A Time of Magic

At just about every turn you find people that are looking for evidence that aliens are amongst us, but there seem to be a great deal fewer people looking for time evidence of time travellers even though one would think they’d be easier to find.

Where (or when) would you look though? The problem in identifying them is that, as we’ve discussed here before, it would be far from easy to pick them out whilst they were in our time period. There’s all kinds of reasons for that but boiling down to the fact that they’d be unlikely to have as detailed a knowledge of events in our period as would be required for them to be able to prove that they were from the future. It would be small things that would identify them and they’d be quite hard to pick out: a different way of phrasing things (but then that could just be because they were from another country), a different way of dressing (if you’ve looked in the highstreet lately you might come to the conclusion that everyone was from the future!) or different expectations (like not understanding why you had to dial a phone number instead of just asking for the person perhaps?).

However, we should be able to pick them out from the past if we narrow down the time period and look very carefully.

In that respect, perhaps the best event to consider is the sinking of the Titanic. It’s something that’s become very well known in our own time and because it sets so many precedents (eg lifeboats for everyone, manning the radio 24/7, etc.) it may remain sufficiently attractive right through to the time when someone builds a time machine. The other attraction for a potential time traveller is that it’s been very well researched so they’d know pretty much exactly where to go to see the various events and even where they needed to be to be amongst those rescued.

That last point is quite critical. If we assume that the time machine itself would need to go into the past then they would need to be amongst the survivors. Naturally, if the time machine didn’t need to go into the past then this wouldn’t apply but let’s be optimistic and assume that it needed to for now.

Think about it: this means that there’s a good chance that at least one of those survivors was from the future.

Thanks to the sheer volume of information available, it might even be possible to identify them too. What you’re looking for is someone on their own (ie exclude anyone with family on the ship or who subsequently returned to family in Europe), who wasn’t famous and who disappeared after they were rescued. An impossible task? I don’t think so: the Encyclopedia Titanica contains biographic details on all of the survivors so, in principle, it’s just a matter of working through the 712 survivors to identify the time traveller.