Time Traveler spotted at the 1928 Chaplin film "The Circus"

[The Good]

Apparently, this has gone viral over the internet...

 

[Pompidou]

If there were time travelers in the future, I think, then the odds that any of us would consistently exist for more than a split second is pretty slim. Every time someone goes back in time and changes anything, they risk wildly altering the future. I mean, the odds that any one of us could even be born are pretty slim, considering how many people had to be in the right place in the right time to form our ancestries. If the future can go on practically forever, that's an infinite amount of future time travelers taking their shot at visiting the past. Any one of them could screw things up so that the future's wildly different. I mean, one man goes and visits earth's primordial stew and introduces modern advanced bacterias and whatnot, and the whole course of evolution is blown out of the water.

An infinite number of humans with a large capacity for screwing up leads me to believe that humans never discover time travel in all the future of our existence, and if they never have, we never will. That's why I don't think time travel is possible. We'd have potentially an infinite number of time travelers walking around at any given moment as every time traveler from the year 2,500 to the year 2,500,000,000 and beyond would be randomly zapping themselves from moment to moment. Something, sometime, would go wrong, and there'd be no doubt on the future of time travel.

EDIT:
That is, unless the time traveler in this video is the last human of a doomed future. Perhaps it's billions of years from now, and the universe has long stopped expanding, and gravity causes the universe to begin to contract, or perhaps it lost all entropy and there's no more heat in the universe - the possible death of the universe scenarios are many. A time travel device was invented on the day before the last life in the universe perished, and instead of going to somewhere useful, the traveller accidently ended up there? I mean, there'd be no time to test things out. That would explain why in all the history of mankind, there aren't an infinite number of recorded time travelers. That woman isn't merely a time traveler - she's the last living human of a doomed universe. The reason her cell phone works is because, while it took billions of years, AT&T finally got a reliable network. I wouldn't be surprised if it's a future model in the iPhone line that had an intertemporal communication app installed by default. Steve Jobs would do it. Who's she calling? Probably just paying her bill before the universe ends in her time - because she's honest and would feel bad if she didn't.

 

[scottyrocks]

EDIT:
That is, unless the time traveler in this video is the last human of a doomed future.

And s/he's not even in good shape. =o\ =o)

 

[Nick D]

Except that our past has already happened, not only for us but for those in the future. I don't think the future is pre-determined, but I have doubts about the ability to change the past. If you go into the past, you go into your own past, which would include your time-traveling self because that already happened in the past even if your present self hasn't traveled in time yet in your own future. And, of course, this is assuming that time is linear anyway. It all ends up a messy paradox.

Tempus fugit.

 

[Widebrim]

"ALL time is now." According to Einstein and my own intuitive understanding of the universe and The Unified Field Theory.
Linear time is simply a convenience put in place to keep us all from going completely insane in trying to figure it all out. ,...maybe until such a time when we invent the means to fold space and travel inter-dimensionally?

Didn't Shemp have a similar scientific viewpoint?

 

[Yeps]

Except that our past has already happened, not only for us but for those in the future. I don't think the future is pre-determined, but I have doubts about the ability to change the past. If you go into the past, you go into your own past, which would include your time-traveling self because that already happened in the past even if your present self hasn't traveled in time yet in your own future. And, of course, this is assuming that time is linear anyway. It all ends up a messy paradox.

Tempus fugit.

I think that it is categorically impossible to cause a paradox. You can go and try to kill your father before he meets your mother, and cause yourself never to have been born, but obviously you cannot succeed, because you have been born already.

 

[scottyrocks]

I think that it is categorically impossible to cause a paradox. You can go and try to kill your father before he meets your mother, and cause yourself never to have been born, but obviously you cannot succeed, because you have been born already.

But if you did succeed, wouldnt you just go <poof>, and disappear?

 

[Yeps]

But if you did succeed, wouldnt you just go <poof>, and disappear?

By the fact that you exist and are going back to try, you obviously didn't succeed.

 

[Pompidou]

I've been thinking about this a lot lately. I imagine, if time began with the big bang, we're most likely riding at the edge of it. It seems to me there is a past, and we ride the present almost like a surfer. There's just no future. It seems weird that if time and space are one, that we'd be riding at the edge of it, but not riding at the edge of the universe - unless of course, we are riding along the relative edge of the universe. Hmm... My mind can't really comprehend time travel being possible. If earth is riding the space-time explosion, well, I thought I had a followup here, but I guess I don't, except that the future is where the universe hasn't gotten to yet, but the past isn't exactly where the universe has already been. Yeah, I don't think time travel is possible.

 

[Nick D]

I think that it is categorically impossible to cause a paradox. You can go and try to kill your father before he meets your mother, and cause yourself never to have been born, but obviously you cannot succeed, because you have been born already.

Which is my point, even if I didn't make it very elegantly. If you can't change the past, no paradox. The ability to change the past is what creates the paradox.

 

[Cobden]

If she's a time traveller, from the future presumably, what is she doing wandering around Hollywood jabbering on a mobile when she could killing Adolf Hitler?

EDIT: or maybe in the future the teaching of history is so convoluted that she doesn't realise there were two chappies with silly moustaches operating at the time...

 

[Yeps]

Which is my point, even if I didn't make it very elegantly. If you can't change the past, no paradox. The ability to change the past is what creates the paradox.

I was basically agreeing with you. I think, given time travel, it is very possible to effect the past, and be very significant, but that will not change anything in your personal present, because you are in your past and it happened a long time ago.

 

[LizzieMaine]

If she's a time traveller, from the future presumably, what is she doing wandering around Hollywood jabbering on a mobile when she could killing Adolf Hitler?

EDIT: or maybe in the future the teaching of history is so convoluted that she doesn't realise there were two chappies with silly moustaches operating at the time...

In the future, Charlie Chaplin *was* Hitler. Didn't you see "Idiocracy?"

 

[jamespowers]

In the future, Charlie Chaplin *was* Hitler. Didn't you see "Idiocracy?"

If that is the future then I would rather stay here. Being King of the Idiots is not exactly an accomplishment.

 

[flat-top]

Perhaps if time travel to the past were possible, we might be able to just "view" it, and not get involved, since of course it has all already happened.

 

[Blackjack]

I think there's a book out right now about two college geeks who discover a way to "view" the past without going there. One is Jewish and they see his grandparents being led into a Polish death camp. They discover they can send things into the past but not actually travel there, so they send a sterility chemical into the water supply of the village where Hitler was born causing him never to be conceived. Immediately after sending it they find themselves no longer in London but at a University in California and that Germany had won WWII . The US was deep in a cold war with Germany. Sounds like an interesting read...

 

[Paisley]

Given the source, we would assume the photo is authentic, and correctly dated to c.1940. Indeed, an Error Level Analysis suggests the image was not digitally tampered with, or at least that if it was, the author was smart enough to normalize the error across the whole thing. It’s a good job, if it was a job. And again, given the source, we would assume it was not a job.

Then again it might just be a case of the guy dressed weird for the era...or?

If this is a fake, it's really good. The lighting angle and intensity match the rest of the photo. So does the contrast.

 

[flat-top]

I'm on the fence about this one:

 

[Maj.Nick Danger]

Didn't Shemp have a similar scientific viewpoint?

Yes soitanly. Shemp is timeless.

 

[scottyrocks]

I'm on the fence about this one:

Why, because the guy in front looks like Jack Nicholson?