lots of of tenuous guesswork. Instead,
(00:49):
I'm gonna do something even more outlandish, like how could
we tell if time travelers have walked among us? All Right,
so we're gonna talk a little bit about that. I
will cover a bit of the philosophy behind time travel,
because there's still a debate about whether or not time
travel is a technological possibility. I mean, we know that
(01:12):
time travel works, because we're doing it right now, traveling
forward in time at the rate of sixty minutes per hour.
That that's just how time works. However, we also know
that if you were able to say, get in a
spaceship and push that spaceship too incredible speeds that humans
(01:34):
have never been able to get to. But let's say
that you're getting into a spaceship and you're able to
accelerate to near the speed of light, like five the
speed of light. That is wicked fast. And you know,
we know the speed of light is the speed limit
for space time in our universe, so you're not gonna
(01:54):
go faster than that. And you can't really get mass
to the speed of the speed of light as it
has mass. That that's one of the limiting factors. But
let's say you can get If you were able to
do that, then time to you would seem to pass
as normal, like a second would be a second, a
minute would be a minute. It would feel exactly the
(02:16):
same as if you were anywhere else. However, time with
respect to someone who's back on Earth, it would seem
to be very different. It would seem as if the
people back on Earth were living out time at a
much accelerated rate, and that to them, you are experiencing
time at a much slower rate. So let's say you
go off on a five year adventure of exploration around
(02:40):
the galaxy. So you're zooming around at the speed of light.
After five years, you come back home to Earth, it
would look like everyone had aged decades while you were
gone for just five years. Like you aged five years,
everyone else aged fifty years. Everyone else looks much older
(03:00):
to them. It would seem as if time had barely
touched you at all. They had lived out their lives
decade after decade, and you are barely any older than
when you left. So, in a way, that's kind of
like time travel, right it would be like you are
traveling to the future, but you're doing so in a
(03:21):
way that time is still to you, passing exactly the
way it always has. It's only when you take the
reference of someone else. Uh, this is why we call
it special relativity. That's part of the theory of special relativity.
It's relative to the perspective of someone else who's moving
at a different speed throughout space time. So that kind
(03:44):
of time travel would be totally possible if you could
get a spacecraft up to those speeds, which right now
would be impossible for us. But if you could, you
would be able to travel to the future. But what
if you wanted to travel to the asked ah That
would be super duper hard traveling to the future is easy,
(04:08):
you just wait. Traveling to the past way more tricky. So, scientifically,
based upon what we understand of our universe and the
laws of physics as we understand them right now, we
would say that if time travel to the past is
possible at all, it's probably only possible up to the
(04:31):
point where uh are from the point where the time
travel machine was first made. So, in other words, let's
say it's Tuesday afternoon and you don't have anything going on,
so you build yourself a time machine. Well, any point
after Tuesday afternoon, you could use that time machine to
travel back to Tuesday afternoon, but you couldn't go to
(04:53):
Tuesday morning or Monday, or any point before you had
created the time machine. The time machine would be your
point zero. So, sadly, this would mean there's no way
for us to go back to the time of the
dinosaurs unless we just happened to come across some t
rex's old time machine sitting around somewhere or something, or
(05:16):
maybe an alien time machine where aliens had visited the
Earth millions of years ago, and so we find their
time machine. It's still miraculously works. We figured out how
to use it, and it doesn't turn us into goo.
That's a lot of ifs. Also, it depends upon aliens
having visiting us, so a long shot at best, I
guess we could say, however, we can look for evidence
(05:40):
to see if time travelers have visited us. So let's
say that someone has infened a time machine at some point.
Presumably that would mean someone from the future could come
back to some point in our past up to present day,
any point where the time machine had been made forward,
(06:01):
and we would potentially be able to figure that out.
How would we do that? How do we identify the
time travelers who secretly walk among us? Well, maybe they
would identify themselves. So the first person I want to
talk about is someone that I actually did a full
episode of tech stuff about years and years ago. This
(06:22):
would be John t toor or tight towards t I
t O R. This is one of those Internet memes
from the early early days of the Internet, back in
the late nineties early two thousands, was actually a radio
thing before it was an Internet thing. And the story
is that, supposedly, according to the narrative, a guy living
(06:48):
in the year twenty six travels back in time, and
the purpose for traveling back in time. According to the guy,
was that he needed to get a specific compute, one
of the early portable computers. And by portable, I mean
you could in theory lug it around, but it was
super heavy, like many many, many pounds. It was a
(07:10):
nineteen computer, the IBM fifty. I think it was like
fifty pounds if I'm not mistaken in weight, not in
not in cost. And that, uh, this computer somehow was
going to be able to fix a problem that existed
in his present day of twenty thirty six, that problem
(07:31):
being largely this issue of a Y two K like problem.
So if you remember the Y two K issue, it
was that a lot of computer programming had designated years
as being two digit numbers. Because this was back in
the nineteen hundreds, the late nineteen hundreds, when no one
(07:52):
was really thinking, oh, the system I build now is
going to be the same one we're gonna rely on
thirty years from now. So pro members were building in
the shortcut of of you know, abbreviating the year to
two digits. The game. By the time this is getting
to the point where we're at nine, surely will have
moved on to a different architecture. Software architecture, and they
(08:15):
were wrong, because if we can build onto existing structures
without having to redo the whole thing, that's usually the
choice we make. So the Y two K problem was
that no one was really sure what would happen when
the year rolled over from to two thousand and all
those two digit numbers would now say zero zero instead
(08:37):
of nine nine. Would that mean that the systems would
suddenly think that we had rolled over and now the
year was nineteen hundred and a lot of those systems
were important for things like calculating things like interest and uh,
you know, financial issues, and other control systems. There's a
worry that things were really going to go pear shaped
(09:00):
on January one, two thousand, when all these computer systems
might spontaneously fail, and so there's a huge effort made
to fix that. Well, there's a similar issue in Unix,
except instead of it being the year two thousand, it
would be the year twenty thirty eight. And so John Titor,
as he called himself, said that was why he came
(09:22):
back in time, was to get hold of this particular
computer in order to solve this problem in the future
and head off a terrible calamity of all the computer
systems in in the world failing in various ways. The
very first appearance of this personality was in a facts
(09:42):
that used to be a thing still is in a
few rare cases, but the facts that was sent to
Art Bell, who was the host of a show called
Coast to Coast a m which was really a show
that focused on all sorts of weird fringe theories and
paranormal phenomenon and things like that. This is back in
nineteen and in that message, the person claimed that the
(10:08):
Y two K problem had created a huge catastrophe in
the future. And so there were a lot of warnings
that John Titor would give. Over the course of the
next several years. He would show up on various message
boards giving various details about the future according to his travels.
(10:30):
You know, he's making all these these claims that were unsubstantiated,
although if you wait around long enough you could find
out if they were true. But a lot of his
predictions failed failed to play out the way he had said.
Like he said, why two K was gonna lead to
massive disaster? It didn't. It did cause problems, but nothing
(10:50):
nearly on the level that what of what people were
afraid of? He said the two thousand four Olympics would
get canceled. They didn't. He also said that by the
United States would split into warring factions and there'd be
a great civil war, which did not happen. I mean,
you could say that people are more polarized than ever before,
(11:10):
but we haven't turned into tribal groups that are actually
making war on each other in uh, in the way
that he was suggesting. And he did say, however, that
he was really from a parallel universe, one that was
nearly identical to ours, but that there was probably a
deviation between one to two per cent, so that things
(11:34):
that happened in his universe may not happen exactly the
same way in ours, but largely things would be more
or less the same. He also said eventually that the
future wasn't necessarily fixed, which is another get out of
jail free car card if you're a time traveler. I
guess uh. Eventually, there was some evidence that suggested that
(11:56):
this was all the work of a couple of brothers
in Florida who had sort of orchestrated the whole thing.
There was another person who claimed that he was sort
of consulted as part of this and that was kind
of a collaborative storytelling exercise that sort of snowballed out
of control. So chances are not a real time traveler.
(12:17):
So then there was also the sad but fascinating tale
of a man who used the pseudonym Bob White among others.
This was back in the early two thousand's and this
guy sent out emails in huge blasts, like millions of
people were getting these emails, and essentially this was a
spam email, but instead of trying to sell something, uh,
(12:40):
this spam email was asking for some pretty crazy fictional technology.
It was like a three page long manifesto and it
included things saying that the person needed something like an
AcBe five by twenty four series time transducing capacitor was
built in temporal displacement, which is not a thing, but
(13:00):
was asked for. So a guy named Dave Hill responded
to this. He found it fascinating and he went so
far as to even send an old hard drive, calling
it a warp generator. But then he found out that
the recipient wasn't just someone like making a joke on
the internet. It was someone who actually seemed to truly
believe in what they were saying, and they were showing
(13:24):
some signs of paranoia and some other concerns. And it
turned out that this was Robert Robbie Todino, who had
been sending millions of emails since November two thousand one.
He was in his twenties. He had founded a company
called RT Marketing, which sent out spam messages about all
sorts of products on behalf of various clients. But he
was eventually hit with a five thousand dollar fine from
(13:46):
the state of Massachusetts in a cease and desist order
for that sort of stuff. That's around the time when
he started sending out these anonymous calls for help in
obtaining various science e sounding but largely fictional pieces of equipment.
And he said that his life had been quote severely
tampered with end quote and they needed to find a
way to rewind time to fix it. And he called
(14:07):
himself Bob Wyatt or Tim Jones or several other aliases
as he corresponded with other people. His father said that
Tudino had mental health problems, including dissociative disorder, and that
the interactions with people had made it worse. Some people
were likely taking advantage of him it's a very sad story.
But he was seemingly convinced that time travelers were in
(14:29):
fact real and walking among us, but no actual evidence
came from that. So that's one way we can look
for time travelers, look for people who claimed to be them.
But maybe that won't work. Maybe people are maybe they're
a little more shy. So what if we were to
ask them to show up at a particular place in time.
So that was the thought behind the m i T
(14:51):
Time Traveler Convention. On May seven, two thousand five, students
at m i T, who were led by an Electrical
engineering and Computer scien it's graduate student named Amal Dora
I held an official convention for time travelers and according
to Dora, any real lifetime traveler was welcome to show
up with no rs VP. They just had to bring
(15:14):
proof that he or she was from the future. And
and what I think was a pretty clever move. They
focused very heavily on getting the word out to the press.
And this wasn't just about night marketing a goofy silly event.
It was a vital part of this experiment because by
(15:36):
publicizing the event, by spreading the word wide, they could
better ensure that people time travelers in the future learn
about that convention, that party, and that as a result,
they could travel back to that moment in time to
attend the party. And as they said, this web page
(15:57):
is insufficient. In less than a year, it will be
taken down when I graduate. Spoiler alert, it wasn't taken down.
It's still up. And furthermore, the World Wide Web is
unlikely to remain in its present form permanently. Probably true,
but it's still pretty much the way it was back then.
We need volunteers to publish the details of the convention
in enduring forms so that the time travelers of future
(16:19):
millennia will be aware of the convention. This convention can
never be forgotten. We need publicity in major outlets, not
just Internet news. Think New York Times, Washington Post, books,
that sort of thing. If you have any strings, please
pull them. And you could ask, well, what what can
I do? And they said that's great. Uh, write it
(16:39):
down on a piece of acid free paper and slip
those pieces of paper into obscure books in academic libraries,
carve them into a clay tablet. If you write for
a newspaper, insert a few details about the convention, tell
your friends so that the word of the convention will
be preserved in our oral history. Time travel is a
hard problem and it may not be invented until long
(17:00):
after m I t itself has faded into oblivion. Thus
we ask you to include the latitude longitude information when
you publicize the convention. You can also make an absolute
commitment to publicize the convention afterwards. In that case, bring
a time counsel or whatever it may be to the party,
and then bury it afterwards. So I got a lot
of coverage. They even got our rite up in Nature
(17:21):
News that was called Time Travelers Snub Conference, So I
guess you can see how that turned out. The website,
which like I said, is still up to this day,
says update. The convention was a mixed success. Unfortunately we
had no confirmed time travelers visit us, yet many time
travelers could have attended incognito to avoid endless questions about
(17:44):
the future. We had a great series of lectures, awesome bands,
and even a DeLorean. We regret having had to turn
away visitors, but there was were capacity restrictions governing Morse Hall.
Thanks so much to the dozens of people who helped,
I've got a lot more to talk about trying to
track down those pesky time travelers, but first let's take
(18:05):
a little time out to thank our sponsor sticking with
these events that are being held for time travelers. On
June two thousand nine, Stephen Hawking held a party in
Cambridge for time travelers. All time travelers were invited to come,
(18:30):
but the catch was he did not issue the invitation
to the party until after the party had already taken place.
So the invitation flyer read you are cordially invited to
a reception for time Travelers hosted by Professor Stephen Hawking,
to be held at the University of Cambridge, Gonville and
Caius College, Trinity Street, Cambridge. And then it's gave the
(18:52):
exact global positioning coordinates for the party and said champagne
would be served. But I guess it wasn't that rally
party because it was it was held at noon, unless
I don't know, kay, Cambridge, if you're out there, do
you get turned up at noon? If so? Well done? Anyway,
(19:14):
Later on, after the party had happened, he publicized the
party in the press and on the web, and had
an elegantly designed version of this flyer printed up and
placed on sale, and said I'm hoping copies of it,
in one form or another, will survive for many thousands
of years. Maybe one day someone living in the future
will find this information and use a wormhole time machine
(19:36):
to come back to my party, proving that time travel
will one day be possible. But no one showed up.
Hawking later said during an interview at the two thousand
twelve Seattle Science Festival, I have experimental evidence that time
travel is not possible. I gave a party for time travelers,
but I didn't send out the invitations until after the party.
(19:56):
I sat there a long time, but no one came.
So I guess Stephen Hawking just kind of watched champagne
slowly go flat. So if they're not showing up to
our parties, maybe maybe there's some you know, weird laws
in the future about time travel and keeping it secret.
What if we were to use big data to mind
(20:17):
for the presence of time travelers. There is a paper
that was written back in or released in It was
written before that, titled searching the Internet for Evidence of
Time Travelers. It was written by Robert J. Nemerov and
Theresa Wilson over at the Michigan Technological University's physics department,
(20:41):
and they looked for evidence of time travelers by sifting
through enormous amounts of data on the Internet. And the
idea was that if travelers from the future were to
come to the Internet age, they might not, you know,
come forward and proclaim themselves as time travelers, but they
might leave some sort of race of their presence on
(21:01):
the web if you just looked for things that showed
evidence of what they called prescient knowledge, in other words,
looking for any indications that someone knows about something before
that something actually happens. And they used three main methods
to do this. First, they looked back at the web
for terms that would not have made any sense at
(21:24):
the time they were published, but which now referred to
something meaningful. They gave examples. They said, search terms related
to comment I sn I S O N, which was
not discovered until September twenty first, two thousand twelve. Or
Pope Francis, which was formerly Cardinal Jorge Mario Burgoglio uh.
(21:44):
He chose the name Francis in March two thousand thirteen,
but before March two thirteen there was no Pope Francis.
There never been a Pope Francis, he's the first one.
So if they said we find evidence of these terms
existing before those dates, that could indicate a time traveler
who was googling around or maybe popping on Facebook or
(22:08):
Twitter or something and looking for these terms, but it
was before those things had happened. The next method they
used was they looked for prescient search terms in search
engine history. So again, if let's say that they're not
posting to Facebook or Twitter or whatever. Also, Facebook is
problematic because you could back date posts for a really
(22:29):
long time, so you could actually cheat. You could post
about you could set the date on a post to
being before the thing actually happened, so that would be
it would look like you were a time traveler, but
it was just because Facebook allowed you to do it. Anyway,
they said, let's see if there's any evidence of search
terms being used before these things happened. Google trends didn't
(22:51):
really turn up any interesting results. But then they pointed
out Google aggregates this data and it very well. Maybe
that if it's a time traveler who's come back to
present day, there might not be enough information there for
you to draw an in conclusions. Uh, one of the
studies authors happened to have access to the back end
for NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day subsite, so he
(23:14):
checked to see if anyone had searched for any evidence
of common ice and before it had been discovered. And Third,
they invited the future people to travel into the past
before the end of August tweet at them with one
of two hashtags. They said, if you're a time traveler,
go back to the past. Use Twitter and send on
the message and include one of these two hashtags. Either
(23:37):
hashtag I can change the past. Two. That would be
if the time travelers says yes, I can travel through
time and history is plastic, which means the past is changeable.
You can go back in time and change things, and
the present and the future are not set in stone.
The second was hashtag I cannot change the past two,
(24:01):
and that would be if time travel works, but it
works in a fixed history scenario, which means it's possible.
But the stuff that we experience is already part of
the whole time travel thing. Like you, you wouldn't be
able to change the future. It would have to be
stuff that it's the way it's always happened. It's a
little confusing. It actually goes into a principle called self consistency.
(24:24):
They were careful to not use the hashtag in search
until after their advertisement asking for past tweets in order
to prevent time paradoxes, and it didn't turn up any results.
So in the end they discovered no prescient knowledge through
any of these inquiries. So that leads to the question
of if time travel is possible, why haven't we seen
(24:46):
any evidence of it. So, so possibility number one is
time travel to the past is impossible. It's just not
possible at all, at least not for human beings, or
we never figure out how to do it. The next
is that, yes, time travel is possible, but we have
that limit of you can only go back as far
as a time travel machine has been invented, and so
(25:07):
far no one's invented one. That's the next possibility. Then
there's the concept of causality branching, or the multiple world's theory,
the idea that that our timeline is one of many,
and anytime you travel through back through time, you're actually
(25:27):
creating a split from your timeline. So you have your
original timeline where everything is the same and nothing in
the past gets changed. Then you have the new timeline
that splits off to the moment when you travel back
to it, and so you can make changes to that,
and everything in that timeline is affected by your actions.
(25:49):
But your original timeline, the one you traveled from, continues
to go without you in it because you've you've moved
away from it, but it doesn't the past events don't
get changed round, so you're looking at lots of parallel universes.
So this would allow you to do stuff like actually
go back in time and to kill yourself or your father,
(26:10):
or your grandfather or or any of your ancestors. And
it wouldn't affect you, the person who traveled back, because
you're from a parallel timeline, But it would mean that
the alternate version of you would either die or never
be born because you eliminated them and called blood you,
(26:31):
you crazy person. So the other possibility is that maybe
time travelers from the future are just hiding from us
and are just really really good at it. Uh So
that's also a question of how would that be possible.
I mean, people make mistakes all the time, so you
would think someone somewhere would have slipped up if they
(26:53):
had traveled back in time. There's gotta be some goofs, right,
if time travel is possible, some goofs eventually gets hold
of time travel and makes a complete mess of things.
But we haven't really noticed that. I'm gonna put political
commentary aside. Let me take another quick break, and then
we'll conclude our discussion about searching for time travelers. All right,
(27:22):
So we talked to a little bit about the different
ways that we might be able to to find time travelers.
There are a couple of other things I think would
be kind of fun to talk about, like, uh, evidence
supposedly of time travel. You may have heard about Chaplain's
film about the Circus, and there's a image of a
(27:43):
woman in the background. Um, it's this movie was made
in nineteen and there's a woman in the background who
looks like she's on a smartphone, Like it looks like
she's holding a smartphone to her face, and you're thinking, nine,
this is someone from the future, but so far in
the future that smartphones are no longer a thing. Although
it raises interesting questions like what network would that smartphone
(28:06):
be on if you had traveled back to nineteen eight.
There's no infrastructure there to support it. It turns out
it probably was just a very large hearing aid, because
hearing aids of that sort of size, portable hearing aids
that you could carry around, but they were quite large,
had been around for a few years. Uh. Prototypes have
(28:28):
been around for at least a couple of years. One
had been patented as early as nineteen twenty four, so
night was still pretty early for that. They might probably
were pretty rare, but it seems like a more accurate
guests than a woman had time traveled to be an
extra and a Charlie Chaplin film. Uh. There's also the
(28:48):
famous picture of a group of people standing around looking
at a bridge and one of them looks like a
hipster from modern day, wearing like a it looks like
a print T shirt, and them crazy looking sunglasses. And
the picture was taken in ninety one at South Fork
Bridge in gold Bridge, British Columbia. However, upon closer examinations,
(29:12):
people pointed out the glasses the guys wearing were totally contemporary.
They existed in the forties. They the leather side guards
were a little antiquated. It wasn't something that you frequently
saw in nineteen forties, but they did exist before then. Uh,
And also that the print t shirt he's wearing was
(29:32):
actually probably more of a sweater and cardigan layer with
a with a logo knit on the sweaters. In fact,
there's some guests that it probably was the logo of
a local hockey team, So that kind of puts the
(29:52):
the the lid on that particular one. Um, So there
are other ones that I've seen h people who supposedly
are time travelers. In some cases you would argue this
could easily be photoshop, or it could just be a
case of, you know, mistaking one thing that was actually
(30:13):
quite common during that era as something that came from
outside of that time. Sadly, no no actual hard evidence
there either, and I am I am hurt to say that.
So what else can we do? Maybe we could provide
an incentive for time travelers to show up and and
(30:34):
leave evidence of time travel. But to do that, we'd
have to figure out what motivates time travelers, like what
what would be considered valuable. I mean, if grabbing a
drink with one of the most famous scientists of the
modern age isn't enough to convince you to pop on
(30:55):
over to Cambridge at noon and have some Champagne. I
don't what is so. I'm not sure that we could
come up with something even if time travel were possible now. Ultimately,
I don't think time travel is going to be possible
any time in our lifetimes. Like if we ever do
(31:17):
design a time travel device, my guess is it's far
into the future. And I also think that the scientists
are right on the money that no one will be
able to travel back further than the moment when the
time travel machine was made. I think it far more
likely that we will develop faster propulsion systems that will
(31:38):
ultimately bring special relativity into the situation where we will
have some discrepancies between how much time seems to have
passed for one person versus another. But that's not quite
the same thing, and I don't think it's going to
be so dramatic as traveling at the speed of light.
(31:59):
I don't think we're gonna get that fast, but we
might get fast enough where you know, the clock on
the ship is not going to match the clocks on Earth.
We already have to account for this sort of stuff
due to both special and general relativity with our satellite systems.
I talked a bit about that in a recent episode
about how special relativity has to do with the relative
(32:21):
speed of various bodies traveling through spacetime. General general relativity
involves time in its relationship with gravity, so both of
those things affect the apparent passage of time for respective bodies.
And again, it's all relative, right, because your experience of
(32:44):
time is dependent upon those factors, And if those factors change,
then the way your experience of time happens will like
to you. It will seem the same until you meet
up with somebody else who has been going through a
different experience, and then you'll realize that they don't match up.
And you might say, I don't understand only five minutes
(33:04):
have gone by, and the other person says, no, you
were gone for an hour, and because of the actual
factors involved, you both could be right. It's the crazy
thing about relativity. Man, it's awesome. I loved thinking about
this stuff. I didn't really touch on things like wormholes
and other hypothetical kind of possibilities, largely because they might
(33:28):
end up being a promising way to look at the
possibility of time travel. I didn't talk about faster than
light travel either, because as far as we can tell,
that's not really possible. Uh, but maybe in the future
ha ha, I will co into those a little bit more.
Maybe I can get somebody on who's kind of an
expert in these sort of physical, uh these physics problems,
(33:51):
and to talk about the possibilities and which ones are
pure science fiction versus well, hypothetically that's possible, and which
ones are no. We might totally do that. I'm very
curious what about you, guys, And I'm also curious what's
your favorite time travel movie? I want to I want
(34:12):
to hear responses because there's so many out there, and
my favorites change. I really like them Back to the
Future series, even though if you look at it from
a theoretical time travel point of view, it gets super messy.
But I really like that series. Uh. I also really
like Bill and Ted, and they're excellent adventure I think
(34:34):
that one's a lot of fun. I really like time
travel movies that don't take it too seriously, because time
travel is hard to do well. But there are a
few out there, a few serious sci fi movies that
use time travel that do it quite well. Do you
have any favorites I want to hear Also, if you
have any suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff. Whether
it's a technology, maybe it's a company, maybe it's a
(34:54):
person in tech. Let me know. Send me an email.
The address is tech stuff at how stuff works dot com.
You can go to our website that's tech Stuff podcast
dot com. You'll find links to other ways to contact me,
like on Facebook or Twitter. You'll find more information about
the show. You'll find all the episodes there. Sorry, does
a great job on that, so go check that out.
(35:15):
You also can head on over to our store that's
over at t public dot com slash tech stuff. Remember,
every purchase you make goes to the show. We greatly
appreciate it, and we're always having fun coming up with
new and uh goofy designs. I mean it's me. You
know it's gonna be goofy. I I gave up trying
to be cool years ago after it was abundantly clear
(35:37):
I would never achieve that status. So that's all right.
I'm all right with who I am now, and that's
it for me. I'll talk to you again really soon
for more on this and bathands of other topics. Because
it how stuff works dot com. Wh whe
Get in touch with technology with tech Stuff from how
stuff works dot com. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with
How Stuff Works, and iHeart radio and I love all
things tech. And today we're gonna talk about a fun
(00:24):
science fiction e kind of topic. We're gonna talk about
time travel. But I don't really want to focus too
much on the various proposed technological approaches to time travel,
because those are all either pure science fiction or they're
very much hypothetical and based upon lots of of tenuous guesswork. Instead,
(00:49):
I'm gonna do something even more outlandish, like how could
we tell if time travelers have walked among us? All Right,
so we're gonna talk a little bit about that. I
will cover a bit of the philosophy behind time travel,
because there's still a debate about whether or not time
travel is a technological possibility. I mean, we know that
(01:12):
time travel works, because we're doing it right now, traveling
forward in time at the rate of sixty minutes per hour.
That that's just how time works. However, we also know
that if you were able to say, get in a
spaceship and push that spaceship too incredible speeds that humans
(01:34):
have never been able to get to. But let's say
that you're getting into a spaceship and you're able to
accelerate to near the speed of light, like five the
speed of light. That is wicked fast. And you know,
we know the speed of light is the speed limit
for space time in our universe, so you're not gonna
(01:54):
go faster than that. And you can't really get mass
to the speed of the speed of light as it
has mass. That that's one of the limiting factors. But
let's say you can get If you were able to
do that, then time to you would seem to pass
as normal, like a second would be a second, a
minute would be a minute. It would feel exactly the
(02:16):
same as if you were anywhere else. However, time with
respect to someone who's back on Earth, it would seem
to be very different. It would seem as if the
people back on Earth were living out time at a
much accelerated rate, and that to them, you are experiencing
time at a much slower rate. So let's say you
go off on a five year adventure of exploration around
(02:40):
the galaxy. So you're zooming around at the speed of light.
After five years, you come back home to Earth, it
would look like everyone had aged decades while you were
gone for just five years. Like you aged five years,
everyone else aged fifty years. Everyone else looks much older
(03:00):
to them. It would seem as if time had barely
touched you at all. They had lived out their lives
decade after decade, and you are barely any older than
when you left. So, in a way, that's kind of
like time travel, right it would be like you are
traveling to the future, but you're doing so in a
(03:21):
way that time is still to you, passing exactly the
way it always has. It's only when you take the
reference of someone else. Uh, this is why we call
it special relativity. That's part of the theory of special relativity.
It's relative to the perspective of someone else who's moving
at a different speed throughout space time. So that kind
(03:44):
of time travel would be totally possible if you could
get a spacecraft up to those speeds, which right now
would be impossible for us. But if you could, you
would be able to travel to the future. But what
if you wanted to travel to the asked ah That
would be super duper hard traveling to the future is easy,
(04:08):
you just wait. Traveling to the past way more tricky. So, scientifically,
based upon what we understand of our universe and the
laws of physics as we understand them right now, we
would say that if time travel to the past is
possible at all, it's probably only possible up to the
(04:31):
point where uh are from the point where the time
travel machine was first made. So, in other words, let's
say it's Tuesday afternoon and you don't have anything going on,
so you build yourself a time machine. Well, any point
after Tuesday afternoon, you could use that time machine to
travel back to Tuesday afternoon, but you couldn't go to
(04:53):
Tuesday morning or Monday, or any point before you had
created the time machine. The time machine would be your
point zero. So, sadly, this would mean there's no way
for us to go back to the time of the
dinosaurs unless we just happened to come across some t
rex's old time machine sitting around somewhere or something, or
(05:16):
maybe an alien time machine where aliens had visited the
Earth millions of years ago, and so we find their
time machine. It's still miraculously works. We figured out how
to use it, and it doesn't turn us into goo.
That's a lot of ifs. Also, it depends upon aliens
having visiting us, so a long shot at best, I
guess we could say, however, we can look for evidence
(05:40):
to see if time travelers have visited us. So let's
say that someone has infened a time machine at some point.
Presumably that would mean someone from the future could come
back to some point in our past up to present day,
any point where the time machine had been made forward,
(06:01):
and we would potentially be able to figure that out.
How would we do that? How do we identify the
time travelers who secretly walk among us? Well, maybe they
would identify themselves. So the first person I want to
talk about is someone that I actually did a full
episode of tech stuff about years and years ago. This
(06:22):
would be John t toor or tight towards t I
t O R. This is one of those Internet memes
from the early early days of the Internet, back in
the late nineties early two thousands, was actually a radio
thing before it was an Internet thing. And the story
is that, supposedly, according to the narrative, a guy living
(06:48):
in the year twenty six travels back in time, and
the purpose for traveling back in time. According to the guy,
was that he needed to get a specific compute, one
of the early portable computers. And by portable, I mean
you could in theory lug it around, but it was
super heavy, like many many, many pounds. It was a
(07:10):
nineteen computer, the IBM fifty. I think it was like
fifty pounds if I'm not mistaken in weight, not in
not in cost. And that, uh, this computer somehow was
going to be able to fix a problem that existed
in his present day of twenty thirty six, that problem
(07:31):
being largely this issue of a Y two K like problem.
So if you remember the Y two K issue, it
was that a lot of computer programming had designated years
as being two digit numbers. Because this was back in
the nineteen hundreds, the late nineteen hundreds, when no one
(07:52):
was really thinking, oh, the system I build now is
going to be the same one we're gonna rely on
thirty years from now. So pro members were building in
the shortcut of of you know, abbreviating the year to
two digits. The game. By the time this is getting
to the point where we're at nine, surely will have
moved on to a different architecture. Software architecture, and they
(08:15):
were wrong, because if we can build onto existing structures
without having to redo the whole thing, that's usually the
choice we make. So the Y two K problem was
that no one was really sure what would happen when
the year rolled over from to two thousand and all
those two digit numbers would now say zero zero instead
(08:37):
of nine nine. Would that mean that the systems would
suddenly think that we had rolled over and now the
year was nineteen hundred and a lot of those systems
were important for things like calculating things like interest and uh,
you know, financial issues, and other control systems. There's a
worry that things were really going to go pear shaped
(09:00):
on January one, two thousand, when all these computer systems
might spontaneously fail, and so there's a huge effort made
to fix that. Well, there's a similar issue in Unix,
except instead of it being the year two thousand, it
would be the year twenty thirty eight. And so John Titor,
as he called himself, said that was why he came
(09:22):
back in time, was to get hold of this particular
computer in order to solve this problem in the future
and head off a terrible calamity of all the computer
systems in in the world failing in various ways. The
very first appearance of this personality was in a facts
(09:42):
that used to be a thing still is in a
few rare cases, but the facts that was sent to
Art Bell, who was the host of a show called
Coast to Coast a m which was really a show
that focused on all sorts of weird fringe theories and
paranormal phenomenon and things like that. This is back in
nineteen and in that message, the person claimed that the
(10:08):
Y two K problem had created a huge catastrophe in
the future. And so there were a lot of warnings
that John Titor would give. Over the course of the
next several years. He would show up on various message
boards giving various details about the future according to his travels.
(10:30):
You know, he's making all these these claims that were unsubstantiated,
although if you wait around long enough you could find
out if they were true. But a lot of his
predictions failed failed to play out the way he had said.
Like he said, why two K was gonna lead to
massive disaster? It didn't. It did cause problems, but nothing
(10:50):
nearly on the level that what of what people were
afraid of? He said the two thousand four Olympics would
get canceled. They didn't. He also said that by the
United States would split into warring factions and there'd be
a great civil war, which did not happen. I mean,
you could say that people are more polarized than ever before,
(11:10):
but we haven't turned into tribal groups that are actually
making war on each other in uh, in the way
that he was suggesting. And he did say, however, that
he was really from a parallel universe, one that was
nearly identical to ours, but that there was probably a
deviation between one to two per cent, so that things
(11:34):
that happened in his universe may not happen exactly the
same way in ours, but largely things would be more
or less the same. He also said eventually that the
future wasn't necessarily fixed, which is another get out of
jail free car card if you're a time traveler. I
guess uh. Eventually, there was some evidence that suggested that
(11:56):
this was all the work of a couple of brothers
in Florida who had sort of orchestrated the whole thing.
There was another person who claimed that he was sort
of consulted as part of this and that was kind
of a collaborative storytelling exercise that sort of snowballed out
of control. So chances are not a real time traveler.
(12:17):
So then there was also the sad but fascinating tale
of a man who used the pseudonym Bob White among others.
This was back in the early two thousand's and this
guy sent out emails in huge blasts, like millions of
people were getting these emails, and essentially this was a
spam email, but instead of trying to sell something, uh,
(12:40):
this spam email was asking for some pretty crazy fictional technology.
It was like a three page long manifesto and it
included things saying that the person needed something like an
AcBe five by twenty four series time transducing capacitor was
built in temporal displacement, which is not a thing, but
(13:00):
was asked for. So a guy named Dave Hill responded
to this. He found it fascinating and he went so
far as to even send an old hard drive, calling
it a warp generator. But then he found out that
the recipient wasn't just someone like making a joke on
the internet. It was someone who actually seemed to truly
believe in what they were saying, and they were showing
(13:24):
some signs of paranoia and some other concerns. And it
turned out that this was Robert Robbie Todino, who had
been sending millions of emails since November two thousand one.
He was in his twenties. He had founded a company
called RT Marketing, which sent out spam messages about all
sorts of products on behalf of various clients. But he
was eventually hit with a five thousand dollar fine from
(13:46):
the state of Massachusetts in a cease and desist order
for that sort of stuff. That's around the time when
he started sending out these anonymous calls for help in
obtaining various science e sounding but largely fictional pieces of equipment.
And he said that his life had been quote severely
tampered with end quote and they needed to find a
way to rewind time to fix it. And he called
(14:07):
himself Bob Wyatt or Tim Jones or several other aliases
as he corresponded with other people. His father said that
Tudino had mental health problems, including dissociative disorder, and that
the interactions with people had made it worse. Some people
were likely taking advantage of him it's a very sad story.
But he was seemingly convinced that time travelers were in
(14:29):
fact real and walking among us, but no actual evidence
came from that. So that's one way we can look
for time travelers, look for people who claimed to be them.
But maybe that won't work. Maybe people are maybe they're
a little more shy. So what if we were to
ask them to show up at a particular place in time.
So that was the thought behind the m i T
(14:51):
Time Traveler Convention. On May seven, two thousand five, students
at m i T, who were led by an Electrical
engineering and Computer scien it's graduate student named Amal Dora
I held an official convention for time travelers and according
to Dora, any real lifetime traveler was welcome to show
up with no rs VP. They just had to bring
(15:14):
proof that he or she was from the future. And
and what I think was a pretty clever move. They
focused very heavily on getting the word out to the press.
And this wasn't just about night marketing a goofy silly event.
It was a vital part of this experiment because by
(15:36):
publicizing the event, by spreading the word wide, they could
better ensure that people time travelers in the future learn
about that convention, that party, and that as a result,
they could travel back to that moment in time to
attend the party. And as they said, this web page
(15:57):
is insufficient. In less than a year, it will be
taken down when I graduate. Spoiler alert, it wasn't taken down.
It's still up. And furthermore, the World Wide Web is
unlikely to remain in its present form permanently. Probably true,
but it's still pretty much the way it was back then.
We need volunteers to publish the details of the convention
in enduring forms so that the time travelers of future
(16:19):
millennia will be aware of the convention. This convention can
never be forgotten. We need publicity in major outlets, not
just Internet news. Think New York Times, Washington Post, books,
that sort of thing. If you have any strings, please
pull them. And you could ask, well, what what can
I do? And they said that's great. Uh, write it
(16:39):
down on a piece of acid free paper and slip
those pieces of paper into obscure books in academic libraries,
carve them into a clay tablet. If you write for
a newspaper, insert a few details about the convention, tell
your friends so that the word of the convention will
be preserved in our oral history. Time travel is a
hard problem and it may not be invented until long
(17:00):
after m I t itself has faded into oblivion. Thus
we ask you to include the latitude longitude information when
you publicize the convention. You can also make an absolute
commitment to publicize the convention afterwards. In that case, bring
a time counsel or whatever it may be to the party,
and then bury it afterwards. So I got a lot
of coverage. They even got our rite up in Nature
(17:21):
News that was called Time Travelers Snub Conference, So I
guess you can see how that turned out. The website,
which like I said, is still up to this day,
says update. The convention was a mixed success. Unfortunately we
had no confirmed time travelers visit us, yet many time
travelers could have attended incognito to avoid endless questions about
(17:44):
the future. We had a great series of lectures, awesome bands,
and even a DeLorean. We regret having had to turn
away visitors, but there was were capacity restrictions governing Morse Hall.
Thanks so much to the dozens of people who helped,
I've got a lot more to talk about trying to
track down those pesky time travelers, but first let's take
(18:05):
a little time out to thank our sponsor sticking with
these events that are being held for time travelers. On
June two thousand nine, Stephen Hawking held a party in
Cambridge for time travelers. All time travelers were invited to come,
(18:30):
but the catch was he did not issue the invitation
to the party until after the party had already taken place.
So the invitation flyer read you are cordially invited to
a reception for time Travelers hosted by Professor Stephen Hawking,
to be held at the University of Cambridge, Gonville and
Caius College, Trinity Street, Cambridge. And then it's gave the
(18:52):
exact global positioning coordinates for the party and said champagne
would be served. But I guess it wasn't that rally
party because it was it was held at noon, unless
I don't know, kay, Cambridge, if you're out there, do
you get turned up at noon? If so? Well done? Anyway,
(19:14):
Later on, after the party had happened, he publicized the
party in the press and on the web, and had
an elegantly designed version of this flyer printed up and
placed on sale, and said I'm hoping copies of it,
in one form or another, will survive for many thousands
of years. Maybe one day someone living in the future
will find this information and use a wormhole time machine
(19:36):
to come back to my party, proving that time travel
will one day be possible. But no one showed up.
Hawking later said during an interview at the two thousand
twelve Seattle Science Festival, I have experimental evidence that time
travel is not possible. I gave a party for time travelers,
but I didn't send out the invitations until after the party.
(19:56):
I sat there a long time, but no one came.
So I guess Stephen Hawking just kind of watched champagne
slowly go flat. So if they're not showing up to
our parties, maybe maybe there's some you know, weird laws
in the future about time travel and keeping it secret.
What if we were to use big data to mind
(20:17):
for the presence of time travelers. There is a paper
that was written back in or released in It was
written before that, titled searching the Internet for Evidence of
Time Travelers. It was written by Robert J. Nemerov and
Theresa Wilson over at the Michigan Technological University's physics department,
(20:41):
and they looked for evidence of time travelers by sifting
through enormous amounts of data on the Internet. And the
idea was that if travelers from the future were to
come to the Internet age, they might not, you know,
come forward and proclaim themselves as time travelers, but they
might leave some sort of race of their presence on
(21:01):
the web if you just looked for things that showed
evidence of what they called prescient knowledge, in other words,
looking for any indications that someone knows about something before
that something actually happens. And they used three main methods
to do this. First, they looked back at the web
for terms that would not have made any sense at
(21:24):
the time they were published, but which now referred to
something meaningful. They gave examples. They said, search terms related
to comment I sn I S O N, which was
not discovered until September twenty first, two thousand twelve. Or
Pope Francis, which was formerly Cardinal Jorge Mario Burgoglio uh.
(21:44):
He chose the name Francis in March two thousand thirteen,
but before March two thirteen there was no Pope Francis.
There never been a Pope Francis, he's the first one.
So if they said we find evidence of these terms
existing before those dates, that could indicate a time traveler
who was googling around or maybe popping on Facebook or
(22:08):
Twitter or something and looking for these terms, but it
was before those things had happened. The next method they
used was they looked for prescient search terms in search
engine history. So again, if let's say that they're not
posting to Facebook or Twitter or whatever. Also, Facebook is
problematic because you could back date posts for a really
(22:29):
long time, so you could actually cheat. You could post
about you could set the date on a post to
being before the thing actually happened, so that would be
it would look like you were a time traveler, but
it was just because Facebook allowed you to do it. Anyway,
they said, let's see if there's any evidence of search
terms being used before these things happened. Google trends didn't
(22:51):
really turn up any interesting results. But then they pointed
out Google aggregates this data and it very well. Maybe
that if it's a time traveler who's come back to
present day, there might not be enough information there for
you to draw an in conclusions. Uh, one of the
studies authors happened to have access to the back end
for NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day subsite, so he
(23:14):
checked to see if anyone had searched for any evidence
of common ice and before it had been discovered. And Third,
they invited the future people to travel into the past
before the end of August tweet at them with one
of two hashtags. They said, if you're a time traveler,
go back to the past. Use Twitter and send on
the message and include one of these two hashtags. Either
(23:37):
hashtag I can change the past. Two. That would be
if the time travelers says yes, I can travel through
time and history is plastic, which means the past is changeable.
You can go back in time and change things, and
the present and the future are not set in stone.
The second was hashtag I cannot change the past two,
(24:01):
and that would be if time travel works, but it
works in a fixed history scenario, which means it's possible.
But the stuff that we experience is already part of
the whole time travel thing. Like you, you wouldn't be
able to change the future. It would have to be
stuff that it's the way it's always happened. It's a
little confusing. It actually goes into a principle called self consistency.
(24:24):
They were careful to not use the hashtag in search
until after their advertisement asking for past tweets in order
to prevent time paradoxes, and it didn't turn up any results.
So in the end they discovered no prescient knowledge through
any of these inquiries. So that leads to the question
of if time travel is possible, why haven't we seen
(24:46):
any evidence of it. So, so possibility number one is
time travel to the past is impossible. It's just not
possible at all, at least not for human beings, or
we never figure out how to do it. The next
is that, yes, time travel is possible, but we have
that limit of you can only go back as far
as a time travel machine has been invented, and so
(25:07):
far no one's invented one. That's the next possibility. Then
there's the concept of causality branching, or the multiple world's theory,
the idea that that our timeline is one of many,
and anytime you travel through back through time, you're actually
(25:27):
creating a split from your timeline. So you have your
original timeline where everything is the same and nothing in
the past gets changed. Then you have the new timeline
that splits off to the moment when you travel back
to it, and so you can make changes to that,
and everything in that timeline is affected by your actions.
(25:49):
But your original timeline, the one you traveled from, continues
to go without you in it because you've you've moved
away from it, but it doesn't the past events don't
get changed round, so you're looking at lots of parallel universes.
So this would allow you to do stuff like actually
go back in time and to kill yourself or your father,
(26:10):
or your grandfather or or any of your ancestors. And
it wouldn't affect you, the person who traveled back, because
you're from a parallel timeline, But it would mean that
the alternate version of you would either die or never
be born because you eliminated them and called blood you,
(26:31):
you crazy person. So the other possibility is that maybe
time travelers from the future are just hiding from us
and are just really really good at it. Uh So
that's also a question of how would that be possible.
I mean, people make mistakes all the time, so you
would think someone somewhere would have slipped up if they
(26:53):
had traveled back in time. There's gotta be some goofs, right,
if time travel is possible, some goofs eventually gets hold
of time travel and makes a complete mess of things.
But we haven't really noticed that. I'm gonna put political
commentary aside. Let me take another quick break, and then
we'll conclude our discussion about searching for time travelers. All right,
(27:22):
So we talked to a little bit about the different
ways that we might be able to to find time travelers.
There are a couple of other things I think would
be kind of fun to talk about, like, uh, evidence
supposedly of time travel. You may have heard about Chaplain's
film about the Circus, and there's a image of a
(27:43):
woman in the background. Um, it's this movie was made
in nineteen and there's a woman in the background who
looks like she's on a smartphone, Like it looks like
she's holding a smartphone to her face, and you're thinking, nine,
this is someone from the future, but so far in
the future that smartphones are no longer a thing. Although
it raises interesting questions like what network would that smartphone
(28:06):
be on if you had traveled back to nineteen eight.
There's no infrastructure there to support it. It turns out
it probably was just a very large hearing aid, because
hearing aids of that sort of size, portable hearing aids
that you could carry around, but they were quite large,
had been around for a few years. Uh. Prototypes have
(28:28):
been around for at least a couple of years. One
had been patented as early as nineteen twenty four, so
night was still pretty early for that. They might probably
were pretty rare, but it seems like a more accurate
guests than a woman had time traveled to be an
extra and a Charlie Chaplin film. Uh. There's also the
(28:48):
famous picture of a group of people standing around looking
at a bridge and one of them looks like a
hipster from modern day, wearing like a it looks like
a print T shirt, and them crazy looking sunglasses. And
the picture was taken in ninety one at South Fork
Bridge in gold Bridge, British Columbia. However, upon closer examinations,
(29:12):
people pointed out the glasses the guys wearing were totally contemporary.
They existed in the forties. They the leather side guards
were a little antiquated. It wasn't something that you frequently
saw in nineteen forties, but they did exist before then. Uh,
And also that the print t shirt he's wearing was
(29:32):
actually probably more of a sweater and cardigan layer with
a with a logo knit on the sweaters. In fact,
there's some guests that it probably was the logo of
a local hockey team, So that kind of puts the
(29:52):
the the lid on that particular one. Um, So there
are other ones that I've seen h people who supposedly
are time travelers. In some cases you would argue this
could easily be photoshop, or it could just be a
case of, you know, mistaking one thing that was actually
(30:13):
quite common during that era as something that came from
outside of that time. Sadly, no no actual hard evidence
there either, and I am I am hurt to say that.
So what else can we do? Maybe we could provide
an incentive for time travelers to show up and and
(30:34):
leave evidence of time travel. But to do that, we'd
have to figure out what motivates time travelers, like what
what would be considered valuable. I mean, if grabbing a
drink with one of the most famous scientists of the
modern age isn't enough to convince you to pop on
(30:55):
over to Cambridge at noon and have some Champagne. I
don't what is so. I'm not sure that we could
come up with something even if time travel were possible now. Ultimately,
I don't think time travel is going to be possible
any time in our lifetimes. Like if we ever do
(31:17):
design a time travel device, my guess is it's far
into the future. And I also think that the scientists
are right on the money that no one will be
able to travel back further than the moment when the
time travel machine was made. I think it far more
likely that we will develop faster propulsion systems that will
(31:38):
ultimately bring special relativity into the situation where we will
have some discrepancies between how much time seems to have
passed for one person versus another. But that's not quite
the same thing, and I don't think it's going to
be so dramatic as traveling at the speed of light.
(31:59):
I don't think we're gonna get that fast, but we
might get fast enough where you know, the clock on
the ship is not going to match the clocks on Earth.
We already have to account for this sort of stuff
due to both special and general relativity with our satellite systems.
I talked a bit about that in a recent episode
about how special relativity has to do with the relative
(32:21):
speed of various bodies traveling through spacetime. General general relativity
involves time in its relationship with gravity, so both of
those things affect the apparent passage of time for respective bodies.
And again, it's all relative, right, because your experience of
(32:44):
time is dependent upon those factors, And if those factors change,
then the way your experience of time happens will like
to you. It will seem the same until you meet
up with somebody else who has been going through a
different experience, and then you'll realize that they don't match up.
And you might say, I don't understand only five minutes
(33:04):
have gone by, and the other person says, no, you
were gone for an hour, and because of the actual
factors involved, you both could be right. It's the crazy
thing about relativity. Man, it's awesome. I loved thinking about
this stuff. I didn't really touch on things like wormholes
and other hypothetical kind of possibilities, largely because they might
(33:28):
end up being a promising way to look at the
possibility of time travel. I didn't talk about faster than
light travel either, because as far as we can tell,
that's not really possible. Uh, but maybe in the future
ha ha, I will co into those a little bit more.
Maybe I can get somebody on who's kind of an
expert in these sort of physical, uh these physics problems,
(33:51):
and to talk about the possibilities and which ones are
pure science fiction versus well, hypothetically that's possible, and which
ones are no. We might totally do that. I'm very
curious what about you, guys, And I'm also curious what's
your favorite time travel movie? I want to I want
(34:12):
to hear responses because there's so many out there, and
my favorites change. I really like them Back to the
Future series, even though if you look at it from
a theoretical time travel point of view, it gets super messy.
But I really like that series. Uh. I also really
like Bill and Ted, and they're excellent adventure I think
(34:34):
that one's a lot of fun. I really like time
travel movies that don't take it too seriously, because time
travel is hard to do well. But there are a
few out there, a few serious sci fi movies that
use time travel that do it quite well. Do you
have any favorites I want to hear Also, if you
have any suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff. Whether
it's a technology, maybe it's a company, maybe it's a
(34:54):
person in tech. Let me know. Send me an email.
The address is tech stuff at how stuff works dot com.
You can go to our website that's tech Stuff podcast
dot com. You'll find links to other ways to contact me,
like on Facebook or Twitter. You'll find more information about
the show. You'll find all the episodes there. Sorry, does
a great job on that, so go check that out.
(35:15):
You also can head on over to our store that's
over at t public dot com slash tech stuff. Remember,
every purchase you make goes to the show. We greatly
appreciate it, and we're always having fun coming up with
new and uh goofy designs. I mean it's me. You
know it's gonna be goofy. I I gave up trying
to be cool years ago after it was abundantly clear
(35:37):
I would never achieve that status. So that's all right.
I'm all right with who I am now, and that's
it for me. I'll talk to you again really soon
for more on this and bathands of other topics. Because
it how stuff works dot com. Wh whe
TechStuff News
Hosts And Creators
Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
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