[Moontanman]

This is either the most important story ever told or the most ridiculous. Which one it is can only be determined by looking closely to see if there is any real predictions coming to pass.

The Story of John Titor

[modest]

I got about a quarter through:

The Time Travel Tale Of John Titor

and could go no further. So, the gist is that John says he's from the year 2034. He got here in his time traveling car which has some atomic clocks and maybe a black hole or two under the hood. John told his story by posting in forums and irc over a few months in 2000 / 2001. People believed him

According to him a civil war will start in the united states in 2005 between farmers and city folk. In 2015 Russia will nuke everybody and the US will nuke Russia. Then humanity goes back to farm living and creates a time machine / car. He's a time traveler - I mean, that's his job.

His mission (time traveling mission) was to go back to 1975 to get an IBM 5100 personal computer (I'm not making this up).



Apparently they really need one in 2034 and lost them all in the nuclear war. On his way back from picking one up in the 70's he decided to stop in on the year 2000 and have some friendly internet chat.

He's not an idiot. I mean, he talks intelligently and has a moderate understanding of science. Clearly capable of misleading a large number of people despite his 2005 prediction never happening. I didn't get far enough into the thing to find where the great predictions that have come true are - If somebody knows they can post them. However, I did find an IRC chat log that isn't in the collection of posts that is normally circulated where he makes an unmistakably failed prediction in October 2000:

Originally Posted by John the time traveler

CERN will discover some very odd things as a result of their high energy experiments in about a year from your point of view. They will accidentally create microsingularities which will evaporate very quickly and create a massive amount of X-ray and Gamma rays. It will puzzle them for a while. Until they figure out how to add and electrical charge and capture these strange odd and massive particles in a magnetic field. If you bombard a singularity with electrons... you can alter the size of its event horizon. and thus its gravitational field. By overlapping these fields from two singularities... you can travel forward and backward through time.

That never happened at CERN or anywhere else. Also, shooting electrons at a black hole isn't going to make it grow to a size he describes elsewhere. So the science is off - as is the prediction about discovering them.

My vote would be not the most important story

~modest

[Moontanman]

Actually I like the story, not because I believe but because it is stitched together so well. supposedly the war is already going on but it hasn't developed to the point where we would see it as war. this should happen very soon, in the next few months to a year but Titor also says we might be able to prevent it from happening if we heed his warnings. Typical stuff really for a fortune teller but his technical expertise is really good. the entire story hings on a point that is essentially impossible but you have to have a little bit of expertise as well to see it. for what it's worth this story is better than the CD player taken back in time story that has been hawked here several times lately. I even like it better than the whole Urinantia story