'Time travellers don't exist on the internet': Researchers spend months scanning the web for voyagers from the future - but find nothing



Physicists scanned websites, search engine results, tweets and emails

They were looking for prescient references about select events



These included Comet ISON in 2012 and Pope Francis’ appointment in 2013

Study found no evidence of time travellers and claim it's unlikely they exist

Anyone hoping to one day emulate the likes of time travellers Doctor Who or Marty McFly in Back To The Future has just been dealt a devastating blow.

Researchers from Michigan have scoured websites, search engine results and social networks dating back as far as 1996 in search of people who discussed select events before they happened.

They even asked time travellers from the future to tweet using a specific hashtag.

Yet despite comprehensive analysis of thousands of records, they were unable to find any evidence time travellers existed.

Anyone hoping to emulate the likes of time travellers Dr Emmett Brown (left) and Marty McFly (right) in Back To The Future have been dealt a devastating blow. Researchers from Michigan scoured web results back to January 1996 in search of people who discussed events before they happened - yet found nothing

THE THEORY OF TIME TRAVEL

Travelling through time may not be the far-fetched science fiction theory it was once thought to be, according to Professor Brian Cox. 'If you go fast, your clock runs slow relative to people who are still.' explained Cox.

'As you approach the speed of light, your clock runs so slow you could come back 10,000 years in the future.' The theory is based on Einstein's Theory of Special Relatively that states to travel forward in time, an object would need to reach speeds close to the speed of light.

However, he said this theory only works when travelling to the future, and it's not possible to come back.

He added that if the technology was developed to accelerate larger objects, it could be possible for humans to travel to the future, similar to Doctor Who's Tardis in the TV show. Yet this technology doesn't exist yet, and will never exist that could take people to the past.

Since the late 1800s, writers and filmmakers have been obsessed with the allure and intrigue of time travel from H.G Wells’ 1895 book The Time Machine to the Back To The Future franchise and Doctor Who.

Inspired by this fascination, Professor Nemiroff, along with a MTU graduate Teresa Wilson, wanted to use the web to try and find evidence of people from the future living among us.

They began by selecting two events from recent history - the Comet ISON in September 2012 and the appointment of Pope Francis in March 2013.

They then scanned websites and search engine results for conversations or references to these events made between January 2006 and September 2013.

'Were a time traveller from the future to access the internet of the past few years, they might have left once-prescient content that persists today,’ explained Nemiroff and Wilson.

'Such content might have been catalogued by search engines such as Google or Bing, or remain in posts left on Facebook, Google Plus or Twitter.'

They spent months researching and scanning these sites for mentions of the comet and Pope Francis before the respective events took place, but concluded there was no ‘clearly prescient’ mention of either.

To verify evidence of time travellers, the researchers choose two events from recent history - the Comet ISON in September 2012, left, and the appointment of Pope Francis in March 2013, right. They then scanned websites for prescient conversations or references to these events dating back to January 2006



They then asked time travellers to send tweets using either hashtags ‘#ICanChangeThePast2’ or ‘#ICannotChangeThePast2’ before the end of August 2013.

The request was deliberately made in September in the hope that a time traveller would see the tweet in the future before travelling back to the past to tweet it before the end of August.

However, no tweets were sent that predated the original request.

'No time travellers were discovered,' said the researchers. ' Although these negative results do not disprove time travel, given the great reach of the internet, this search is perhaps the most comprehensive to date.'