A professor and his students decided to take their search for time travelers online.
Astrophysicist Robert Nemiroff was playing cards with his students and discussing Facebook and other social media platforms when they came up with the idea for the online man-hunt, a Michigan Technological University news release reported.
"We had a whimsical little discussion about this," Nemiroff said in the news release. The group wondered if a time traveler would use the internet.
Instead of simply posting a Craigslist ad for time travelers, the group created a strategy that employed something they call "prescient knowledge."
This meant "If they could find a mention of something or someone on the Internet before people should have known about it, that could indicate that whoever wrote it had traveled from the future," the news release reported.
The time-traveler hunters focused on two current events pertaining to Pope Francis and Comet ISON. The team searched for prescient knowledge on search engines such as s Google and Bing as well as social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.
They were not able to find any mention of Comet ISON before it was first spotted in September of 2012 but they did find a blog post mentioning Pope Francis that was put up before Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elected. The group had a feeling this post was an accident, rather than a sloppy time traveler.
They also looked at Astronomy Picture of the Day (co-edited by Nemiroff himself) and for prescient inquiries that had been typed into search engines.
In September 2013 they tweeted for any time travelers out there to post or email "#ICanChangeThePast2" or "#ICannotChangeThePast2" before August of 2013. Their call still went unanswered.
"In our limited search we turned up nothing," Nemiroff said. "I didn't really think we would. But I'm still not aware of anyone undertaking a search like this. The Internet is essentially a vast database, and I thought that if time travelers were here, their existence would have already come out in some other way, maybe by posting winning lottery numbers before they were selected. "
Despite their (so far) failure, Nemiroff and his students have had a great time searching for time travelers.
"I'm always doing stuff on space and time," Nemiroff said. "This has been a lot of fun."
