[hot_pastrami]

My thoughts on John Titor from my reading thus far... LONG post...

His story is a hoax which was executed with great creativity and discipline. The writer was not only creative, but very knowledgable in computer technology and physics. I know a person (a scientist, in fact) who possesses the creativity and knowledge to execute such a ruse, and I can imagine that he might delight in the philosophical and scientific discussions such a ruse would spawn (I'm not referring to myself, by the way... I am only superficially knowledgable in this sort of advanced physics).

The writer knew from the outset that there would be unanswerable questions and unforeseen holes in his tapestry, so he wisely set up a number of traps, from the very beginning, to capture and disarm such questions:

1) His "three rules," which are morally driven, and prevent him from disclosing names, catastrophic events, etc (That's why he didn't predict 9/11!)

2) His very true assertion that the disclosure of a future event by a time traveller could possibly prevent that event from ever occurring.

3) Similarly, the argument that his presence and actions have already altered the timeline, and so as time ticks away, this timeline's events become more and more different from those in his own remembered history.

4) The "I'm not a physicist, I'm just a time-travelling military agent with a little physics knowledge" argument.

5) The "I would really prefer that you didn't believe my story, for the sake of the discussion" argument.

He also uses a fair share of misdirection, and feigned misunderstanding. It's brilliant, really... he suggests an outlandish idea ("I am a time traveller from the near-future!"), then whittles away the disbelief slowly, and replacing it not with facts, but with safe fictions, and very believable, well-thought-out reaons why a time traveller might not disclose the truth. These believable excuses sneakily lend false believablity to the whole story.

A few holes...

1) He asserts numerous times that he doesn't want those he is discussing the subject with to believe him, because then the discussion could not continue. He claims that if the others knew he was a time traveller, they would no longer be able to discuss the philosophical points, and would be too wrapped up in trying to learn details of the future from him. This is a dumb, incorrect assumption, because for one thing, intelligent discourse on the subject would increase if everyone could drop their fear of making a fool of themselves (by public admitting that they believe the story), and discuss it openly. For another, he himself admits that his predictive abilities are pretty much screwed by the fact that he has already irreversibly altered our timeline.

2) Would a government time-travel agency ever send an individual, alone, with a highly expensive "time machine" and a critical mission? There would be at least two people on the mission. He himself said there was a three-person capacity to his device, yet he claims they sent him alone.

3) He claims that "The War" crippled the development of technology badly.... so without technology, how did they create and capture singularities and develop sophisticated computer systems to manipulate them? They have the capacity to build that, but they need a computer from 1975 which has 16K of RAM and less processing power than a modern Palm device?

I'll not bore you with any more of my lengthy thoughts on the matter. I am impressed by the delivery of this hoax, however, and I hope that the instigator is never discovered. I intend to keep reading about John Titor, because although it has some holes, it is a highly engaging read. And I like to think that I have an open enough mind to believe something like this if it were to really happen.

Ok, I'm done. This thread re-jacking is complete.

edit: clarified a couple points