Scientists seek time travelers on Twitter

Have time travelers been posting online ? Image Credit: CC BY-SA 3.0 Junior Melo

Scientists have been using social media in an effort to look for time travelers from the future.

The research was based on the prediction that if humans ever did discover a way to travel back in time, they would leave subtle clues about future events on social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook.

To test this idea, a team from Michigan Technological University picked search terms relating to recent news topics and searched the Internet to see if anyone had posted references to them before they had taken place.

Unfortunately despite the team's best efforts, the project entitled "Searching the Internet for Evidence of Time Travelers" ultimately came up empty.

"In our limited search we turned up nothing," said study lead author Robert Nemiroff. "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 travellers were here, their existence would have already come out in some other way, maybe by posting winning lottery numbers before they were selected."