WASHINGTON: In a first-of-its-kind study, researchers have searched through the Internet to look for any time travelers from the future that may be lurking in our world.
Astrophysicist Robert Nemiroff from Michigan Technological University and his students were inspired to conduct the research after they wondered: If there were time travelers among us, would they be on social media? How would you find them? Could you Google them?
“We had a whimsical little discussion about this,” said Nemiroff.
The result was a serious-but-fun effort to tease out travelers from the future by sifting through the Internet.
Nemiroff’s team developed a search strategy based on what they call prescient knowledge. If they could find a mention of something or someone on the Internet before people should have known about it, that could indicate that whoever wrote it had traveled from the future.
They selected search terms relating to two recent phenomena, Pope Francis and Comet ISON, and began looking for references to them before they were known to exist.
Their work was exhaustive: they used a variety of search engines, such as Google and Bing, and combed through Facebook and Twitter.
In the case of Comet ISON, there were no mentions before it burst on the scene in September 2012. They discovered only one blog post referencing a Pope Francis before Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elected head of the Catholic Church on March 16, but it seemed more accidental that prescient. -PTI
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