Culture and Society
PUBLISHED
Every now and then, someone on the Internet claims to be a time traveler, or else have spotted telltale signs of time travelers, for example, an iPhone in old videos and paintings.
These usually turn out to have plausible alternative explanations which don't require humanity to have figured out backwards time travel at some point in our future, nor the traversal of a wormhole. That doesn't stop the claims of time travel coming, though.
In a particularly stupid example highlighted by the Daily Mail recently, we can add the tale of "Mike" the time traveler to the list.
Mike, a man blurred out in an extensive interview with ApexTV, makes a number of strange and impossible-to-test claims. According to the man, who claims to be on the run from fellow time travelers, he became involved in several secret projects at Canada's national security agency, which included a number of military gadgets and, why not, a time machine.
Mike, who cannot be trusted further than you yourself can step back in time, claims that the group would hop at random through time, eventually reaching all the way to the year 3,700 CE. You may think humanity has its problems now (and it does), but according to Mike, things will get a lot worse.
"Since the year 3000 humanity was entirely replaced by robots, artificial intelligence and softwares," the man said in the video, adding on the bright side that humanity had finally switched to using solar energy rather than fossil fuels.
He claims that humanity's population had been reduced to around 3 billion people, who were nevertheless free to follow their own creative pursuits, while sharing the planet with around 1 million robots. But 700 years later, and in accordance with science fiction rules, everything went a bit SkyNet.
"In the year 3, 700 the war began. The war between humans race and artificial creators, the robots," he said. "The robots who had an artificial intelligence, once [they] understood their power, they understood their dominance above humans and raised above them."
According to "Mike", humanity did not fare well in this war and took to hiding from the now estimated 4 million robots in forests and caves. The robots, however, were willing to burn down the forests in their efforts to destroy all organic life.
In the way of "evidence" he showed the interviewer a "hand" taken from a "fox" robot, which he claimed to have personally killed.
As well as fox robots, which were non-human-like in appearance, he claimed to have met a humanoid robot which appeared to have developed a fear of death.
"People showed me a humanoid robot. He had skin, hair, eyes and artificial blood which was flowed in its cable veins," he said of the robot, which does not exist. "As a human he was scared, he didn't want to die, he knew what his death and was in depression."
As with all of these tales, not much was offered in the way of proof, beyond a nice little robot arm prop, and a few excuses as to why he is explaining this to a time travel-obsessed YouTube channel rather than the international press.
"I stole this robotic hand and ran away from laboratory, from Canada, and from continent," he said. "I know that they want to kill me as I am the only person who ran away from their company and the only person that wants to tell the truth."
We probably don't need to tell you this is all nonsense, though given this is just a sci-fi tale told to a camera, there is very little to actually debunk.
But we would say that it would be odd for a time traveler who claims to have proof of time travel and a horrifying future to communicate these claims in a single interview with a YouTube channel which constantly publishes videos of "aliens", "giant creatures" and "vampires".
At the current time, we have a few theoretical ideas of how time travel might be logically possible, and even a few far-flung methods (like the Tipler cylinder) which a significantly more advanced human species could have a try at, assuming the work still holds up.
But we certainly have no devices capable of time travel.
We do have the occasional time traveler party, however, which would provide an easy opportunity for any Arnold Schwarzenegger types to prove their existence. Stephen Hawking, MIT, and Caltech have all hosted such parties, where the idea is you invite attendees after the event has concluded.
Of course, nobody showed up, with Mike not even making the trouble to RSVP. Though a fun story, there is no reason to believe it is anything but a fun story, if a little derivative of The Terminator.
