Who was John Titor, the 'time traveller' who came from 2036 to warn us of a nuclear war?
As the world celebrates Back to the Future Day, it has forgotten the unknown man whose 2001 internet postings might just have saved humanity
By
Laurence Dodds
6:34PM BST 21 Oct 2015
If time travel is possible, why haven’t we met any time travellers?
This was the question Stephen Hawking advanced on the topic of time warps. But it misses something: what if we
have met time travellers without even knowing it? Or what if we’ve met them, but didn’t believe them?
As the world
marks the passing of Back to the Future’s fictional future, it has almost forgotten a much less famous series of predictions which started sixteen years ago next month.
It was in the year 2000, on November 2, that a man calling himself John Titor logged onto an obscure internet discussion board and posted this message:
"Greetings. I am a time traveller from the year 2036. I am on my way home after getting an IBM 5100 computer system from the year 1975.
“My ‘time’ machine is a stationary mass, temporal displacement unit manufactured by General Electric. The unit is powered by two top-spin dual-positive singularities that produce a standard off-set Tipler sinusoid.
“I will be happy to post pictures of the unit.”
Questions followed. Titor answered them, some copiously, some cryptically. And he did indeed post pictures of his machine: mounted, like Back to the Future’s, in a car (though it was a
1967 Chevrolet rather than a DeLorean).
Between November 2000 and March 2001, he answered many more questions. At one point he was even interviewed on a national talk radio show. He described his time machine in detail, even posting pictures of its user’s manual. A small internet cult grew up around him. Then one day he was gone, leaving his acolytes to pick over the remains. Today, there are
little shrines to his name all across the internet. But who was he really?
Titor's actual target was the year 1975; he was making a stopover in 2000 for “personal reasons”. He was a member of a military unit tasked with retrieving items from the past which could help get society back on its feet. A civil war in the United states had triggered a limited nuclear exchange with Russia in 2015, which killed nearly three million people. In the aftermath, life had returned to something more like what Republican survivalists imagine America should be:
"In 2036, I live in central Florida with my family and I'm currently stationed at an Army base in Tampa… the people that survived grew closer together. Life is centered on the family and then the community. I cannot imagine living even a few hundred miles away from my parents.
“There is no large industrial complex creating masses of useless food and recreational items. Food and livestock is grown and sold locally. People spend much more time reading and talking together face to face. Religion is taken seriously and everyone can multiply and divide in their heads.”
etc (long article)
[
This article was udpdated at 18:34 on October 21, 2015, to add details of the Haber family and their connection to John Titor.]
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/sci...me-from-2036-to-warn-us-of-a-nuclear-war.html
