I read this 1-2 years ago. I was very surprised to find his beliefs in time travel to be exactly like mine (There are no paradoxes). That only made the story more believable for me. Especially his predictions of war and such.
I’m not against the possibility, I just don’t believe “him”.
For one, you wouldn’t want to tell people that you are from the future as it potentially alters it. Secondly people start asking for proof, now if you were from the future the very act of giving information could seriously harm your own exsistence. You have no idea what could come of it.
Then taking pictures of what you claime to be your time machine could affect the possibility of it ever being made.
John Titor was a fake. But his views were still interesting.
I notice the lack of a World War 3 though. Although the way things are going, always a possibility.
It seems most people tend to disbelieve this by stating a whole panoply of “granfather clause”-style arguments, but Titor never says that that he’s from our future. His explanations are based on the idea that there are an infinite number of branching timelines that encompass every possible combination of quantum states. He says he’s visited himself in this timeline and that there are no ill effects from it because the only version of him he can affect is in his own timeline, ie himself.
Anyways, my objection is this, and it’s a minor one: he says that his machine can travel through time, but not spatially, so that he always ends up in the same spot he was before, just earlier. Well the earth is hurtling through space at breakneck velocity, and is nowhere near where it was a hundred, ten, or even a single year ago (galaxies spin too). I imagine this just limits his traveling to timelines that happen to be spatially offset just enough so that Earth is in the exact same spot that Titor is coming from.
Not that this necessarily means I believe him, but that’s a moot point for me. I just like reading the ideas and envisioning alternate futures.
A big problem with what he says is that our world is divergent from his (by what he says is 2%), and that it diverges more and more as time goes on. Thus, he can never be proven entirely wrong: even if nothing he says ever comes true, people can hack it up to “oh, well it turns out we just diverged from his own timeline enough to have that not happen.” And since he predicts bad things ahead, it wouldn’t even be something that Titor “believers” would scoff at but would celebrate, maybe saying that his message has been spread around enough to make the difference between having a civil war and not having one.