If you were a time traveler, what would you do to prove that your powers are real?
Would you write a Tweet about this? …of course.
At least that's what astrophysicist Robert Nemiroff and physics graduate student Teresa Wilson at Michigan Technological University think you would. So they tried to search for time travelers on the social networking sites Facebook and Twitter.
The pair searched the two social media platforms for any mentions of two specific events, the discovery of Comet ISON in September 2012 and the election of Pope Francis in March 2013, before they happened. Their theory, presented in a study published last month (PDF), states that if there were any tweets containing “Comet ISON,” or “#cometison,” or “Pope Francis” or “#popefrancis” before those dates, they could very well have come from a time traveler.
Nemiroff and Wilson wrote that when searching Facebook for such posts, the website often returned no results, or the results they did have were incomplete, the Huffington Post.
” Perhaps, like many others, time travelers prefer to keep their posts on Facebook very personal and have blocked the search.”
Unfortunately for humanity and Hollywood, the researchers didn't have better luck on Twitter, where the majority of members of the popular microblocking keep their tweets public. The researchers, however, have not lost hope, as they explain in their study, because the fact that they themselves haven't discovered any time traveler doesn't mean that none exist.
It is quite possible that time travelers do not leave any evidence of their journey, say Nemiroff and Wilson. ” Or it may be naturally impossible for us to discover this information as it would violate some laws of physics unknown to date”, they say, “or the time travelers may not want to be found, and may be very good at covering their tracks.”…..
