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[mainiac]

John Titor is boring trolling about time travel.

Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel is an awesome movie about time travel that is much more deserving of being poured over.  If you felt like wasting your time discussing him, then discuss this movie instead.

There are so many interesting things to discuss.  For instance, did Cassie delaying Ray on his trip to the bathroom help create the time leak?  Were Ray, Toby and Pete really famous in the future or were they just wikipedia level famous and Cassie just happened to be a fan?  Did Pete get lost in a jungle in the past or in the future?

[Scood]

Ya I think he's almost angry with the way we live(d?) our lives.

i find this quote particularly interesting.

All of the questions asked have been answered in one way or another. You assume I am here to start a war?

Consider this: You are a time traveler who wishes to go back in time to 1941 because your grandparents live close to Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. You realize you can't stop the war but you may be able to help them prepare for it. Strangely, December 7th comes and goes with no sneak attack. As the war in Europe rages on, Japan fails to join the axis power, there is no war in the Pacific and the United States remains neutral. Then, you watch as Germany begins to develop the atomic bomb… all by themselves.

For a change, I have a question for all of you. I want you to think very hard. What major disaster was expected and prepared for in the last year and a half that never happened?

As far as war goes, I have faith you are quite capable of starting one all by yourself. I am hard pressed to accept any criticism on my outlook on that subject. Growing up might have been a vastly different experience for me than it was for most of you. Personal responsibility, determination, honor, friendship and self-reliance are not just words we try to live up to or fantasize about.

On my worldline, life is not easy. We live in a world recovering from years of war, poison, destruction and hate. All of it, courtesy of the thinking and actions of people that live right now in the same world you do, worrying about which stocks to buy or whether or not a stranger is lying to them on the Internet.

I believe that hardship and challenge develop character and community. My first experience with war came when I joined a shotgun infantry unit at the age of thirteen. In the 4 years I served as a "rebel", I watched hundreds of people get shot, burn and bleed to death. I know exactly where I was and every detail of the exact moment the first nuclear warheads began falling on Jacksonville. I know the pain and regret of not acting soon enough to enjoy a relationship as a loved one dies of brain cancer from a war that gained nothing.

How can you possibly criticize me for any conflict that comes to you? I watch every day what you are doing as a society. While you sit by and watch your Constitution being torn away from you, you willfully eat poisoned food, buy manufactured products no one needs and turn an uncaring eye away from millions of people suffering and dying all around you. Is this the "Universal Law" you subscribe to?

Perhaps I should let you all in on a little secret. No one likes you in the future. This time period is looked at as being full of lazy, self-centered, civically ignorant sheep. Perhaps you should be less concerned about me and more concerned about that.

perhaps he wanted to prepare his family for the upcoming war (by sending them to nebraska? {which was stated that the new U.S. capitol was moved there}) but somehow something went wrong, i think the incident he refers to as the disaster we all prepared for but ended up not happening may have been the y2k insident, in which all computers would fail. Maybe he feels a bit of guilt because he thinks he ruined our timeline for the worste.

John Titor is boring trolling about time travel.

Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel is an awesome movie about time travel that is much more deserving of being poured over.  If you felt like wasting your time discussing him, then discuss this movie instead.

There are so many interesting things to discuss.  For instance, did Cassie delaying Ray on his trip to the bathroom help create the time leak?  Were Ray, Toby and Pete really famous in the future or were they just wikipedia level famous and Cassie just happened to be a fan?  Did Pete get lost in a jungle in the past or in the future?

you're very welcome to create you're own thread.

trolling or not, His story is well put together, very interesting, and told in a medium that is unique or rarely used.

[mainiac]

I'm actually a time traveler from a possible future trying to save you from a discussion that will seem pointless in retrospect.

[Max White]

Well if anybody of our time was sent back to the dark ages, they too, would complain about how barbaric everybody was. And the Y2K incedent? No, that was just a formatting problem with old computers storing 19XX rather then XXXX. It took some prodding, but from what we could gather it had to do with a chemical weapon, but it could just have easly been biological. The point was that we didn't know what we were missing out on, and he was so amused by that, that he didn't want to make it easy for us to know. I was tempted to see he's line to find out for myself, but restrictions on going back meant that it wasn't worth the risk.

[rarborman]

This notion of time travel is silly, and this guy is crazy, and anyone else is as well that believes that time travel to and from a self similar universe is possible.

At best if this guy is a time traveler he would find himself in a vastly different world that ever degrades from his standard even if he just when back to watch something happen, the effects of him even being there are massively distorting and collective as time passes, with no hope of fixing it at all even he traveled back to when he was going to travel in time and told himself to just destroy the damn machine.

Time travel fucks up everything drasticly and if indeed there is a way to travel through time, albeit from an alternet 2036 (who knows what alternate time line tech they have) wouldnt they at least heavily control the ability to time travel with legislation, preventing the timeline from becoming hopelessly ruined, before they would give it to idiots who could even possibly want to travel back and do stupid things like displacing a IBM 5100 in time...

This "John Titor" is about as crazy as my brother that lives in my moms basement and claims to be building a fueless engine...that powers itself.

[Max White]

This "John Titor" is about as crazy as my brother that lives in my moms basement and claims to be building a fueless engine...that powers itself.

Does your brother be claiming to build such a device? Because it would be most useful, although I would like to know how he over came certain restrictions from the laws of common physics...

[rarborman]

This "John Titor" is about as crazy as my brother that lives in my moms basement and claims to be building a fueless engine...that powers itself.

Does your brother be claiming to build such a device? Because it would be most useful, although I would like to know how he over came certain restrictions from the laws of common physics...

Really? You want to ask somebody that was commited twice about physics? Probably powered by magical emitions from semen obtained from bigfoot raped by aliens if were lucky...I'll ask him if you REALLY want to know, I dont.

[Max White]

I don't think the rate that bigfoot is raped by aliens is high enough for this to be feasable in practice, but if an alternative were found, it would be most valuable. Although I fail to see how any species of alien could cause such emmissions. Also, I was under the impression that bigfoot was a myth.

[rarborman]

I was just trying to make a point that my brother is insane and beter left alone...

[Max White]

Well that severly lowers he's chance of building such a device.

[rarborman]

Doesnt stop him from building weird things in his room out of random stuff he finds in the neighbors trash or on the side of the road.

[Scood]

from what i gather, your brother is trying to create a device that uses energy, otherwise wasted, to make a more efficient moter (at best).
 It's a hobby that he enjoys. why do you belittle your brother?. It does not make him insane to dream of a goal that is thought to be impossible.

It is possible that yes, John Titor is insane. If the story is false i find it more likely that he is perfectly sane, and a very good writer.

[rarborman]

why do you belittle your brother?

Because he is mean and yells at anyone who even looks in his room, and the last time he was in the hospital we cleaned the junk out of his room and put most of it in the shed, and he literally snapped at everyone broke things, before dragging everything and then some back inside.

Just two days after christmas he stole the living room tv, to use in addition to the 20 something junk ones hes got lining his walls, with nothing but the excuse that, 'He needs it.'

I'll give him that he's smart, like being able to describe time-space while drunk or fix stuff when it breaks, but he takes it too far...like when he ask a local church if he can do experiments on god.

He's just like that, I'm not belittling him, or exagerating.

[Megaman]

Experiments on god?
Interesting

[Starver]

Stacked butterfly effect?
[...]

not exactly, what i was trying to get at.
John Titor's time machine has a range of 60 or so years before the worldline becomes completely different and its not necessarily that people make that change time, sometimes the change is just an atom moved 2 centimeters to the left. or the wind blowing pollen to a different flower.
[...]

Ah, then it seems like a mix of two particular 'mythologies' of parallel universes.

The first is series of books that I forget the name of (having read them at least two decades ago) where Time Travel is merely moving across a skewed set of alternate worlds, like taking a stack of playing cards, nudging it into a diagonal and drilling up and down the vertical.  The gist being that travelling to "200 years ago world" indeed sends you a world generally consistent with being 200 years ago, but 200 years into that world's future isn't 'now', but just happens to be the contemporary "200 years ago world" to our own one after 200 years have passed.  And with both there and here having had 200 years (potentially) of inter-world commerce between themselves and all the others to change how their history happens.  (And our future not the same as a future-partner world had.)

The second is that the "Universe Next Door" is a parallel universe because it differs by a little bit, the one next to that differs by slightly more, etc.  So that in JT's case it looks like the skewed-history parallel-worlds are also 'nudged-history'  (Probably because of subtle but increasing amounts of different starting conditions to them... and/or 'time constant', after all, the 'now' skew could be because the 'cards' are all slightly different scales but with the 'starting' edge vertical.)  But unless the starting conditions are arbitrarily small compared with the time-slip, I agree with the poster who thinks that they'd be completely different, as the differences over the life of the universe would build up massively.  If that's what he was saying.

the rest of you're post was a compilation of movie and short story references. Of which i found irrelivent.

Exemplar.  I thought they'd be useful anchors for a common understanding.  Much as (without any irony) I used at least one exemplar from fiction (the other being so generic I didn't actually bother to tie it down to any particular example) in the first bit of this post.  However, I think I did go overboard, the last time, but I wasn't exactly sure which ones everyone would understand.

BTW: All my best to rarborman's brother.  He either needs help or we need his help.  Whichever it ends up being (and I won't rule out that it's the latter), I hope the situation resolves itself without too much grief.