Proponents of a new study crawled different corners of the Internet to find clues on the existence of a real-life Doctor Who or any traces of TARDIS, the time-traveling ship of the fictional humanoid popularized on British TV. The experts failed to find any but have not given up on the possibility that time travelers exist.
Robert Nemiroff and Teresa Wilson, physics experts from the Michigan Technological University, decided to look for time travelers from the future in their study titled "Searching the Internet for Evidence of Time Travelers."
"Time travel has captured the public imagination for much of the past century, but little has been done to actually search for time travelers. Here, three implementations of Internet searches for time travelers are described, all seeking a prescient mention of information not previously available," the abstract of the study read.
The proponents were tickled by the idea of looking for time travelers on the Internet during a card game. They wondered if the Dr. Whos out there use social media platforms such as Twitter or Facebook and if they are searchable via Google. Aside from these platforms, they also made use of Bing.
Nemiroff and Wilson focused on searching for the terms Pope Francis and Comet ISON and looked for posts related to the said terms dating back to 2006 through September 2013. They used the two terms primarily because they are unique for the time being with Pope Francis being the first head of the Catholic church to use the name and Comet ISON only being identified in 2012.
Aside from searching for terms Comet ISON and Pope Francis on the Internet, the scientists also looked into inquiries that might have been submitted by time travelers to search engines. The last resort was to ask for a direct contact from such entities via Twitter or email.
"Technically, what was searched for here was not physical time travelers themselves, but rather informational traces left by them. Although such information might be left by physical time travelers, conceivably only information itself could be sent back in time, which would be a type of time travel that might not directly involve the backwards transport of a significant amount of energy or momentum," the authors explained.
"Although the negative results reported here may indicate that time travelers from the future are not among us and cannot communicate with us over the modern day Internet, they are by no means proof," the study concluded.
Undeniably, the study was quite exhaustive but upon reflection, time travelers who might have figured out how to jump the universe's timeline will definitely have no trouble deleting evidences about their existence or activities.
"You wanted advice, you said. I never give it - never. But I might just say this: always search for truth," so goes a famous line of Dr. Who.
