This is interesting, but these methods don't strike me as really viable. The Twitter outreach was specifically targeted at the cooperation of Twitter-using time travelers, and while Pope Francis might or might not be historically significant enough to warrant prescient mentioning, I'm sure comet ISON is not. The assumption is also (and maybe it has to be) that time travelers would blurp out important prescient information - however, I don't think that holds true if they were either well disciplined or engaged in historical research - which would mean they know little more (if anything) about our immediate future than we do.
I'm obviously not advocating time travelers are present (I would think with the certain prospect of leaving your time line in order to create another one, the proposition of time travel seems akin to a one-way change in universes that doesn't sound very inviting), but it's definitely fun to speculate about. Realistically, one would also have to take into account the fact that, by mere virtue of being present, a time traveler will change the course of history in the long run.
A more thorough effort could center on large-scale automated data mining for prescient terms on the internet. Of course, there would be many false positives, but as a side effect we could learn more about the epidemiology of ideas even if we don't discover time travelers. It seems to me that a disciplined time traveler would not purposefully drop historically significant hints - however, if they are from a future and culture close enough to our own, they might still reveal themselves inadvertently through idiosyncratic phrases and reference to concepts that are from the future. Hand-picked phrases are not enough to discover this, it would have to be large-scale AI-supported text mining.
If I were a time traveller I probably wouldn't use any of the social networks that are popular for non-time-travellers. Firstly managing so many social network accounts to keep up with the latest fashions would be a right pain (imagine having to change your profile picture on all of them...), but also their 'timeline' view would be completely different to my relative timeline.
I'd assume the network format would be distributed, running on something akin to a phone that you keep on you at all times. Whenever you make a post it records your relative 'life time', or just increments an id, so posts are always ordered in your relative timeframe. When you meet someone it would sync up with their account - I'm not quite sure how that would work though. The issue is you could post something about them publicly that hasn't happened yet in their timeframe (that could be embarrassing). Private messages are even worse...
(N.b. I should probably patent this idea for when time travel is invented)
Nice idea. Although the user-base of time travellers might be a bit limited. I would suggest broadening your product to include the soon-to-be emerging high relativistic speed and FTL travel sectors. Part of the process of friending someone could be to indicate how your respective light-cones intersect, for example.
If your network is ad-supported then there might be extra complications in temporally localising the ad content so that it doesn't induce the wrong kind of causality violations. You might want to give that some thought, now or in the future.
> a time traveler "will" change the course of history in the long run
Going by the current recognized (theoretically possible) understanding of time travel based on Einstein's theory of special relativity[0] it would be only possible to travel in the future (near or distant based on technology that is not yet available).
Travel back would not be possible. And for the entire period of the time jumped the person(s) would not be present.
Based on this theory alone the time travelers would not be able to change history.
Depending on how far they travel I doubt they'd be able to change the future either.
I'm obviously not advocating time travelers are present (I would think with the certain prospect of leaving your time line in order to create another one, the proposition of time travel seems akin to a one-way change in universes that doesn't sound very inviting), but it's definitely fun to speculate about. Realistically, one would also have to take into account the fact that, by mere virtue of being present, a time traveler will change the course of history in the long run.
A more thorough effort could center on large-scale automated data mining for prescient terms on the internet. Of course, there would be many false positives, but as a side effect we could learn more about the epidemiology of ideas even if we don't discover time travelers. It seems to me that a disciplined time traveler would not purposefully drop historically significant hints - however, if they are from a future and culture close enough to our own, they might still reveal themselves inadvertently through idiosyncratic phrases and reference to concepts that are from the future. Hand-picked phrases are not enough to discover this, it would have to be large-scale AI-supported text mining.