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Time Traveller?


Quagmire

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This is weird. Has a time traveller been spotted using a 'mobile phone' of sorts in a Chaplin film? :)

From the clip description:

"This short clip is from the DVD which includes behind the scenes in Charlie Chaplin's film 'The Circus'. Attending the premiere at Manns Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, CA - the scene shows a large woman (or man), dressed in black and a hat, talking into something that only be described as a mobile phone device or possibly a walkie-talkie. Remember this is from 1928."

It's even on the BBC site: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-11646933

Watch in HD for clarity:

Q

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Greetings,

Ref the "listening device" in the clip:

It's probably something simmilar to this,

http://hearing.siemens.com/ca/10-about-us/01-our-history/milestones.jsp?year=1924

One of the first "pocket sized" hearing amplifiers. And although the person appears to be speaking to "someone" they could just be listening to there own voice. (as a novelity at that time, but we still do that now when you listen to yourself "in playback" talking into a current recording device)

All for now

9erRed

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If time travel was possible and practical: Where are they?

Assuming that it will get invented at some point in the future and become some sort of a tourist attraction, and the technology lasts for hundreds if not thousands of years, one would expect an avalanche of people of the future to visit history. Alas, none have been spotted yet - reductio ad absurdum.

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The person may possibly be a schizophrenic responding to an internal stimulus. It is not uncommon for those so afflicted to project the 'voices' onto an external object. I've had encounters with such persons whilst they were engaged with 'magic' rocks and the like. The object itself could be anything; seashells, rocks, or small carved fetishes are examples.

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Sure, a time traveller could bring a mobile phone, but how would she use it? there's no network!

Or maybe she's a iPhone user and used to having no network? Or, is the iPhone actually a time machine!? Is she holding it wrong?

Questions, questions...

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I mean, it's absurd, really. Nobody can really say if it is a man or a fat lady, and from a few black pixels the proponents of the most outlandish theory claim to be able to deduct that it is a "cell phone" from a time when there weren't even mobile networks, just because "nobody could explain it" when there are tons of explanations that are much simpler than the assumption of time travel at work.

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If time travel was possible and practical: Where are they?

Good question. But surely if time travel was possible, the number one rule would be to do it without drawing attention to yourself. Think how life-changing an event it would be if a time traveller were spotted in the middle of London on Monday morning by hundreds of people. The story would appear in every newspaper and website and this would affect our future, the traveller's and everything else from that point forward. Science as we know it would be turned on it's head. :eek2:

Imagine if we could go back in time in the next few years. We choose to visit a major event, say the assassination of Kennedy. Once they begin to examine the tapes of the shooting they may spot us standing there with 'modern' clothing holding an iPhone 15. :) This would raise major questions and would go down in history - and would be pounced upon by all the conspiracy theorists quoting the headline "Time Traveller Kills President".

Surely if you did this trip you would dress appropriately to blend in, wearing dodgy 60's clothing and doing your best not to show your fancy gadgets to anyone.

I've always been interested in the mathematics behind the theory - perhaps one day! :sonic:

This site makes good reading:

http://www.lifesci.sussex.ac.uk/home/John_Gribbin/timetrav.htm

I agree with 9erRed though. Chances are it's one of the 'new' hearing aids available at the time. Funny clip though. For a 'woman' she has HUGE feet! :)

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Good question. But surely if time travel was possible, the number one rule would be to do it without drawing attention to yourself.

Why?

This is just an artificial construct of science-fiction writers to minimize the inevitable (and the only things that makes these stories worthwhile) - the time paradox.

Quantum theory has made abundantly clear that you can't be a passive observer. Your mere presence changes the reality around you. Even with minimal intrusion the ripple effect will become ginormous if you just wait long enough for the consequences, provided that there actually was a way to compare "before" and "after". Just look at chaos theory and the butterfly effect.

So, tiptoeing around in the past is but a fig leaf, about as practical as Asimov's "laws" of robotics. Looks great on the outside but doesn't hold up to scrutiny.

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As been said, if time travel were possible, where are these people? If they're incognito everywhere, it seems that the only purpose that it serves if for some gimmicky tourist attraction if they aren't doing things to manufacture reality or consiciousness.

This is unlikely- whatever it is that transports them into the past would have needed to have been brought back with them, presumably to send them back to the future again. Think of the contingency plans needed if a device like this failed- perhaps the person doesn't show up back in the future at a pre agreed upon time, so they have to send someone back to get them. Depending upon how long the trip is, if not just a mere jaunt for the vain purpose of observing things for a few hours, they'd need supplies or the means to sustain, to continue to pass unnoticed without too much exposure- have a stash of money somewhere, food, have a safeplace to chill out, hide, or rest or regroup, have things from the period to belend in such as clothes, and for really advanced time travellers, particular knowledge of dead cultures, their langauges, their customs.

The more you do this, the bigger the conspiracy required to have more people set this up, the more resources needed to facilitate it, perhaps even have people 'stationed' at every point in every country or society in the ancient past to the present in on it to help them. Do future travellers need car insurance to drive around, apply for a home loan, do they just rent? Do they become invested enough in another time such that they decide to register to vote, do they start businesses? Maybe one falls in love with someone from a different time period, starts a family or refuses to go back. Maybe someone gets depressed or bored, or someone is a jerk and decides it would be a lot of fun to reveal it to the world for the curious sake of seeing what would happen. Is it possible to do all that and at the same time and keep this a secret before just one person letting the cat out the bag and destroying all that effort? A situation like that would be very difficult to control- the more people who know about it, who are initiated into it, the likliehood that it would stay secretive just seems to tilt more in the direction of coming unravelled soon or later. Maybe they have some code where they kill a person who they begin to suspect is going to spill the beans, in which case that particular ethic of staying undercover in order to avoid wrecking everything seems rather arbitrary. Maybe someone else protests that such a killing was wrong, and you start to have the beginnings of a disillusioned rebellion taking place.

Besides, in this case, a cellular phone does not look like some wonderful device from the future, but this is current to us now. It's interesting that people deduce a cell phone from a future society advanced enough to invent time travel. If this person from the future is trying to avoid being noticed, it's not working. As an extra a film, she wandered on the film set doing this, it would have been intentional. Never mind the cell towers needed, either. Again though, I don't know what future devices will look like, but cellphones imply that the technology needed for time travel has either been developed already or will be possible in the near term, provided that a time traveller doesn't do anything to mess up the possiblitly of inventing the means of time travel.

My guess is that it's one of the portable microphone type hearing aids that were held up to the ear.

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Good question. But surely if time travel was possible, the number one rule would be to do it without drawing attention to yourself.

Easier said than done. How long before you would think you would have to communicate with someone? "Excuse me, where are the toilets?" Just a seperation of a few years runs the risk of using idioms or expressions that are out of date, and in the case of future time travellers, ones that aren't invented yet. If you've ever studied a foreign language, there is a vast gulf between its 'proper' use learned in school, and the practical way a language is used, including the settings or context when being used. The only way to really use a language as they locals use it is not to remain passive but to interact with them, which creates its own 'paradox'- to avoid detection, you want to blend in with the locals, well, to do that, you probably have to interact with them to learn how to do that. Someone who completely withdraws and remains aloof actually might stand out under select conditions.

What makes me skeptical of this is the more modern we become, the less indepence from others we have. It's difficult to plan a vacation in your own time without setting up accomadations, never mind completely avoiding all contact in another time. Even if you did everything right and avoided people, there will be times where they will still come up to you- ask for directions, ask for the time, accidenlty run into you, think that you may be attractive and might be worth talking to, try to rob you or whatever.

People have revealed state secrets to undercover agents just as a means to get laid, or just for a bag of cash- this would be the ultimate pick up line in a bar to score hot chicks, or secure some kind of personal advantage in wealth or prestige. The lure would easily weigh on most if not all people who did this. "Hmm, I'm really rather average in my own time, but I can go back and time and virtually be a god- I can start the Beatles without John Lennon and be loved by millions," for example. This would probably be virtually impossible to control as human motives are too easily corrupted.

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If there are any time travellers browsing these forums, please contact me via PM. Thanks.

In which case other time travllers migh kill these guys or whisk them away and dump them somehwere before they give up everyone and spoil it.

I'm not quite ready to advance anything necessary here, but with time travel, the problem conceivably is that nearly anything seems to be virtually possible. In a sense, people have as many trials to do something over and over again to figure out something, or alter events. You have an eternity.

Suppose a future society, being careful about revealing itself in history, took all steps to control who or how many people could time travel. Again, all it takes is one person- if they can travel back in time, and can travel forward again to their own time, they can travel into the far future past their own time and gather information or technology that they could bring back and change the rules. Then other people anticipating that would also time travel and attempt to stop them, forwards and backwords, and other people would try to stave off those efforts, and so on. I don't see it being anything but a mess- even if you killed the family line that eventually gives birth to the people who invent time travel, sooner or later, someone else will figure it out. If it's possible for some people, presumably, it's possible for someone else to discover it.

You could have problems just because people will question why people have to die at all anymore- with time travel, you could presumably live for ever. There might be a massive effort to use this technology to be immortal, to save yourself, dying friends or family, something like that would have to be resisted- people who know they could save their families or something when the techonolgy exists to save them will be turned away. Or maybe only certain people selected for privilege can do it- leading to massive social discontent and pershaps rebellion against the rules.

I don't believe in mutli-verse theories, but maybe I just lack the education to understand them. Still, they have conceptional problems becuase in theory it would be possible to have contradicting or self negating realities, i.e., a universe where there is more apples than oranges, and at the same time, more oranges and apples, or in this case a universe where time travel both exists and does not exist because there is a perpetual time travel war going on where people travel forwards and backwords, spilling over into other multiverses where they destroy each other's time travelling equipment, and attempt to preempt each other from doing that going back or forward in time- and on and on, the whole thing is too fragmented or incoherent to even think anyone could get a handle on it.

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I just want to go back to last week and repick my lotto numbers.

DENIED!

Temporal prime directive number 2

Make oneself wealthy with hindsight.

Right after:

Killing Hitler and Stalin.

Does kicking them in the nuts before their respective rises to power count?

Cos I want to be first in the queue on this one.

As to what the shemale is holding its probably a clutch handbag type thing. Though it does look suspiciously like an iPhone.

:nukem:

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LOL.thats funny vid.Like everytime someone sees a light in the sky its a UFO.Im a believer but a skeptic first,when it comes to these things.Ithink you need to be.The most famous photo of the Loch Ness Monster has proven to be a fake,as with the most famous video of Bigfoot in the mountains,Crop Circles ect.I believe its possible to travel in time,but to what extent ,who knows.Just because people dont pop up here and there dosent mean its not poss.Maybe its regulated some how.Entry and Exit to different Planets and dimensions maybe tightly regulated by certain goverments.Say like access to this planet/dimesion.In other worlds it may be a common action.who knows.:debile2:

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I'll admit to this without any regret- if I were a pioneer in time travel, I might at first adhere to some principles, but more out of anxiety but the unkown, about the practical sense of not getting myself into trouble rather than some ethical imperative, and I know I wouldn't be the only one. People tend to be more cautious about something they've never seen before. Over time, caution becomes replaced with complacency or confidence, you take more risks or you cut loose some. And I don't doubt that given enough opportunity, I would eventually take advantage here- however slight at first, until at some point I engineer events or people to do what I want. This probably will begin without me really being that aware of doing it- but simply becoming comfortable enough to forget that my actions should be much more self controlled to the point of them being very tedious and thought out. I'd even likely make innocent mistakes like mention the outcome of future events, forgetting that other people would not know what I know. This sort of intorspective self control with regards to consciousness or sense of identity is very difficult to sustain over a long enough term. If you want to see what it looks like, look at sleeper agents and spies who over enough period of time, begin to blur the line between which side they're on if not under constant supervision or contact with their handlers.

If the burden of proof is on me to prove otherwise, I've explained why this seems very unlikely. If the burden of proof is on you, it doesn't simply do to suggest that this might be happening already. In reality, it's an impossible standard to meet- to 'prove' that people are doing something which can't be detected other than to say we don't know that it isn't happening already. The US government has tried things such as the remote viewing program, apparently that didn't come into anything- no surprise there.

Simliarly, alien corpes don't persuade me, given my penchant not to believe a lot of these kinds of claims. The 'Gray' aliens, the generic, sexless, universally representation of humanoid beings from outerspace are the perfect construction- because they are so non distinct and uniform, they can appeal across all cultures, rather the B movie monster movies where the alien creatures appeared in some grotesque combination of things we recognize on Earth- monsters with tentacles, with a giant eye, they look caucasian, or they look like apes and chimps, or insectoid, or plant like. The older myths have simply been replaced with a thing that's been designed for our modern outlook.

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