joeburd
Timekeeper
"Our heirs, whatever or whoever they may be, will explore space and time to degrees we cannot currently fathom. They will create new melodies in the music of time. There are infinite harmonies to be explored."
This prolific quote by celebrated author Clifford A. Pickover, published in his 1998 bestseller Time: A Traveler's Guide, undoubtedly stems from humanity's inherent and infinite belief that we can achieve and accomplish absolutely anything our species Can perceive and conceptualize through imagination, intellect and determination.
According to prevailing thought, time travel is the notion of moving between different moments in time with an approach comparable to moving between different points in space. Objects or information, in theory, could be sent backward or forward from the present without the need to experience the natural arbitrary period of time.
The contemporary notion of time travel began over a century ago with Enrique Gaspar Rimbau's groundbreaking 1887 book, El Anacronopete, about the world's first fictitious time machine. When H.G. Wells published his classic novel The Time Machine in 1895, the concept of time travel boldly took its place as a significant bedrock in modern science fiction and, more importantly, was embedded into the hearts, minds and imaginations of people around the world. Besides appealing to our insatiable hunger for the ability to correct mistakes of the past, time travel is the ultimate 'square peg in the round hole' narrative staple that works for absolutely any modern storytelling genre.
The quirky thing about science fiction though, especially over the past century, is that it has undeniably and significantly fueled modern scientific and technological progress in tangible ways that have affected every single facet of today's sophisticated, modern society. The basic nature of science fiction, without a doubt, is that it covers a broad genre of fiction that often involves speculations based on current or future science and technology. Science fiction uses concepts and imaginary elements that, within the substance of the story, are largely possible within scientifically established or scientifically postulated laws of nature even if some elements in a particular story might still be pure imaginative speculation.
The question of the ages concerning time travel is, of course, if it's possible to travel through time, then why aren't there time tourists hanging around today making news? After all, time travel by definition involves the present and past as well as the future, so either all time travelers from all the untold ages have shown extraordinary levels of discretion and prudence, or they simply haven't yet traversed what we would consider our modern history-in-the-making.
This brings us to the moment's topic at hand. John Titor. This is the decisive pseudonym used by a man, who by many accounts, is the world's first self-proclaimed time traveler that broke out of the mold of medically certifiable and, for many believers, into the plausible realm of unexplained mystery. Since I've always loved science fiction as a story genre, and tales of time travel especially, John Titor's story immediately caught my attention, both as a journalist and an individual. Once I learned more about Titor, I came to realize that, if his story and claims were indeed a hoax, it was the best, most convincing hoax [with respect to time travel] perpetrated in modern times. However, it's also in my nature to be skeptical and, having said that, I just haven't yet been able to bring myself into the column of believers. My imagination wanted to believe Titor's claims, but my intellect, life's experience, and genuine understanding of humanity's dark side screamed at me to remain rational and reserve judgment.
To be completely honest, this topic incipiently peaked my imagination and journalistic interest right from the beginning in 2001 and, over the years, continued to garner more and more of my attention. However, the main point of contention in my mind about writing a serious editorial about John Titor's story has always been that, until recent years, an adequate amount of time needed to pass so that his revelations, speculations and predictions could be properly weighed and evaluated through the clear lens of time. This article will deliver the facts in an unbiased fashion and it will be up to each person that reads the information presented to form their own opinion.
This bring us to November 2, 2000, when a person, going by the pseudonym TimeTravel_0, suddenly began posting to the internet, claiming to be a time traveler and offering possible revelations about the ensuing three decades. Soon after his initial postings, he revealed his chosen pseudonym to be John Titor, saying that he was an American Solider from the future sent to retrieve unique equipment from 1975 and return it to his own time. He claimed to be in the year 2000 on a personal "stopover". In actual fact, John Titor became the name used on several internet bulletin boards and rudimentary website forums, from November 2000 to March 2001, by a person claiming to be a time traveler from the year 2036.
To digress for a moment, it should be noted what the generally accepted opinion is of the feasibility of time travel according to two of the greatest minds to emerge during the past century - Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein.
Einstein, arguably the father of modern physics, once stated in his 1921 book Relativity, in discussing Minkowski's Space World interpretation of his theory of relativity, "Since there exists in this four dimensional structure (space-time) no longer any sections which represent "now" objectively, the concepts of happening and becoming are indeed not completely suspended, but yet complicated. it appears therefore more natural to think of physical reality as a four dimensional existence, instead of, hitherto, the evolution of a three dimensional existence."
Contemporary physicist Stephen Hawking has said, time and again in his infamous public lectures, "We thus have experimental evidence from the bending of light, that space-time is curved, and confirmation from the Casimir effect, is that we can warp it in the negative direction. So it might seem possible, that as we advance in science and technology, we might be able to construct a wormhole, or warp space and time in some other way, so as to be able to travel into our past."
Having said that, John Titor claimed to be an American soldier from the year 2036, based in Tampa, Florida, who was assigned to a preeminent governmental time-travel project. According to his story, he had been sent back to 1975 to retrieve an early model IBM 5100 computer which he said was needed to "debug" various legacy computer programs in 2036 all related to the anticipated UNIX 2038 timeout error. The 5100 was a hybrid in its day because of its special capabilities and is the only machine that's able to run both APL and BASIC. Titor further said that he had been selected for this mission specifically because his paternal grandfather had been directly involved with the assembly and programming of the 5100 when it was designed in the mid-1970s.
According to IBM engineer Bob Dubke, "Titor's statements regarding the IBM 5100's little-known ability to emulate and debug mainframe systems were correct."
Some skeptics of the story have suggested, despite contrary statements from IBM in Titor's favor, that this information about the 5100 was actually published as early as 1999 in trade magazines, albeit still recognizing that such information at the time would have been considered "obscure trivia".
Titor wrote that he was on an unofficial stopover in the year 2000 for "personal reasons" including "to collect pictures lost in the civil war" and to visit his family and warn them about, what he referred to as, the "coming years of hardship and change". Titor also said he had been, for a few months before taking his warnings to the internet, trying to alert anyone that would listen to him about, what he coined, the looming continental-wide threat of Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (otherwise known as Mad Cow Disease at pandemic levels) that's been a harbinger death in his own time, the possibility of new civil war within the continental United States, and massive changes coming to "life as we know it". According to Titor, these changes will affect everything, that we now take for granted and hold sacred, such as health care, civil liberties, the conventional structure of government, personal and national security, spirituality values, the education system, and entertainment industry.
Titor made an immediate and substantive impact, right off the bat, by posting detailed descriptions of his own time and sharply answering questions posted by other forum members about life in the future and his predictions about the present ages. And, as to be expected in order to establish any solid credibility, the mechanics of time travel and the technology behind the time travel device was also hotly discussed, described, and, eventually by Titor himself, illustrated with photographs.
Most of his posts concerned the predicted condition of the our world as it's to unfold over the next three decades, but he also forcibly and convincingly responded to many questions from both skeptics and believers alike. He also posted images on several occasions, to illustrate his descriptions, that he claimed to be of the time travel device itself or its operating manual. Despite reservations on the part of many, it's clear from the posted conversations on record that most of the people who interacted and conversed with John Titor believed that he was being as candid, transparent and informative as possible considering his precarious position, regardless of whether or not he was telling the truth.
He said the underlying foundation of the technology behind time travel would be put into motion "within a year or two" (from his first posting) by an international physics organization called CERN, and such research would culminate in 2034 with the world's first practical time travel device manufactured by General Electric and under contract with the military. According to Titor, the time travel device itself is a "stationary mass, temporal displacement unit powered by two top-spin, dual positive singularities", producing a "standard off-set Tipler sinusoid". Evidently, the typical unit consists of six major elements including; two magnetic housing units for the dual micro singularities, an electron injection manifold to alter the mass and gravity of micro singularities, a cooling and X-ray venting system, gravity sensors or a variable gravity lock system, four main caesium clocks, and three main computer units.
It's not my intention to be overly technical in writing this piece, but it's quite important to detail the purported technology behind time travel. Equally critical is Titor's assertion that the first discoveries [that will lead to this coveted technology] will happen during this current decade and will be the first in a sequence of events and breakthroughs that will culminate in 2034 with tangible, practical time travel technology.
Let's for a moment examine Titor's comments about CERN more closely with respect to what was publicly known at the time about their research and then from the perspective of what's happening today, almost a decade later, in their clandestine state-of-the-art laboratories and research facilities based in Europe.
To be clear, when Titor was discussing what CERN would discover from their experiments that "involve very high energies using protons", the organization itself had released very little information to date about any such research to the public. In fact, that same year and, important to note, subsequent to Titor's revelations, CERN announced publicly that it intended to develop and build the world's largest and most ambitious Large Hadron Collider. Today's LHC lies in a tunnel 27 kilometers (17 mi) in circumference, as much as 175 meters (570 ft) beneath the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, Switzerland. The project is both privately and publicly funded and has been built in collaboration with scientists and engineers from over 100 countries.
Titor indicated that, during the coming years that LHC was being developed and constructed, many scientists and physicists around the world outside of the project would claim that, if the research was to come to fruition, the resulting experiments could endanger the planet. In recent years and exactly what Titor said to expect, announced and proposed experiments at the Large Hadron Collider have sparked fears among the public that the produced particle collisions might abet a doomsday phenomena involving the production of stable microscopic black holes or the creation of hypothetical particles called strangelets.
On September 8, 2008, the LHC was brought online and the proton beams were successfully circulated in the main ring of the LHC for the first time in this significant project's history. On September 10, 2008, the mechanical operations were halted due to a serious fault between two superconducting bending magnets. Due to the resulting damage, the LHC will not be fully operational again until early2010.
Today's Large Hadron Collider was built with the intention of testing various predictions of high-energy physics, including the existence of the hypothesized Higgs boson and of the large family of new particles predicted by super-symmetry. Titor said in a post from February 2001, "When I first started posting online a few months ago, I said that major breakthroughs in particle physics were around your corner. Soon, CERN will bring their big machine online and they will be smashing very fast and high-energy particles together."
Detractors of Titor have said, despite this unprecedented technology coming to fruition in this decade, that he predicted this project to happen earlier than 2008, therefore John Titor must be a fraud. The reality of the matter is that, with the exception of those scientists that fathomed and pioneered the project in its very early stages, it's highly unlikely that anyone would have extensive foreknowledge of it as early as 2000. The mere fact that Titor predicted the "big machine" in the first place, by many accounts, is absolutely confounding. Another fact that skeptics tend to overlook is that, although LHC (a.k.a. "the big machine") didn't go online until later in the decade, other integral experiments did indeed come about much earlier in the decade and, in some instances, as early as 1998.
The most significant of those early breakthroughs, an apparatus called the Z-machine, was referenced by Titor when he remarked, "The machine with the energy to do it will come on-line very soon [referencing the means to which enough energy can be generated and controlled required to make time travel possible]. The "method" for doing it has already been "mostly" perfected in the Z-machine at the [Sandia] National Lab in New Mexico."
Aside from the technology used to make time travel possible, Titor made numerous statements regarding his future; the prospect of civil war in the United States, the broad curtailing of American civil rights, future technologies, major changes structurally inside the U.S. government, diseases that catch humanity off guard with dire consequences, and other random catastrophes and events that have a global impact. On a more positive note, Titor also conveyed vivid details about a brighter post-modern future in that the global community has renewed itself, governments around the world learned from their mistakes and get along, world trade is bustling, and education, family values, and spirituality are paramount to the human existence.
To better understand the nature of Titor's predictions, it's also important to understand how, according to Titor, time travel fundamentally works and its impact on humanity's perception of reality and the universe as a whole. John claimed that the "Everett-Wheeler model of quantum physics" is correct and this model, better known as the many-worlds interpretation, dictates that every possible outcome of a quantum decision actually occurs in a separate universe or "world-line". Instead of a universe, we suddenly have multiverse. Titor specifically said, "Temporal space-time is made up of every possible quantum state. The Everett Wheeler model is correct. I have met and/or seen myself twice on different world-lines. The first was a training mission and the second is now."
Titor further said there's a saying where he comes from, "Every possible thing that can happen or will happen has already happened somewhere."
He said the time machine that he used during his mission, referred to as model C204, apparently uses a non-yet-perfected GDU (otherwise known as a "gravity distortion unit") that has, what's referred to as, a minute temporal margin of error between 1% and 2%. Accordingly, when traveling within the machine's safe limits (no more than 60 years in either direction) it's probable that the destination worldline will be similar enough to pass for, but likely won't be, the original. Due to such a small margin of temporal divergence, the time traveler wouldn't necessarily notice any differences unless they spent a extended period of time in the alternate worldline. However, Titor also said that GE (circa. 2036) is working on a newer temporal unit, model C206, that will be more accurate and make possible traveling further backward or forward through time than its predecessor, C204.
Having this understanding, it only stands to reason to conclude, and important to keep in mind while reading, that Titor's predictions and revelations, if you will, about the future may not always be dead accurate (timing or event details) in direct comparison to our own world-line. However, since the divergence between world-lines is so insignificant, by Titor's own admission, it's also reasonable to expect that a great deal of his revelations should come to pass if he's really a time traveler from the future.
Now let's see what else he said about his own time period, where he lives, and how society's changed since 2001. In 2036, he lives in central Florida with his family and is stationed at an Army base in Tampa. A world war that occurred in 2015 allegedly killed nearly three billion people and those who survived grew closer together as a human community. Life in Titor's alleged future is, first and foremost, centered on the family and family values, and then the community. He said that he "couldn't imagine living even a few hundred miles away from his parents". Another major difference, according to his posts, is that there's no longer a large industrial complex "creating masses of useless food and recreational items". Food's grown, livestock's raised, and commodities are manufactured, then all sold locally.
Life is also apparently much more rural in Titor's future but sophisticated "high technology" is still used to communicate and conduct travel. Despite the many changes that come after the world war, the internet not only survives but actually evolves into something more significant and integral. Education is also more important and, to reinforce this fact, apparently all communities in the future are based around large universities. Titor said he attended school at Fort UF, which is presently called the University of Florida. Regarding this, he said, "Not too much is different except the military is large part of people's life and we spend a great deal of time in the fields and farms at the University or Fort."
Titor's future worldline also includes a drastically changed, more personable health care system which he likened to "the Old West", a more diverse, participation based, less localized entertainment industry, and a decentralized smart power grid system is used throughout the United States. In reference to time travel technology, Titor said that time travel was originally pursued for military purposes, but that in his future the official mandate for time travel is actually to help repair the environmental damage caused by humanity over the years through war and ignorance.
The repeatedly mentioned world war that's to occur in 2015 is apparently initiated by Russia as a direct result of U.S. foreign policy in the preceding years. According to posts, in 2015 Russia will launch a nuclear strike against the major cities in the United States, China and Europe. The United States counter attacks, but in the end there's only apocalyptic destruction all over the world. The European Union and China will also be destroyed in the war and, for all intents and purposes, it takes almost two decades to rebuild and detoxify the earth through patience, hard work and innovative new technologies. In 2001, how could John Titor have predicted the thawing that's taken place between the U.S. and the rest of the world, and particularly Russia, over the past decade?
In direct reference to the coming world conflict, Titor said, "Real disruptions in world events begin with the destabilization of the West as a result of degrading US foreign policy and consistency around the world. The Jewish population in Israel is not prepared for a true offensive war. They are prepared for the ultimate defense. Wavering western support for Israel is what gives Israel's neighbors the confidence to attack. The last resort for a defensive Israel and its offensive Arab neighbors is to use weapons of mass destruction. In the grand scheme of things, the war in the Middle East is a part of what's to come, not the cause."
When Titor made the aforesaid comments, he also could not have possibly known that Israel would suffer wavering support from the West in the ensuing years, but that's exactly what we've witnessed happening only as recently as over the past year.
Titor also indicated that the United States would attack an Arab nation early in the present decade on the basis of "lies, misconceptions and false evidence". He said that the nation's misguided foreign policy would erode, tarnishing America's image around the world, and become increasingly hostile toward other nations. Titor also said that American civil liberties would become progressively convoluted and eventually stripped in the name of "keeping us safe". He predicted that in the 2008 U.S. election, the race would be between a woman that represents change and a man that has good intentions but who's actions would keep the status quo and continue destroying the country's reputation around the world.
It should be noted that when Titor made these particular predictions, the U.S. had not yet started its decline in the eyes of its international contemporaries. You're probably asking yourself why he didn't predict the election of Barack Obama, but keep in mind that his world-line may be slightly different than ours. In his world-line's history, perhaps the 2008 election was actually between Hilary Clinton and John McCain and, based on what he described leading up to 2015, the winner was probably McCain.
Another of Titor's more significant predictions was that of a second major civil war set to occur inside the continental United States from [approximately] 2004 to 2015. He said that this new civil war will not resemble its 1860s predecessor but rather will be evident in the form of political upheaval, civil unrest, and widespread resentment by the people toward the government. Detractors always use this as a main point of contention in their argument against Titor's claims saying that there's been no semblance of civil war [since 2004] and, therefore, he's a fraud. However, reasonably it must be taken into account that after George W. Bush's narrow victory in 2004 and his robbery of Election 2000 still fresh in many people's hearts and minds, the nation became more polarized in 2004 than at any other point in its modern history.
In Titor's world-line, people of this time period stood against the government through armed conflict and civil unrest, but in our worldline perhaps we focused our discontent politically and that's why the 2008 election resulted in Barack Obama becoming President rather than John McCain. A civil war in the conventional sense may have not come to pass, but certainly there's been more resistance against corrupt government in recent years than at any other point in modern history.
It is true that Bush's attacks upon our civil rights never sparked outright civil war, but there's no question whatsoever that American freedoms were consistently under attack, that civil war could have easily broken out if Bush had pushed things far enough, and that many minor conflicts that had the potential to escalate were filtered out from the public awareness by a sellout news media machine failing to do their jobs with integrity and honesty. Domestic relocation camps operated by FEMA were never used by the Bush administration, whereas in Titor's original world-line they may have been used for the internment of Americans under the guise of imprisoning 'domestic terrorists'. Anyone who doubts that our civil liberties have been under attack and were actually significantly compromised under the Bush administration hasn't been paying attention very well. Titor's predictions about that were right on the money, and nobody could have reasonably contemplated that in 2000 or 2001.
In Titor's worldline, the civil war and ensuring world conflict forced the country to enact major structural changes to the U.S. Constitution and how the country is fundamentally governed. He said this about what followed the time of conflict, "After the war, the United States had split into five separate regions based on the various factors and military objectives they each had. There was a great deal of anger directed toward the Federal government and a revival of states rights was becoming paramount. However, in their attempt to create an economic form of government, the political and military leaders at the time decided to hold one last Constitutional Congress in order to present a psychological cohesion from the old system. During this Congress, the leaders discovered and decided that coming up with a new and better form of government was nearly impossible. The original Constitution itself was not the problem it was the ignorance of the people that lived under it."
Further, Titor said that five separate, but all equally influential, Presidents are elected for each of the five political regions setup under the new Constitution, and this is done democratically on a rotating schedule. He said of the five Presidents, "The reason the job of President was split into an office of 5 has 4 main reasons. With 5 (presidents), foreign policy is more consistent, power shifting between parties has less of an impact on the overall government, individual strengths between presidents add to the strength of the overall office, and one president is elected for each major area in the United States."
Another one of his prominent predictions centered around the cancellation of the Olympic Games after 2004 due to the civil unrest happening in the United States and additional conflicts happening around the world. However, it's not hard to imagine that since our world-line didn't see an armed civil war within its borders, it stands to reason that this particular prediction would also be different than what John remembers from his own history. In actual fact and to Titor's credit, the Olympics have indeed been plagued over the past decade with countless scandals, conflicts, threats of boycott, and other issues that, for all intents and purposes, could have easily escalated into more serious matters. In 2008, it's common knowledge that a number of nations at least threatened to boycott the Summer Games in China due to the hosting nation's poor human rights record, and militant measures had to be taken to prevent domestic and international human rights groups from protesting and causing disruptions. More recently, Vancouver 2010 has also been plagued with numerous scandals, loss of sponsors, low expectations, security concerns, accusations of being less than competitively fair, and threats of boycott.
At this point in the process, let's breakdown Titor's story, examine the elements of it closely, and attempt to answer any of the remaining questions.
In late-2000, a person suddenly surfaces on the internet claiming he's from the future, 2036 to be precise. The man, calling himself John Titor, details his mission, the mechanics behind time travel technology, and makes a number of predictions. He also explains that, for all intents and purposes, his predictions and speculations may not always be 100% accurate due to a phenomenon referred to as temporal divergence and brought on by technological limitations. At best, he stated that he'd achieve a 98% rate of accuracy in relation to most of what he might reveal during his time with us. He discussed his assertions, predictions and speculations, with dozens of interested parties and answered virtually every question asked to the satisfaction of most of those participating in the conversation, skeptics and believers alike. Despite what appeared to be some minor contradictions in his text along the way [over a period of a grueling three months to be exact], most of his story content was consistent, direct, and often compelling even in the face of intelligent debate and tough questions. Finally, he vanished in 2001 as suddenly as he appeared on the scene several months earlier.
In hindsight, Titor hasn't been 100% accurate in his predictions and assertions, and perhaps he hasn't even maintained a 98% ratio of success. However, he has been correct on a number of issues including, and certainly not the least significant of his predictions, the inception and evolution of the technologies that could lead to a practical time travel device over the next few decades. Although the U.S. didn't endure a second civil war, there's unquestionably been political and civil unrest that, under different circumstances, could have evolved into something much more serious and violent than what we've witnessed. America is still more divided and polarized today than at any point in its history since 1861. John Titor said that the West would unjustly attack an Arab state early in the current decade and this, to be sure, came to pass two short years after he predicted it. He predicted that Election 2008 would be between a woman and a man and, although this wasn't quite the case, that could have easily been the course of events. Until 2008, no other female candidate has ever been taken as serious as Hilary Clinton and, under different conditions, she could have been the Democratic candidate on the November 4, 2008, ballot. However, instead of Clinton versus McCain [that Titor predicted and claimed to have occurred in his own world-line], Barack Obama capitalized on the times and made enough of an impact to change the game entirely.
I also want to revisit John Titor's revelation that WW3 is imminent and set to take place in 2015, initiated by Russia and as a direct result of rogue U.S. foreign policy around the world. I hate to be a pessimist, but the facts seem to support the notion of a coming broad scaled conflict. In 1989, the Cold War was over, the Berlin Wall was scheduled to fall, and Russia was weaker than ever before [and at the economic, political, and military mercy of the West]. Over the ensuing years, Russia behaved like a model nation, received billions in aid, and commenced rebuilding their economy and military.
Let's look at the history between Russia and the West over the past two decades. Although Gorbachev and Yeltsin were pro-American, President Vladimir Putin is not and, like it or not, he's still the most prevailing, dominant force in Russian politics. While Putin was the President of Russia, George W. Bush ruled the free world with an iron fist, politically demeaned and humiliated Russia at every opportunity, and seriously alienated the U.S. from the rest of the planet. Even the staunchest skeptic would have a hard time arguing that Titor's prediction about a degradation in U.S. foreign policy and it's reputation around the world didn't definitively come to pass during Bush's time as President. Titor couldn't have been more dead on the mark than he was with this particular revelation. Having said that, it's also during Bush's time in office that President Putin presided over Russia and, as such, Putin has made it his mission to resurrect his nation from the ashes and restore his country's economic, military, and political might. His intent became more and more clear and evident each time he openly defied U.S. foreign policy on the world stage, even sending Russia's military into politically charged situations. Presently, Putin's serving as Russia's Prime Minister and President Dmitry Medvedev, Putin's hand picked successor, is at the nation's helm for the moment. However, it's well documented that most observers believe Putin plans to run for Russian president again in 2012 with the intent to continue his crusade against U.S. foreign policy and mission to restore Russia to its former glory as the world's preeminent superpower. Further, while Russia continues to make leaps and bounds in its national goals and agenda, the U.S. seemingly continues to suffer one setback after another, major economic issues, an overstretched military, a deteriorating situation around the world, more national polarization, a crumbling dollar, and unheard of levels of domestic division and political unrest. It's true that this future may not happen at all but if you truly open your mind to the direction things are going nowadays, it doesn't take a time traveler to imagine or fathom that this could happen in our world. Since I'm an optimist, I chose to believe that we'll avoid this type of apocalyptic future but I've been wrong before especially when it comes to having faith in humanity.
As far as the details that come after his accounts of WW3, those particular aspects of the future are nothing more than hearsay based on whether or not a number of other significant events come to pass in the next few years. However, true or not, it's nice to imagine a future global society that has overcome national interests and war, and where family, spirituality, and education are the most important things in everyone's lives. A future in that humanity has survived its most difficult challenges seems perfect, but this future could only occur if the world underwent something significant enough (i.e. a global war or alien invasion) to force these changes to happen, especially on a world-wide scale.
In my opinion and remembering that, after all, I am truly a skeptic that, in this particular case, wants to believe that John Titor was really a time traveler from the future, I am still sitting on the fence like, believe or not, many people that have studied Titor's posts. The amazing aspect of Titor's story is that, even after almost a decade, people are still debating him and keeping his story alive and kicking. Even if he was a fraud, he was very astute in his observations, predictions, and advanced due diligence into everything that he discussed or implemented as part of his planned story. So if he's not a time traveler, he's for all intents and purposes a bonafide genius that was able to pull off such a sophisticated, elaborate hoax that it transcended its original medium and convincingly invaded mainstream.
To be fair to the skeptics and despite any arguments in Titor's favor, some elements of his story have been discounted, to at least some degree, and mainstream investigation into his story has brought together a substantial amount of evidence suggesting that, perhaps, his story was indeed an elaborate hoax after all. However, despite all of the debunking taking place there's no question that John Titor's claims have stood the test of time, so to speak, and continues to capture attention and interest as, at the very least, a popular culture phenomenon.
This prolific quote by celebrated author Clifford A. Pickover, published in his 1998 bestseller Time: A Traveler's Guide, undoubtedly stems from humanity's inherent and infinite belief that we can achieve and accomplish absolutely anything our species Can perceive and conceptualize through imagination, intellect and determination.
According to prevailing thought, time travel is the notion of moving between different moments in time with an approach comparable to moving between different points in space. Objects or information, in theory, could be sent backward or forward from the present without the need to experience the natural arbitrary period of time.
The contemporary notion of time travel began over a century ago with Enrique Gaspar Rimbau's groundbreaking 1887 book, El Anacronopete, about the world's first fictitious time machine. When H.G. Wells published his classic novel The Time Machine in 1895, the concept of time travel boldly took its place as a significant bedrock in modern science fiction and, more importantly, was embedded into the hearts, minds and imaginations of people around the world. Besides appealing to our insatiable hunger for the ability to correct mistakes of the past, time travel is the ultimate 'square peg in the round hole' narrative staple that works for absolutely any modern storytelling genre.
The quirky thing about science fiction though, especially over the past century, is that it has undeniably and significantly fueled modern scientific and technological progress in tangible ways that have affected every single facet of today's sophisticated, modern society. The basic nature of science fiction, without a doubt, is that it covers a broad genre of fiction that often involves speculations based on current or future science and technology. Science fiction uses concepts and imaginary elements that, within the substance of the story, are largely possible within scientifically established or scientifically postulated laws of nature even if some elements in a particular story might still be pure imaginative speculation.
The question of the ages concerning time travel is, of course, if it's possible to travel through time, then why aren't there time tourists hanging around today making news? After all, time travel by definition involves the present and past as well as the future, so either all time travelers from all the untold ages have shown extraordinary levels of discretion and prudence, or they simply haven't yet traversed what we would consider our modern history-in-the-making.
This brings us to the moment's topic at hand. John Titor. This is the decisive pseudonym used by a man, who by many accounts, is the world's first self-proclaimed time traveler that broke out of the mold of medically certifiable and, for many believers, into the plausible realm of unexplained mystery. Since I've always loved science fiction as a story genre, and tales of time travel especially, John Titor's story immediately caught my attention, both as a journalist and an individual. Once I learned more about Titor, I came to realize that, if his story and claims were indeed a hoax, it was the best, most convincing hoax [with respect to time travel] perpetrated in modern times. However, it's also in my nature to be skeptical and, having said that, I just haven't yet been able to bring myself into the column of believers. My imagination wanted to believe Titor's claims, but my intellect, life's experience, and genuine understanding of humanity's dark side screamed at me to remain rational and reserve judgment.
To be completely honest, this topic incipiently peaked my imagination and journalistic interest right from the beginning in 2001 and, over the years, continued to garner more and more of my attention. However, the main point of contention in my mind about writing a serious editorial about John Titor's story has always been that, until recent years, an adequate amount of time needed to pass so that his revelations, speculations and predictions could be properly weighed and evaluated through the clear lens of time. This article will deliver the facts in an unbiased fashion and it will be up to each person that reads the information presented to form their own opinion.
This bring us to November 2, 2000, when a person, going by the pseudonym TimeTravel_0, suddenly began posting to the internet, claiming to be a time traveler and offering possible revelations about the ensuing three decades. Soon after his initial postings, he revealed his chosen pseudonym to be John Titor, saying that he was an American Solider from the future sent to retrieve unique equipment from 1975 and return it to his own time. He claimed to be in the year 2000 on a personal "stopover". In actual fact, John Titor became the name used on several internet bulletin boards and rudimentary website forums, from November 2000 to March 2001, by a person claiming to be a time traveler from the year 2036.
To digress for a moment, it should be noted what the generally accepted opinion is of the feasibility of time travel according to two of the greatest minds to emerge during the past century - Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein.
Einstein, arguably the father of modern physics, once stated in his 1921 book Relativity, in discussing Minkowski's Space World interpretation of his theory of relativity, "Since there exists in this four dimensional structure (space-time) no longer any sections which represent "now" objectively, the concepts of happening and becoming are indeed not completely suspended, but yet complicated. it appears therefore more natural to think of physical reality as a four dimensional existence, instead of, hitherto, the evolution of a three dimensional existence."
Contemporary physicist Stephen Hawking has said, time and again in his infamous public lectures, "We thus have experimental evidence from the bending of light, that space-time is curved, and confirmation from the Casimir effect, is that we can warp it in the negative direction. So it might seem possible, that as we advance in science and technology, we might be able to construct a wormhole, or warp space and time in some other way, so as to be able to travel into our past."
Having said that, John Titor claimed to be an American soldier from the year 2036, based in Tampa, Florida, who was assigned to a preeminent governmental time-travel project. According to his story, he had been sent back to 1975 to retrieve an early model IBM 5100 computer which he said was needed to "debug" various legacy computer programs in 2036 all related to the anticipated UNIX 2038 timeout error. The 5100 was a hybrid in its day because of its special capabilities and is the only machine that's able to run both APL and BASIC. Titor further said that he had been selected for this mission specifically because his paternal grandfather had been directly involved with the assembly and programming of the 5100 when it was designed in the mid-1970s.
According to IBM engineer Bob Dubke, "Titor's statements regarding the IBM 5100's little-known ability to emulate and debug mainframe systems were correct."
Some skeptics of the story have suggested, despite contrary statements from IBM in Titor's favor, that this information about the 5100 was actually published as early as 1999 in trade magazines, albeit still recognizing that such information at the time would have been considered "obscure trivia".
Titor wrote that he was on an unofficial stopover in the year 2000 for "personal reasons" including "to collect pictures lost in the civil war" and to visit his family and warn them about, what he referred to as, the "coming years of hardship and change". Titor also said he had been, for a few months before taking his warnings to the internet, trying to alert anyone that would listen to him about, what he coined, the looming continental-wide threat of Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (otherwise known as Mad Cow Disease at pandemic levels) that's been a harbinger death in his own time, the possibility of new civil war within the continental United States, and massive changes coming to "life as we know it". According to Titor, these changes will affect everything, that we now take for granted and hold sacred, such as health care, civil liberties, the conventional structure of government, personal and national security, spirituality values, the education system, and entertainment industry.
Titor made an immediate and substantive impact, right off the bat, by posting detailed descriptions of his own time and sharply answering questions posted by other forum members about life in the future and his predictions about the present ages. And, as to be expected in order to establish any solid credibility, the mechanics of time travel and the technology behind the time travel device was also hotly discussed, described, and, eventually by Titor himself, illustrated with photographs.
Most of his posts concerned the predicted condition of the our world as it's to unfold over the next three decades, but he also forcibly and convincingly responded to many questions from both skeptics and believers alike. He also posted images on several occasions, to illustrate his descriptions, that he claimed to be of the time travel device itself or its operating manual. Despite reservations on the part of many, it's clear from the posted conversations on record that most of the people who interacted and conversed with John Titor believed that he was being as candid, transparent and informative as possible considering his precarious position, regardless of whether or not he was telling the truth.
He said the underlying foundation of the technology behind time travel would be put into motion "within a year or two" (from his first posting) by an international physics organization called CERN, and such research would culminate in 2034 with the world's first practical time travel device manufactured by General Electric and under contract with the military. According to Titor, the time travel device itself is a "stationary mass, temporal displacement unit powered by two top-spin, dual positive singularities", producing a "standard off-set Tipler sinusoid". Evidently, the typical unit consists of six major elements including; two magnetic housing units for the dual micro singularities, an electron injection manifold to alter the mass and gravity of micro singularities, a cooling and X-ray venting system, gravity sensors or a variable gravity lock system, four main caesium clocks, and three main computer units.
It's not my intention to be overly technical in writing this piece, but it's quite important to detail the purported technology behind time travel. Equally critical is Titor's assertion that the first discoveries [that will lead to this coveted technology] will happen during this current decade and will be the first in a sequence of events and breakthroughs that will culminate in 2034 with tangible, practical time travel technology.
Let's for a moment examine Titor's comments about CERN more closely with respect to what was publicly known at the time about their research and then from the perspective of what's happening today, almost a decade later, in their clandestine state-of-the-art laboratories and research facilities based in Europe.
To be clear, when Titor was discussing what CERN would discover from their experiments that "involve very high energies using protons", the organization itself had released very little information to date about any such research to the public. In fact, that same year and, important to note, subsequent to Titor's revelations, CERN announced publicly that it intended to develop and build the world's largest and most ambitious Large Hadron Collider. Today's LHC lies in a tunnel 27 kilometers (17 mi) in circumference, as much as 175 meters (570 ft) beneath the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, Switzerland. The project is both privately and publicly funded and has been built in collaboration with scientists and engineers from over 100 countries.
Titor indicated that, during the coming years that LHC was being developed and constructed, many scientists and physicists around the world outside of the project would claim that, if the research was to come to fruition, the resulting experiments could endanger the planet. In recent years and exactly what Titor said to expect, announced and proposed experiments at the Large Hadron Collider have sparked fears among the public that the produced particle collisions might abet a doomsday phenomena involving the production of stable microscopic black holes or the creation of hypothetical particles called strangelets.
On September 8, 2008, the LHC was brought online and the proton beams were successfully circulated in the main ring of the LHC for the first time in this significant project's history. On September 10, 2008, the mechanical operations were halted due to a serious fault between two superconducting bending magnets. Due to the resulting damage, the LHC will not be fully operational again until early2010.
Today's Large Hadron Collider was built with the intention of testing various predictions of high-energy physics, including the existence of the hypothesized Higgs boson and of the large family of new particles predicted by super-symmetry. Titor said in a post from February 2001, "When I first started posting online a few months ago, I said that major breakthroughs in particle physics were around your corner. Soon, CERN will bring their big machine online and they will be smashing very fast and high-energy particles together."
Detractors of Titor have said, despite this unprecedented technology coming to fruition in this decade, that he predicted this project to happen earlier than 2008, therefore John Titor must be a fraud. The reality of the matter is that, with the exception of those scientists that fathomed and pioneered the project in its very early stages, it's highly unlikely that anyone would have extensive foreknowledge of it as early as 2000. The mere fact that Titor predicted the "big machine" in the first place, by many accounts, is absolutely confounding. Another fact that skeptics tend to overlook is that, although LHC (a.k.a. "the big machine") didn't go online until later in the decade, other integral experiments did indeed come about much earlier in the decade and, in some instances, as early as 1998.
The most significant of those early breakthroughs, an apparatus called the Z-machine, was referenced by Titor when he remarked, "The machine with the energy to do it will come on-line very soon [referencing the means to which enough energy can be generated and controlled required to make time travel possible]. The "method" for doing it has already been "mostly" perfected in the Z-machine at the [Sandia] National Lab in New Mexico."
Aside from the technology used to make time travel possible, Titor made numerous statements regarding his future; the prospect of civil war in the United States, the broad curtailing of American civil rights, future technologies, major changes structurally inside the U.S. government, diseases that catch humanity off guard with dire consequences, and other random catastrophes and events that have a global impact. On a more positive note, Titor also conveyed vivid details about a brighter post-modern future in that the global community has renewed itself, governments around the world learned from their mistakes and get along, world trade is bustling, and education, family values, and spirituality are paramount to the human existence.
To better understand the nature of Titor's predictions, it's also important to understand how, according to Titor, time travel fundamentally works and its impact on humanity's perception of reality and the universe as a whole. John claimed that the "Everett-Wheeler model of quantum physics" is correct and this model, better known as the many-worlds interpretation, dictates that every possible outcome of a quantum decision actually occurs in a separate universe or "world-line". Instead of a universe, we suddenly have multiverse. Titor specifically said, "Temporal space-time is made up of every possible quantum state. The Everett Wheeler model is correct. I have met and/or seen myself twice on different world-lines. The first was a training mission and the second is now."
Titor further said there's a saying where he comes from, "Every possible thing that can happen or will happen has already happened somewhere."
He said the time machine that he used during his mission, referred to as model C204, apparently uses a non-yet-perfected GDU (otherwise known as a "gravity distortion unit") that has, what's referred to as, a minute temporal margin of error between 1% and 2%. Accordingly, when traveling within the machine's safe limits (no more than 60 years in either direction) it's probable that the destination worldline will be similar enough to pass for, but likely won't be, the original. Due to such a small margin of temporal divergence, the time traveler wouldn't necessarily notice any differences unless they spent a extended period of time in the alternate worldline. However, Titor also said that GE (circa. 2036) is working on a newer temporal unit, model C206, that will be more accurate and make possible traveling further backward or forward through time than its predecessor, C204.
Having this understanding, it only stands to reason to conclude, and important to keep in mind while reading, that Titor's predictions and revelations, if you will, about the future may not always be dead accurate (timing or event details) in direct comparison to our own world-line. However, since the divergence between world-lines is so insignificant, by Titor's own admission, it's also reasonable to expect that a great deal of his revelations should come to pass if he's really a time traveler from the future.
Now let's see what else he said about his own time period, where he lives, and how society's changed since 2001. In 2036, he lives in central Florida with his family and is stationed at an Army base in Tampa. A world war that occurred in 2015 allegedly killed nearly three billion people and those who survived grew closer together as a human community. Life in Titor's alleged future is, first and foremost, centered on the family and family values, and then the community. He said that he "couldn't imagine living even a few hundred miles away from his parents". Another major difference, according to his posts, is that there's no longer a large industrial complex "creating masses of useless food and recreational items". Food's grown, livestock's raised, and commodities are manufactured, then all sold locally.
Life is also apparently much more rural in Titor's future but sophisticated "high technology" is still used to communicate and conduct travel. Despite the many changes that come after the world war, the internet not only survives but actually evolves into something more significant and integral. Education is also more important and, to reinforce this fact, apparently all communities in the future are based around large universities. Titor said he attended school at Fort UF, which is presently called the University of Florida. Regarding this, he said, "Not too much is different except the military is large part of people's life and we spend a great deal of time in the fields and farms at the University or Fort."
Titor's future worldline also includes a drastically changed, more personable health care system which he likened to "the Old West", a more diverse, participation based, less localized entertainment industry, and a decentralized smart power grid system is used throughout the United States. In reference to time travel technology, Titor said that time travel was originally pursued for military purposes, but that in his future the official mandate for time travel is actually to help repair the environmental damage caused by humanity over the years through war and ignorance.
The repeatedly mentioned world war that's to occur in 2015 is apparently initiated by Russia as a direct result of U.S. foreign policy in the preceding years. According to posts, in 2015 Russia will launch a nuclear strike against the major cities in the United States, China and Europe. The United States counter attacks, but in the end there's only apocalyptic destruction all over the world. The European Union and China will also be destroyed in the war and, for all intents and purposes, it takes almost two decades to rebuild and detoxify the earth through patience, hard work and innovative new technologies. In 2001, how could John Titor have predicted the thawing that's taken place between the U.S. and the rest of the world, and particularly Russia, over the past decade?
In direct reference to the coming world conflict, Titor said, "Real disruptions in world events begin with the destabilization of the West as a result of degrading US foreign policy and consistency around the world. The Jewish population in Israel is not prepared for a true offensive war. They are prepared for the ultimate defense. Wavering western support for Israel is what gives Israel's neighbors the confidence to attack. The last resort for a defensive Israel and its offensive Arab neighbors is to use weapons of mass destruction. In the grand scheme of things, the war in the Middle East is a part of what's to come, not the cause."
When Titor made the aforesaid comments, he also could not have possibly known that Israel would suffer wavering support from the West in the ensuing years, but that's exactly what we've witnessed happening only as recently as over the past year.
Titor also indicated that the United States would attack an Arab nation early in the present decade on the basis of "lies, misconceptions and false evidence". He said that the nation's misguided foreign policy would erode, tarnishing America's image around the world, and become increasingly hostile toward other nations. Titor also said that American civil liberties would become progressively convoluted and eventually stripped in the name of "keeping us safe". He predicted that in the 2008 U.S. election, the race would be between a woman that represents change and a man that has good intentions but who's actions would keep the status quo and continue destroying the country's reputation around the world.
It should be noted that when Titor made these particular predictions, the U.S. had not yet started its decline in the eyes of its international contemporaries. You're probably asking yourself why he didn't predict the election of Barack Obama, but keep in mind that his world-line may be slightly different than ours. In his world-line's history, perhaps the 2008 election was actually between Hilary Clinton and John McCain and, based on what he described leading up to 2015, the winner was probably McCain.
Another of Titor's more significant predictions was that of a second major civil war set to occur inside the continental United States from [approximately] 2004 to 2015. He said that this new civil war will not resemble its 1860s predecessor but rather will be evident in the form of political upheaval, civil unrest, and widespread resentment by the people toward the government. Detractors always use this as a main point of contention in their argument against Titor's claims saying that there's been no semblance of civil war [since 2004] and, therefore, he's a fraud. However, reasonably it must be taken into account that after George W. Bush's narrow victory in 2004 and his robbery of Election 2000 still fresh in many people's hearts and minds, the nation became more polarized in 2004 than at any other point in its modern history.
In Titor's world-line, people of this time period stood against the government through armed conflict and civil unrest, but in our worldline perhaps we focused our discontent politically and that's why the 2008 election resulted in Barack Obama becoming President rather than John McCain. A civil war in the conventional sense may have not come to pass, but certainly there's been more resistance against corrupt government in recent years than at any other point in modern history.
It is true that Bush's attacks upon our civil rights never sparked outright civil war, but there's no question whatsoever that American freedoms were consistently under attack, that civil war could have easily broken out if Bush had pushed things far enough, and that many minor conflicts that had the potential to escalate were filtered out from the public awareness by a sellout news media machine failing to do their jobs with integrity and honesty. Domestic relocation camps operated by FEMA were never used by the Bush administration, whereas in Titor's original world-line they may have been used for the internment of Americans under the guise of imprisoning 'domestic terrorists'. Anyone who doubts that our civil liberties have been under attack and were actually significantly compromised under the Bush administration hasn't been paying attention very well. Titor's predictions about that were right on the money, and nobody could have reasonably contemplated that in 2000 or 2001.
In Titor's worldline, the civil war and ensuring world conflict forced the country to enact major structural changes to the U.S. Constitution and how the country is fundamentally governed. He said this about what followed the time of conflict, "After the war, the United States had split into five separate regions based on the various factors and military objectives they each had. There was a great deal of anger directed toward the Federal government and a revival of states rights was becoming paramount. However, in their attempt to create an economic form of government, the political and military leaders at the time decided to hold one last Constitutional Congress in order to present a psychological cohesion from the old system. During this Congress, the leaders discovered and decided that coming up with a new and better form of government was nearly impossible. The original Constitution itself was not the problem it was the ignorance of the people that lived under it."
Further, Titor said that five separate, but all equally influential, Presidents are elected for each of the five political regions setup under the new Constitution, and this is done democratically on a rotating schedule. He said of the five Presidents, "The reason the job of President was split into an office of 5 has 4 main reasons. With 5 (presidents), foreign policy is more consistent, power shifting between parties has less of an impact on the overall government, individual strengths between presidents add to the strength of the overall office, and one president is elected for each major area in the United States."
Another one of his prominent predictions centered around the cancellation of the Olympic Games after 2004 due to the civil unrest happening in the United States and additional conflicts happening around the world. However, it's not hard to imagine that since our world-line didn't see an armed civil war within its borders, it stands to reason that this particular prediction would also be different than what John remembers from his own history. In actual fact and to Titor's credit, the Olympics have indeed been plagued over the past decade with countless scandals, conflicts, threats of boycott, and other issues that, for all intents and purposes, could have easily escalated into more serious matters. In 2008, it's common knowledge that a number of nations at least threatened to boycott the Summer Games in China due to the hosting nation's poor human rights record, and militant measures had to be taken to prevent domestic and international human rights groups from protesting and causing disruptions. More recently, Vancouver 2010 has also been plagued with numerous scandals, loss of sponsors, low expectations, security concerns, accusations of being less than competitively fair, and threats of boycott.
At this point in the process, let's breakdown Titor's story, examine the elements of it closely, and attempt to answer any of the remaining questions.
In late-2000, a person suddenly surfaces on the internet claiming he's from the future, 2036 to be precise. The man, calling himself John Titor, details his mission, the mechanics behind time travel technology, and makes a number of predictions. He also explains that, for all intents and purposes, his predictions and speculations may not always be 100% accurate due to a phenomenon referred to as temporal divergence and brought on by technological limitations. At best, he stated that he'd achieve a 98% rate of accuracy in relation to most of what he might reveal during his time with us. He discussed his assertions, predictions and speculations, with dozens of interested parties and answered virtually every question asked to the satisfaction of most of those participating in the conversation, skeptics and believers alike. Despite what appeared to be some minor contradictions in his text along the way [over a period of a grueling three months to be exact], most of his story content was consistent, direct, and often compelling even in the face of intelligent debate and tough questions. Finally, he vanished in 2001 as suddenly as he appeared on the scene several months earlier.
In hindsight, Titor hasn't been 100% accurate in his predictions and assertions, and perhaps he hasn't even maintained a 98% ratio of success. However, he has been correct on a number of issues including, and certainly not the least significant of his predictions, the inception and evolution of the technologies that could lead to a practical time travel device over the next few decades. Although the U.S. didn't endure a second civil war, there's unquestionably been political and civil unrest that, under different circumstances, could have evolved into something much more serious and violent than what we've witnessed. America is still more divided and polarized today than at any point in its history since 1861. John Titor said that the West would unjustly attack an Arab state early in the current decade and this, to be sure, came to pass two short years after he predicted it. He predicted that Election 2008 would be between a woman and a man and, although this wasn't quite the case, that could have easily been the course of events. Until 2008, no other female candidate has ever been taken as serious as Hilary Clinton and, under different conditions, she could have been the Democratic candidate on the November 4, 2008, ballot. However, instead of Clinton versus McCain [that Titor predicted and claimed to have occurred in his own world-line], Barack Obama capitalized on the times and made enough of an impact to change the game entirely.
I also want to revisit John Titor's revelation that WW3 is imminent and set to take place in 2015, initiated by Russia and as a direct result of rogue U.S. foreign policy around the world. I hate to be a pessimist, but the facts seem to support the notion of a coming broad scaled conflict. In 1989, the Cold War was over, the Berlin Wall was scheduled to fall, and Russia was weaker than ever before [and at the economic, political, and military mercy of the West]. Over the ensuing years, Russia behaved like a model nation, received billions in aid, and commenced rebuilding their economy and military.
Let's look at the history between Russia and the West over the past two decades. Although Gorbachev and Yeltsin were pro-American, President Vladimir Putin is not and, like it or not, he's still the most prevailing, dominant force in Russian politics. While Putin was the President of Russia, George W. Bush ruled the free world with an iron fist, politically demeaned and humiliated Russia at every opportunity, and seriously alienated the U.S. from the rest of the planet. Even the staunchest skeptic would have a hard time arguing that Titor's prediction about a degradation in U.S. foreign policy and it's reputation around the world didn't definitively come to pass during Bush's time as President. Titor couldn't have been more dead on the mark than he was with this particular revelation. Having said that, it's also during Bush's time in office that President Putin presided over Russia and, as such, Putin has made it his mission to resurrect his nation from the ashes and restore his country's economic, military, and political might. His intent became more and more clear and evident each time he openly defied U.S. foreign policy on the world stage, even sending Russia's military into politically charged situations. Presently, Putin's serving as Russia's Prime Minister and President Dmitry Medvedev, Putin's hand picked successor, is at the nation's helm for the moment. However, it's well documented that most observers believe Putin plans to run for Russian president again in 2012 with the intent to continue his crusade against U.S. foreign policy and mission to restore Russia to its former glory as the world's preeminent superpower. Further, while Russia continues to make leaps and bounds in its national goals and agenda, the U.S. seemingly continues to suffer one setback after another, major economic issues, an overstretched military, a deteriorating situation around the world, more national polarization, a crumbling dollar, and unheard of levels of domestic division and political unrest. It's true that this future may not happen at all but if you truly open your mind to the direction things are going nowadays, it doesn't take a time traveler to imagine or fathom that this could happen in our world. Since I'm an optimist, I chose to believe that we'll avoid this type of apocalyptic future but I've been wrong before especially when it comes to having faith in humanity.
As far as the details that come after his accounts of WW3, those particular aspects of the future are nothing more than hearsay based on whether or not a number of other significant events come to pass in the next few years. However, true or not, it's nice to imagine a future global society that has overcome national interests and war, and where family, spirituality, and education are the most important things in everyone's lives. A future in that humanity has survived its most difficult challenges seems perfect, but this future could only occur if the world underwent something significant enough (i.e. a global war or alien invasion) to force these changes to happen, especially on a world-wide scale.
In my opinion and remembering that, after all, I am truly a skeptic that, in this particular case, wants to believe that John Titor was really a time traveler from the future, I am still sitting on the fence like, believe or not, many people that have studied Titor's posts. The amazing aspect of Titor's story is that, even after almost a decade, people are still debating him and keeping his story alive and kicking. Even if he was a fraud, he was very astute in his observations, predictions, and advanced due diligence into everything that he discussed or implemented as part of his planned story. So if he's not a time traveler, he's for all intents and purposes a bonafide genius that was able to pull off such a sophisticated, elaborate hoax that it transcended its original medium and convincingly invaded mainstream.
To be fair to the skeptics and despite any arguments in Titor's favor, some elements of his story have been discounted, to at least some degree, and mainstream investigation into his story has brought together a substantial amount of evidence suggesting that, perhaps, his story was indeed an elaborate hoax after all. However, despite all of the debunking taking place there's no question that John Titor's claims have stood the test of time, so to speak, and continues to capture attention and interest as, at the very least, a popular culture phenomenon.
