This seems to be the day of finding oddball stories. In this case, a pair of Physics Professors scoured the internet for any evidence of…time travelers. SPOILER ALERT: Sadly, they found no evidence of any:
As a fan of science fiction, one of my favorite concepts to explore both in my writings (my own personally written favorite time travel story can be found in the short story collection Shadows at Dawn. The story is titled Dreams Do Come True) and in the works of others is time travel. There are plenty of really good stories out there featuring this idea and plenty of others that somehow screw the concept up.
The reality -and allure- of time travel as a concept is that it is so very cool yet also so very messy. The “grandfather” paradox, which if applied broadly explores the concept of changing your future via traveling to the past, is perhaps the biggest issue regarding any time travel story. The original concept is that you go back in time and accidentally or on purpose kill your grandfather…before your father was born. That being the case, how can you (the time traveler) in your present even exist if in the past your grandfather was dead before your father was conceived?
The concept of killing a figure in the past can thus be expanded to others, the most noted one being Adolph Hitler. So the story goes that you’re in the future and have a time machine. You go back in time and target and kill Adolph Hitler well before he comes to power in Nazi Germany (perhaps you murder him as a child, perhaps you make sure his parents never meet, etc).
Yet by doing so, you’ve made your “present” Adolph Hitler free. That being the case, why would you want to go back in time and eliminate this man? Your present would thus be a whole different one, perhaps one where another figure took over the vacuum left behind by Hitler’s death (there were other geo-political events in motion during that time and it is possible if Hitler didn’t come to power someone else might well have in his place…perhaps someone much smarter, bolder, and crueler -if such a thing is possible). Or perhaps your future would be so radically altered that there was no time travel…or perhaps no “you”!
Which begs the question: If time travel is possible, can you alter history? Can you eliminate yourself if you do so? If not, could time travel actually be some kind of alternate dimensional trip, where instead of going “back” in time you’re actually traveling to an alternate universe that is currently experiencing a different year than yours? And this brings up another, even more deeply philosophical issue: Is our future thus pre-determined? While we affect history in the present, does the idea of not being able to “change the past” essentially mean the future is also unchangeable? If we can’t go back and kill an Adolph Hitler and make a more peace-loving alternate 1930’s era Germany, then could whatever happens from this day forward is also written in stone on some God/alien/Supreme Being’s mountain? Is our fate pre-determined?
Anyway, getting back to the original article: No evidence of time travelers.
Bummer. 😉