Two scientists have conceived a search for time travelers on the Internet.
If you propose that 100 people choose the single most impressive science fiction technology, then time travel is sure to win. You can almost be sure of this.
And believe it or not, time travel isn't all that fantastic. Combining theories of the universe, General Relativity, and several other important factors, it turns out that, in principle, time travel is quite easy.
This is why two American researchers tried to find real time travelers.
One of the axioms of time travel is that if retrograde (backward) time travel is possible, then it is likely that some future time traveler has traveled back to our time. The main idea and purpose of searching for such potential time travelers is that we need to find them from the general crowd on the principle that they have the gift of foresight, that is, in principle, knowledge of the future.
Robert Nemiroff and Teresa Wilson at Michigan Technological University are trying to find such travelers on the global Internet, suggesting that such people from the future could leave special messages in blogs, tweets or elsewhere, but how to separate such people from those who just too rich imagination or just schizophrenia ?! The authors of the study do not know this yet, but persistently "rummage" the global network in search of unwary "aliens" from the future who leave their traces somewhere on the electronic pages.
To hunt down time travelers on the Internet, Nemiroff and Wilson developed three ingenious search patterns. The first method is the included google and twitter searcher (hashtags). So far, searches for references to the comet ISON are used even before it was discovered. The authors of the experiment are trying to find out who absolutely correctly foresaw the appearance of the comet ISON even before it was discovered.
The second plan involved researchers flipping through a search log on NASA's website to see if the time traveler was looking for the ISON comet before it was discovered. The third method was a simple request from researchers, asking the time traveler to send them a direct message and report himself. A bit naive, but who knows, it might work.
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Unfortunately, at the moment, none of these searches have produced significant results, however, the researchers do not give up and continue their search. Time travelers may just be very careful not to draw attention to themselves, but according to the authors of the experiment, they are certainly among us. They cannot but be.