Just about the scariest thing you could read.

[Flippy_D]

If you're paranoid, steer clear.

Now frankly, I don't believe it, but it's very very detailed, all feasible (bear in mind when it was written), and no-one seems to find flaws in his story.

However, like I said, I don't hold for that kind of thing.
Nevertheless, it's highly... unsettling...

[Ben]

Heh.. Well, it's fun to read. It's elaborate enough to be believable, even to a cynical dick like me  

No new information there (on UFOs and aliens). I find that an interesting
subject myself. Personally, I think "UFOs" might be time travelers with very
sophisticated distortion units. But that might be a bit wacky.

[LordHart]

Yeah, like in #ags, that freaked me out. Don't know why, but it did.

[c.leksutin]

"George W. Bush wins second term as American President"


... THAT would be the scariest thing I could ever read....



C.

[Robert Eric]

I'm sure Eric would be interested in this.

So far, it seems the only current possible direction in time to travel is forward.  Going back in time would depend if time really exists and is actually accessible.

Edit: By the way, Howard Dean will become the next US president, and Osama will stage another attack on the US, which Dean will handle brilliantly without declaring war.  Wouldn't it be funny if this happens.

[strazer]

Sounds like a great idea for an adventure game  

[gemen]

Very disturbing. The scariest part is that he is so passive at some points, just as you would imagine a regular person, not someone that is pretending to be a hero from the future.


The biggest thing, though, is that he has not mentioned September 11, or anything, for that matter, that would proove without a doubt that he is from the future.

And what on earth would he be doing telling people this shit online? The way I see it, he would simply be getting his shit and leaving, especially since we are so hated in his time.

Come to think of it, I heared this story before. The first time, it was called KPax, though.


This is obviously a smart man, one who is familliar with advanced physics. (Oh yeah, he's NOT a physicist, and he also conveniently doesnt know who wins the 2001 super bowl.) It is very possible that.................(Somewhere inside me, I'm kinda scared that he is for real.)

[Bluke4x4]

This sort of scares me, but I don't know why. I LOVE sci-fi movies involving time travel, so I have no clue why this disturbs me rather than intruiging me. But it'd be pretty frickin' hilarious if it was just some mischevious prankster who got bored one day and decided to mess with people's heads.

[Ben]

Well, after reading a lot more of it, it is kind of disturbing. All the predictions he makes could be possible, especially the way Bush handles foreign policy like he's pissing blindfolded. If he's reelected, I might just consider buying that bomb shelter

Bah.. I'm too paranoid to read stuff like that..

[Raggit]

I find his discussion of WWIII quite scary.  Especially the nuclear wars and fighting killing like three billion people.  But he mentioned something about a civil war starting in 2004.  Which is now, so we'll see what happens.  

I'm kinda skeptical though.

[shbaz]

If a civil war starts this year, the only reason I could think of would involve the presidency. Some people really are angry enough about Bush that they'd try this.

All in all.. I think a grad student could come up with this if they were skilled in the sciences and knew a lot about psychology. I haven't read a lot of it yet.. but it seems the most implausible is the 2005 civil war, since that is now and it seems unlikely to happen.

[Raggit]

All in all.. I think a grad student could come up with this if they were skilled in the sciences and knew a lot about psychology. I

I agree.  And until a civil war starts I won't believe it.

[TerranRich]

I just got the greatest idea. If someone else used John Titor's information for something (say the basis for a story or game) with his details and all, then it turned out to be true, it would that person in this timeline that would gain from it.

Imagine, making a game that involves those details, made, say, today, and then it comes true. The creator of the game would be heralded as a prophet/seer/psychic.

Heh, I love how John doesn't understand the "I don't buy it" comments and wonders what he could possibly gain by selling his story.

[Nine Toes]

All in all.. I think a grad student could come up with this if they were skilled in the sciences and knew a lot about psychology. I

I agree.  And until a civil war starts I won't believe it.

Ditto.  Hey, it's supposed to happen sometime later this year, early next year, right?  So we'll see...

Now, don't get me wrong, as I was reading this, I started to wonder... "what if?"  Should I quit smoking?  Should I start building a bunker?  Should I go buy myself a bicycle?  The paranoid side of me said, "quite possibly".  But the logical side of me just tells me I get way too excited about nothing.

Now, what I want to know is (and spare me if I just missed this part or read some info wrong)... Why wasn't this guy afraid of causing a paradox (and in turn, ultimately causing the end of the universe)?  And what about the Chaos Theory?  He didn't care about disclosing this information to a public forum, because "he's not worried about our world line"... but isn't he supposed to be from OUR future?  So by being here in our present time, and his actions, he could actually be altering our future, and his present (possibly into a reality where he never existed, which in turn, would cause a paradox because he's here and he exists, yet at the same time he never will exist so that he could be here in our time)?  I may be rambling, but I have a general idea of what I'm talking about and I could go on forever.

It's creepy shit, and it does make me stop, take a step back, and appreciate all that I have, but at the same time I think it's horse shit.

A good thrill, I must say!

BTW, Flippy... how did you ever come across this?

EDIT:  I just got back to thinking...

If it is some grad student just trying to manipulate and scare people just for laughs, "You suck, go get a life."  (wouldn't that qualify as some type of terrorism?  Attempting to cause mass hysteria?)

But, if somewhere off in the distant future, John Titor is reading this and laughing his ass off at me because I'm wrong, "Yer momma..."

[remixor]

I read that whole thing a while ago and honestly I think it's a load of crap.  I got the impression it was just a way for some guy to mess with people and criticise modern society in a roundabout way.

[Bob The Hun]

But if you read all of the posts, you'll find them bubbling with contradictions and impossible predictions.
For one, a US Civil War, in 2004?! Um, that's NOT going to happen, trust me. If it was going to happen, there would be several signs that it would happen so soon. The original US Civil war had signs that it would happen YEARS in advance. Anybody who's studied American history would know that, before the civil war, the US was much less united, in the sense that states tended to think of themselves as more independent than they do today, and the government was nowhere near as central or stable as it is today.

If a civil war starts this year, the only reason I could think of would involve the presidency. Some people really are angry enough about Bush that they'd try this.

Not anything anybody would try to start a civil war about. Lots of conservatives hated Clinton, but they didn't start a civil war. Also, people starting a war because they don't like somebody else starting a war?
And also, Russia is probably one of the countrys that is least able to attack us. Sure, they were a threat in the cold war, but that ended over 10 years ago. Saying they'd nuke us in 15 years is like saying Germany would attack France in 1960.
Also, his "predictions" are ripe with contridictions. One of them I remember is that once, he says he can't remember who won the Superbowl that year, and we shouldn't expect him too because we can't be expected to remember sporting events from a long time ago. In another thing, he notes that the present does seem to be a little 'different', in the sense that things seem to turn out a little differently, one of the examples given being that he notices that some sporting events turn out differently. So he can remember the outcome of minor sporting events but not of the biggest one in the year?
Also, why didn't he mention any specific dates? If a bunch of people in the 30's believed I was a time traveler, and I did go back there, I'm sure I would mention December 7th, 1941. All the ways he sidesteps around all these questions seem quite suspicious.

If you could go back in time to 1941 and tell the radar operators to take a second look at the radar screen on December 7th, would you? Before you say yes and accept that parade in your honor down Main Street, perhaps you should go forward in time and see if the U.S still had the motivation to make the A-bomb before Hitler did.

Um, excuse me Mr. Titor, but we still would have gone to war with Japan. We still would have gone to war with Germany. And, Hitler never really had a chance of developing an A-Bomb, seeing as how all his top scientists were smart enough to see that it wouldn't be good to give Hitler an A-Bomb, and so they purposely mislead him and refused to develop a working one. With or without the Manhatten project, Hitler probably wouldn't have developed an A-Bomb anyway.
And I could get in to the whole scientific ludicrousy that is his "time machine". It's in a car? Oh, however did you come up with that idea? I see, Mr. Titor, that you must have watched 'Back to the Future' before you decided to try and convince everyone you were a time traveler. Anybody with any training in science should know that his whole "time machine" system is just flat-out stupid. Remember fusion power? That's been proven possible, and they've worked on it for decades with no practical results. Especially with a war going on (resulting in the focus of science shifting from peaceful technology to warfare technology) it would be impossible for a time travel theory to be conceived, proven, and put into practical usage in such a short amount of time.
Agh, I won't even go on with this. IMHO, he's just some bored nerd with too much time on his hands, so he decided to go and try to convince people he's a time traveler. I imagine this has happened before, it's just that this one's "predictions" can be wildly distorted out of context so that it sounds like he predicted something. And pretty much all of the predictions are either extremely vague or extremely farfetched.

[Barcik@School]

Many people believe John may have known of these events and dropped clues without actually referring to them.

That is so human. I'll be damned if a person won't be able to find some 'hint' where he is looking for it.

[Squinky]

Hmmm, Here he says:

My greatest joy is sailing. For fun, I enjoy swimming, playing cards,
reading, playing games on the net

Later:
Do they have (old computer games) in 2036?

I am aware they are video games but I have not come across them.

Then, this is the one that really sticks out to me:

What type of money do you use in 2036?

Its not very different than it is now. Yes, we have money and credit cards.
However, like everything else, the monetary system is decentralized. Banking
is based mostly around the community structure. There are no multinational
banking or computerized economic systems. There are also no income taxes.

Heres why later:

Is there an IRS?


Yes, we pay taxes. Sounds like you don't enjoy keeping track of your
personal income taxes. I don't think anyone does.


Yes, this is crap.

[TerranRich]

I can already see this debate slowly degradnig into one of time travel and paradoxes.


I agree with Titor in that temporal paradoxes cannot happen, because there are multiple universes, or parallel timelines.

Scenario #1: I go back in time to kill my mother in an attempt to end my own existence pre-emptively.

I am currently in Timeline A. I go back to the past. Immediately, this creates a Timeline B, because I wasn't normally there, and I just created a new parallel timeline. Therefore, when I kill my mother, I will still exist, and if I go to the future, it will be the future of that current timeline, in which nobody knows who the hell I am, because I never existed. Scary, eh?

Scenario #2: John Titor also mentioned that if you sent a message to your future self through him, Future You would receive it, but would have no memory of ever having met you or asked you to send yourself a message.

This one I couldn't grasp. I am currently in Timeline A. John Titor comes back, creates Timeline B. In Timeline B, I ask Titor to send Future Me a message. He does. He travels back to the future, which is the future of Timeline B. Since it's the same timeline, I should vaguely remember the message and giving it to him. Maybe I'm missing something here.

God, I love temporal theory and the logistics of it all.

[Nacho]

C´mon guys... this is the typical magical trick of disctraction... I remember one...

You say to somebody that you´re going to read his mind... You say him that you´re going to ask him something, but that you´re going to write in a paper the answer before he says in loud voice.

You write in a paper "RED"and you save it... Then you ask to somebody "Which is your favourite number?" (A totally different question)

He asks: 12... And you write in a paper "12" and you guard it... You have one question answered correctly.

You make this person a lot of questions, and you finally ask him which is his favourite color... and then you show him the papers. Of course, all of them are correct, because you wrote the answers after he said them (But he thinks you wrote it before...). Some times, even the color question is well answered, but, if not, you can claim that guessing 12 or 13 questions of 14 is quite correct. That has been a trick.

The same is happening here. That forums were created after knowing the terrorist strike on 11/9 and all the stuff... the trick is to use a lot of people to say that the predictions were made before. When the rumor starts to spread, a lot of people will start to say "I WAS IN THAT FORUMS BEFORE 11/9 AND I READ THE PREDICTIONS" which is false...

This way of "rumour" spreading is very known by the folklore students. I remember that a few years ago (2002) there was a "surprise" program on tv. It consisted in hiding famous people in the houses of their fans and surprise them. The rumour said that a teen girl put mermelade in her "parts" and called his doggie to lick her "parts" before the famous person appeared... The girl was surprised and her fantasy was seen by milions of people on TV live.

Of course... this was false, it never happened. But people claimed that they had the video at home, that they saw the re-playing of the video in some late-night program, that a friend ensured him that he was seeing the program live... All was a lie!!!

Late investigations revealed that the rumour started in a late "radio-confessions" program. One guy called asking "Is that true that this thing happened in the TV program "surprise-surprise"?" The rumour was "official" just 16 days after.

We´ve got more examples... Houdini, the famous scapists, claimed that his most famous trick was just a lucky strike. He said that the box were he was in when he was thrown to the Hudson river was took by the water current far far away. As the box was underwater, people believed that he died, when they saw no sign of life after 10-15 minutes. When Houdini appeared 30 minutes later he was lauched to the fame.

Where is the trick? Well... the trick is that Houdini never did that trick... it was just a rumour he spreaded to forge his legend. And it worked.

So... we have two options...

a) believing that in fact there is such a stupid time traveler who has been trapped in this time and likes internet forums, or...

b) believing that this is a trick.

I vote for b.