80: JOHN TITOR: Soldier from the Future | Can this time traveler save us from destruction?
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Hey, it's your buddy AJ from the Y-Files. And Hecklefish. Right, and Hecklefish. We just wanted to tell you that if you want to start a podcast, Spotify makes it easy. It'd have to be easy for humans to understand it. Will you stop that? I'm just saying. Spotify for Podcasters lets you record and edit podcasts from your computer. I don't have a computer. Do you have a phone? Of course I have a phone. I'm not a savage. Well, with Spotify, you can record podcasts from your phone, too.

Spotify makes it easy to distribute your podcast to every platform and you can even earn money. I do need money. What do you need money for? You kidding? I'm getting killed on guppy support payments. These 3X wives are expensive. You don't want to support your kids? What are you, my wife's lawyer now? Never mind. And I don't know if you noticed, but all Y-Files episodes are video too. And there's a ton of other features, but... But we can't be here all day. Will you settle down? I need...

you to hurry up with this stupid commercial. I got a packed calendar today. I'm sorry about him. Anyway, check out Spotify for Podcasters. It's free, no catch, and you can start today. Are we done? We're done, but you need to check your attitude. Excuse me, but I don't have all day to sit here and talk about Spotify. Look, this would go a lot faster if you would just let me get through it without...

This is our future. The United States of America endures a second civil war killing millions. Immediately after that, a world war begins. Nuclear weapons are used. Billions are killed. The aftermath leaves the Earth in ruins. Electric grids are down. Food becomes scarce. Disease is rampant. Society breaks down. Then in 2038, all computers go offline.

Civilization is set back several hundred years. The world enters a second Dark Age. Only by changing events in our past and present can we avoid this nightmare of a future. In 1998, in a small town in Florida, John Titor was born. In the year 2036, John, a temporal soldier, would be sent back in time. His mission? Save the world.

On July 29th, 1998, Art Bell, host of Coast to Coast AM, was running what he called open timelines. He wanted calls from people who claimed to be time travelers. Obviously, this brought out plenty of kooks. But then a fax came in that felt eerily real. Dear Art, I had a fax when I heard other time travelers calling in from any time past the year 2500 AD. Please let me explain.

Time travel was invented in 2034. Certain successful fusion reactor research allowed scientists at CERN to produce the world's first contained singularity engine. The basic design involves rotating singularities inside a magnetic field. By altering the speed and direction of vocation, you can travel both forward and backward in time.

"'Time itself can be understood in terms of connected lines. "'When you go back in time, you travel on your original timeline. "'When you turn your singularity engine off, a new timeline is created "'due to the fact that you and your time machine are now there.'

Some interesting outcomes of this are, one, you meet yourself. I have done it often, even taken a younger version of myself along for a few rides, before returning myself to the new timeline and going back to mine. Two, you can alter history in the new universe that you have just created. Most of the time, the changes are subtle.

Sometimes I'll notice car models that don't exist or books that come out late. Unfortunately, it was also discovered that anyone going forward in time for my 2036 hit a brick wall in the year 2564. Please pray that we discover the reason why there is no apparent future after 2564. A few days later, a second fax came in. Dear Mr. Bell, I'm glad you're back.

I faxed this information to you the day before you left the air. As I said then, I am a time traveler. I have been on this world line since April of this year and I plan to leave soon. Typically, time travelers do not purposely affect the world lines they visit. However, this mission is unusually long.

and I've grown attached to some of the people I have met here. Anyway, for my own reasons, I have decided to help this world line by sharing information about the future with a few people, in the hope that it will help their future. I realize my claims are a bit difficult to accept, so I will send the following once I know you have received this fax. A few pages from the operations manual of my time machine, and a few colored photographs of my vehicle.

Art Bell didn't hear from this person again, which was too bad because he offered to show proof. Everybody who heard that broadcast wanted to see a working time machine, learn the science behind time travel, and know events from the future. Two years later, they would get their wish.

A little over two years after the time traveler sent faxes to Art Bell, a user who called himself Time Traveler Zero and later John Teeter created an account on a message board called the Time Travel Institute. On November 2nd, 2000, he submitted his first post. Greetings. I am a time traveler from the year 2036. I am on my way home after getting an IBM 5100 computer system from the year 1975.

My time machine is a stationary mass temporal displacement unit manufactured by General Electric. The unit is powered by two top spin dual positive singularities that produce a standard offset Tipler sinusoid. I will be happy to post pictures of the unit.

Now, before we get into it, I have to be fair and say there were plenty of people on the message board who were skeptical, who wouldn't be. But John Titor was very specific and seemed to have very specialized knowledge. First off, a Tipler sinusoid or Tipler cylinder is a theoretical method of time travel outlined in a paper by Frank Tipler in 1974. So we're off to an interesting start. But what about the IBM 5100?

Why would anyone with the technology to travel through time need a computer that was, in 2036, about 80 years old? Well, John Titor said the 5100 was needed to debug legacy computer programs in 2036 because Unix has a problem in 2038.

Well, that's true. Remember the Y2K scare? The fear was hardware and software that measured the year in two digits would freak out when the year changed from 99 to 00. Now, the world didn't end as some people anticipated, but Y2K did cause some sporadic problems. Something similar is going to happen in 2038, and it could be worse.

Unix systems measure time in seconds. A Unix timestamp is the number of seconds since January 1st, 1970. So the Unix timestamp one minute after that date is 60. The timestamp one hour after that date is 3600 and up it goes.

As I write this, the Unix timestamp is 1664131870, so about 1.6 billion seconds. Without getting too geeky, a 32-bit integer can only go as high as about 2.1 billion. The official last date that a 32-bit system can recognize is Tuesday, January 19th, 2038. After that, things could get interesting. No, interesting is never good. It's not.

And the way to solve this is by upgrading systems to 64 bits. And how far in the future does that get us? Well, the max 64-bit number is about 9.2 quintillion. So that gets us to the year 292 billion and change. Oh, that should be enough.

It will be. So what does an old computer have to do with this? Well, John Titor said the IBM 5100 could help them debug legacy code. And this is actually correct. Most personal computers like the IBM 5100 could only support the basic programming language. But the 5100 had special functionality that was hidden from the public. It could run programs written in BASIC, but it could also run APL programs written for IBM mainframes. That's useful.

Only the IBM engineers who designed it knew this secret. They were afraid of how competitors might use it. In 2002, NASA was buying old gear on eBay because that was the only way to find Intel 8086 chips, which they needed for various missions. So this is something that happens. So John Titor's first post contained a lot of sound science and information that wasn't well known at the time. But he was just getting started.

John Titor was very active on the message board. He would answer any question anyone had. He just wouldn't talk about things like the stock market or who would win the Super Bowl. He said he wasn't interested in helping anyone get rich. And even if he was, he couldn't remember who won a Super Bowl 35 years ago.

But John Titor also said that predictions like that could be wrong because he was from a different timeline, which he called a worldline. How he explained it was imagine a cone where the diameter of the cone is how different the destination time is from your own. You enter the time machine at the tip of the cone.

The further backward or forward in time you go, the larger the divergence. Titor said that when he arrived in the year 2000, the divergence was about 1 or 2%. Now that's not a lot, but it's enough where different teams could win different games. What Titor is describing is the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, where

where anything that can possibly happen does happen, it just happens in a different timeline. Titor specifically referred to the Everett Wheeler model, which again shows a good grasp of quantum mechanics and the scientists working in the field. Even though John Titor wouldn't make petty predictions, he would describe his life and the future in detail. John said that in the early 2000s, there would be a Waco-type event every month that steadily gets worse.

The Civil War in the United States starts in 2004, and the war affects everyone. At the age of 13, John joins a shotgun infantry unit called the Fighting Diamondbacks, and the war continues until 2015 and finally ends with what he calls a very short World War III. Taking advantage of America's weakness, Russia attacks cities in the United States, China, and Europe. The United States retaliated, and as a result, 3 billion people are killed.

The only people to survive are the ones who don't live in the big cities. In the aftermath of the war, the United States is split into five separate regions. Each region elects its own president, and all five presidents serve a new, very diminished federal government in the capital, which has been moved to Omaha, Nebraska. In 2036, I live in central Florida with my family, and I'm currently stationed at an army base in Tampa.

A world war in 2015 killed nearly 3 billion people. The people that survived grew closer together. Life is centered on the family and then the community. I cannot imagine living even a few hundred miles away from my parents. There's no large industrial complex creating masses of useless food and recreational items. Food and livestock is grown and sold locally. People spend much more time reading and talking together face to face.

Religion is taken seriously and everyone can multiply and divide in their heads. - This new world is now a simpler place. More focus is placed on family, the community and religion. The biggest fear John Titor has is mad cow disease, which has become a worldwide pandemic. John transfers into a military unit with seven other time travelers.

And their job is to go back and try and prevent as much environmental damage as possible. The narrative John Titor creates is very detailed, and I'll link to a page where you can read every one of his posts. And even though people on the message board were entertained and fascinated, they were skeptical. They wanted to know, one, can you tell us how your time travel device works? And two, can you show us a picture of it? The answer was yes, and yes.

John Titor posted diagrams of his time travel device, pictures of the operator's manual, and even pictures of the device itself. According to John, time travel is discovered in 2034 by scientists at CERN. Using this breakthrough technology, General Electric actually creates working time travel devices.

These machines go through various iterations and improvements. The time travel unit John Titor uses is a C204 Gravity Distortion Time Displacement Unit, which operates using micro singularities or tiny black holes. The source of power for the C204 that allows it to distort and manipulate gravity comes from two micro singularities that were created, captured and cleaned at a much larger and circular facility.

The dual event horizons of each one and their mass is manipulated by ejecting electrons onto the surface of their respective herbospheres. The electricity comes from batteries. The breakthrough that will allow for this technology will occur within a year or so when CERN brings their larger facility online.

John Titor talks about Kerr black holes, which are black holes that rotate, and Tipler cylinders. Now, these are real theories in physics that involve time travel. One of the most interesting pieces of technology in John Titor's time machine is called a Variable Gravity Lock System, or VGL.

Since the machine only travels through time and not space, the VGL makes sure that the Earth is in the same place in orbit when it reaches its destination. Otherwise you end up floating in space, which is not ideal. The hard part of traveling through time is not the bending of gravity, but the plotting of your course and holding to the basic position in your environment. This is done through a system called VGL, Variable Gravity Lock. In effect, it holds you to the Earth.

During travel, it periodically checks to see that the field has not varied. If it does, it stops and reverses course or drops out at that point. Buildings and other terrain features are avoided in the same way. As soon as the VGO sensors pick up an unexpected mass in the target world line, it would shut down.

The C204 has an array of computers, clocks and sensors to get you to the correct date. But because timelines get more and more different the further forward or back you go, the unit maxes out at about 60 years. Someone asked him about traveling back a thousand years. John said that you wouldn't even recognize that world. The distortion unit reaches its target destination by using very sensitive gravity sensors and atomic clocks. The basic unit of calculation is the second.

So yes, in a sense you do dial in a date and the computer system controls the distortion field. At maximum power, the unit I have is capable of traveling about 10 years an hour. Unfortunately, time traveled is not an exact science. There is inherent error and chaos in the computer's ability to make accurate calculations. Based on the current technology of the clocks and sensors, distortion units are only accurate to about 60 years or so.

So no, in 2036 we are unable to travel back 1,000 years due to the error rate in the system. The divergence between the world line of origin and the target world line would be too great. If one were to try and travel back that far, history would look nothing like what you would expect. In other words, if I wanted to go back 2,000 years and meet Christ, there is a better than average chance I would end up on a world line where he was never born.

Yep, that's because on John Titor's first trip, the time machine was mounted inside a 67 Chevy. Well, the reason for the Chevy and why John later moved the machine to a truck is because the C204 is heavy. It needs a vehicle with a suspension that can handle the weight. Plus, the time machine has to be mobile. Since

Since it only travels through time and not space, you have to drive to your physical destination first and then move through time. He chose those vehicles because they blend into the times he was traveling to. Well, John Titor does talk about this.

You feel a tug toward the unit, similar to rising quickly in an elevator, and it continues to rise based on the power setting the unit is working under. At 100% power, the constant pull of gravity can be as high as 2G or more, depending on how close you are to the unit. There are no serious side effects, but I try to avoid eating before a flight. No bright flash of light is seen. Outside, the vehicle appears to accelerate as the light is bent around it.

We have to wear sunglasses or close our eyes as this happens due to a short burst of ultraviolet radiation. Personally, I think it looks like you're driving under a rainbow. After that, it appears to fade to black and remains totally black until the unit is turned off. We're advised to keep the windows closed as a great deal of heat builds up outside the car. The gravity field also traps a small air pocket around the car and acts as your only O2 supply unless you bring compressed air with you.

2Gs, ugh. I can never time travel because of my IBS. Uh, that's TMI. Um, no, it's I-P-S. Never mind. Naturally, people were skeptical of all this technology, but John Titor didn't really care. My goal is not to be believed. Most people do not take news of the war very well, but I find that everyone believes it's inevitable. I watch every day what you are doing as a society.

"'Why do you sit by and watch your constitution being torn away from you? "'You willfully eat poisoned food, buy manufactured products no one needs, "'and turn an uncaring eye away from millions of people suffering and dying all around you. "'Perhaps I should let you all in on a little secret. "'No one likes you in the future. "'This time period is looked at as being full of lazy, self-centered, civically ignorant sheep. "'Perhaps you should be less concerned about me and more concerned about that.'

John Titor's face was never seen, his voice was never heard, and John Titor is not his real name, so there's not much we know about him. But one person did have a close relationship with John, or at least claimed to, Pamela Moore. Pamela was very active on the message boards,

and spent a lot of time chatting with John over IM. Before John Titor left, he said he would make a departure video and send it to Pamela. How is she supposed to know the video is legit? Well, because John provided Pamela with a secret song to act as a password. This is something only the two of them know so she could identify imposters. And to this day, the departure video has not arrived.

and Pamela has never revealed the secret song. On March 24th, 2001, John Titor would leave his final message and some words of wisdom. "I will be leaving this worldline shortly and this will be my final post. There are only a handful of people who will know exactly when I will be leaving, and I'm sure they will let you know when I'm gone. In the last few days I have found your choice of topics quite interesting, and from an objective viewpoint I think it collectively answers one of your own questions,

If time travel is real, where are all the time travelers? In the past, I've stated that, quite frankly, you all scare the hell out of me. And I'm sure other temporal draggers would feel the same. But now, I have an expanded explanation. A while ago, I related an experience I had with my parents while we were driving down an highway. Every now and then, we would pass someone who was in obvious distress with their vehicle. I was amazed that so many people could pass them without stopping to help.

Their explanation was fear. The risk of helping someone was too great, and with today's technology, it probably had a cell phone anyway. If they didn't, the walk to a gas station would be good for them and teach them a lesson for running out of gas. This is why town travelers do not show themselves. In trying to help you, we put ourselves at great risk, and there's really no point to it. I already know you won't pay any attention or believe me because we've already been through it on this world line.

Besides, I think the walk to the gas station will do you some good. I also want to thank Pamela for helping me with the email and everyone else who asked intelligent and insightful questions. I have learned a great deal. My parting thought revolves around something J.C. has been harping on since day one. No, I do not have a secret agenda, but I have been paying a great deal of attention to your worldline.

My interaction with you was not a direct mission parameter, but it was a secondary mission protocol based on standing orders given to all temporal drivers. That secondary objective is basically to gather as much information about a worldline based on a set of observable variables when we first arrive. Your worldline met those conditions.

And John Titor was gone, and hasn't been heard from since. But that was really just the beginning of the legend.

When the John Titor story first landed in 2001, it was a sensation. But as the years went on, we've been able to see the accuracy of John's predictions. John predicted a civil war in the United States that would begin in 2005.

Obviously, that didn't happen. But you can make the case that America has never been more divided than it is today. Thanks, Twitter. 20% of adults in a recent survey said they believe a civil war is likely within the next 10 years. That's a high percentage. And John Titor predicted a nuclear war in 2015. And that, too, didn't happen. But considering current world events, the last time we were this close to nuclear war was the Cuban Missile Crisis.

I actually think we're in more danger now." He predicted there would be no Olympic Games after 2004. He was wrong about that, but there were no 2020 Olympics. John Titor did get a few things right.

There was a mad cow disease outbreak in the early 2000s. It's America's first confirmed case of bovine spongiform encephalitis in six years. BSE is mad cow disease, a potentially deadly brain-wasting infection that can be transferred to humans. When John Titor was posting in early 2001, most people were still accessing the internet with a dial-up modem. John said in the future, the internet would look more like their current cell phone system.

That's exactly right. He said that in the future, the entertainment industry would be decentralized and anyone would be able to create video which could be watched by many people. More people watch YouTube than watch the networks or even go to the movies. John Titor was right again. He predicted breakthroughs in high energy physics at CERN. In 2013, the Higgs boson was confirmed.

Stephen Hawking originally thought that everything that enters a black hole disappears forever. Titor said that Stephen Hawking made a mistake about this. Stephen Hawking did later change his mind. Now, many of these predictions could be dismissed as educated guesses by someone who is intelligent and knew a lot about science and technology.

But there's no denying that John Titor was right. As for the predictions John Titor got wrong, true believers, and there are still a lot of those, always fall back on the many worlds theory. Sure, many of John Titor's predictions were wrong in our timeline, but they came true in other timelines. And there's no way to prove this wrong.

But if you look closely at the John Titor story, you do find inconsistencies. You also find convenient coincidences. Because of these problems with the story, many believe that John Titor was a hoax. And if that's true, then who was the real John Titor? Well, there are a few suspects. Whenever anyone does a story about John Titor and who he actually may be, there are a few names that always pop up.

The first is Joseph Matheny. He's described as a writer and transmedia artist.

He's mostly known for Ong's Hat, which was one of the first alternate reality or real-time interactive games. And Matheny makes a good case. He said that he, along with three other people, developed the John Titor story as a fun experiment to see if they could develop an internet myth. Matheny won't divulge who the other three people are because they're pretty high up in the entertainment industry and have reputations to protect.

But a lot of the story tracks. Matheny says the time machine we see in the fuzzy photos was created by a prop designer who's worked on major movies. And John Titor fans have been able to identify pieces of the time machine that are actually real things. Matheny says the reason the messages often have different tones is because they were written by different people on the team. Matheny was responsible for character development.

And the reason that John Titor's story is so similar to John Connor's is because it was intentional. I've heard and read some interviews with Matheny, and at first I was skeptical. Initially, I didn't think he had the tech or science background to flesh out the details in the John Titor story.

I was very wrong. Matheny was involved in tech since the 80s. He worked with Adobe and Netscape in the early days and holds a few patents. Also, his game Ong's Hat had references to theoretical physics. He had the tech chops and a track record in creating online myths. He could have definitely pulled this off. Still, I'd love to see hard evidence. Matheny won't provide any. And when asked...

He gets pretty annoyed. He says, believe him or don't, he doesn't care. I think that after 20 years, he's sick of people asking him about John Titor. But there are more people to look at.

The other name that comes up in the John Titor story is Larry Haber and the Haber brothers. Larry Haber is a Florida-based entertainment attorney. He claims to represent John Titor's mom, Kay, and the Titor family. Hey, how does a lawyer sleep? I don't know, how? Oh, first he lies on one side, then he lies on the other. Good one. Now, I've seen and read a number of interviews with Larry Haber. He definitely does not have the technology or science background to create John Titor.

But his brothers do. Richard Haber is an IT administrator and Maury Haber is a very senior cybersecurity professional. Maury also has a lot of experience writing about technology. And if you go down the John Titor rabbit hole on YouTube, you'll eventually run into a channel called Hoax Hunter run by John Rasmus Houston. And I'll link to his channel below. Now, John has done a ton of research on the subject.

He's tracked P.O. boxes. He's done text comparisons of Maury Haber's writing to John Titor's posts. He's tracked all the usernames from John Titor's message board. I mean, this is exhaustive research. He's convinced that John Titor is actually Maury Haber, who eventually enlisted his lawyer brother to represent the story. Now, what does a lawyer get when you give him Viagra? What? Tola! Ha ha!

Larry Haber has been attached to John Titor for years. Not only does he claim to represent the Titor family, in 2003, he registered the John Titor Foundation LLC, a for-profit business. And this LLC published John Titor's posts as a book called A Time Traveler's Tale.

Larry Haber also registered John Titor as a trademark in 2007. So this lawyer claims to represent the Titor family, right? Yeah. And at the same time, he's got businesses and books and is making money from this thing? That's right.

Is that a conflict of interest? I think it is. But I guess Larry Haber and the Teeter family are okay with it. He won't say. Hey, how do you get a lawyer out of a tree? How? Cut the rope. Joseph Matheny said he had someone reach out to the publisher of Larry Haber's book and get it pulled. Larry Haber can't confirm that Matheny did this, but he did confirm that the book is out of print and doesn't know why. So this Matheny guy torpedoed the lawyer? That's what it looks like. He's okay in my book.

What do you have when a lawyer is buried up to his neck in sand? What do you have? Not enough sand. Ha ha ha ha!

In Larry Haber's defense, even though he represents the Teeter family, he doesn't claim to believe the story. He says he doesn't know one way or the other and doesn't care. He's just working for his client. And making money from his client. Yeah. And that. Pamela Moore said she was sent a copy of Larry Haber's book, signed by John with a song quoted at the end. Was it the secret song? Nope. How do you know if a lawyer is lying? His lips are moving. His lips are moving.

Over 20 years later, and the John Titor story still fascinates people.

Honestly, I had never considered doing this story because it's been done so many times, but it's one of the most requested topics on the channel. I think the reason we love time travel stories is because it all comes down to possibilities and opportunities. A story about a possible future, especially such a frightening one, gives us an opportunity to reflect on our present and choose a path to avoid that dark future. Or it gives us a chance to prepare for it.

Think of how useful it would be if someone came back from that future to warn us, to give us the exact steps to follow to ensure our survival. Well, before John Titor disappeared, he did just that. "Do not eat or use products from any animal that is fed and eats parts of its own dead. Do not kiss or have intimate relations with anyone you do not know. Learn basic sanitation and water purification. Be comfortable around firearms. Learn to shoot and clean a gun.

Get a good first aid kit and learn to use it. Find five people within 100 miles that you trust with your life and stay in contact with them. Get a copy of the U.S. Constitution and read it. Eat less. Get a bicycle and two sets of spare tires. Ride it 10 miles a week. Consider what you would bring with you if you had to leave your home in 10 minutes and never return.

Now, I don't know if the story of John Titor is real. I don't think we'll ever know. But still, my family is taking his advice. We've got the first aid kit, the bicycle, and lots of ammo. We're prepared for the future that John described, at least as best as we can be. And it's okay if you don't believe that John Titor is from the future. It's a story that anyone would be skeptical of. But be skeptical of John Titor at your own risk. Me? I'm not willing to take the chance.

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