#1
Honestly Stanislav Petrov should have statues in every country.
Phosphoron:
Stanislav Petrov was a Soviet lieutenant known as "the man who saved the world." Tensions were riding between the Soviet Union and the United States, so on the 26th of September in 1983, he was on duty for a nuclear early-warning system. The system detected multiple missiles launched by the United States, but Petrov broke protocol, following his instincts by choosing not to report the danger to his higher-ups. The missiles turned out to be a false alarm, as he had thought, and, as Petrov's title suggests, he very well may have saved the world that day. Saving the world just off of a hunch definitely seems like something a time traveler might do... Sus.
egaustex:
Stanislov Petrov traveled back from a post nuclear apocalyptic future to establish the current timeline.
#2
Jakkzzyy:
Da Vinci. The mad man designed a tank in the 1500s.
Travel_Jellyfish_5:
I can believe this. He's like a modern dude trying to reverse engineer things he's used to seeing in a bid to remain sane.
#3
20,000 people could have died but a worker found a burning gas bag in a toilet just before it mixed with another poisonous another gas bag - just in time - and put them out. That was in Shinjuku station. I was in that station that day, and that person might have saved my life.
Probably not time travel - but very good timing.
Let's get to the most important question here: is time travel possible? Well, sort of, but not really. We can't just hop into a DeLorean and travel back 30 years into the past to meet our parents. Time travel doesn't happen the way we imagine it: there are no intricate machines or plans to off baby Hitler. In turn, it's more about how differently time moves.
For example, time passes slower when we're traveling on a plane. A 1971 experiment by physicists Joseph Hafele and Richard Keating, called the Hafele-Keating experiment, tested Einstein's theory of relativity. Einstein essentially claimed that the faster you travel, the slower time passes for you. Hafele and Keating proved it by flying atomic clocks on commercial airplanes around the world: once from East to West, and then from West to East.
Then they compared the times on the atomic clocks with stationary clocks at the U.S. Naval Observatory. The West to East clocks gained time, and the East to West clocks lost time. Granted, it was only a tenth-million of a second, yet it still proved that time is relative.
#4
Basically, Poe writes about four people who are starving at sea, draw straws, and k**l and eat the loser, cabin boy Richard Parker. 40 odd years later four people are adrift at sea in a lifeboat, one drinks seawater and goes into a coma. When they draw straws for who will be eaten, the coma guy gets the short straw in a development that surprises no one. And so the three other men k**l and eat the cabin boy. Richard Parker. Seriously.
#5
I know it’s not exactly a major historical event, but it’s been the foundation of science for over a century but when I first heard I thought it was a bit suspicious how it all fell into place.
#6
Gravity can also cause time to pass slower. In real life, scientists see this with GPS satellites: the clocks on them run faster than the clocks on Earth. That's because the closer to the Earth's core we are, the stronger the Earth's gravity is, and the slower the passage of time. Since the satellites are high up in the Earth's orbit, clocks run faster up there.
Astronauts who spend time at the International Space Station also age slower than their human counterparts on Earth while they're in the Earth's orbit. The best real-life example of this was identical twins and astronauts Scott and Mark Kelly. Scott spent one year in space, while Mark remained on Earth.
Mark was born six minutes before his brother and was therefore older. He was still older after Scott returned from space, but by six minutes and five milliseconds. 1,000 days in orbit translates into roughly 0.027 seconds into the future.
#7
anonymous:
I read a theory somewhere that this has essentially happened because The Simpsons has had 706 episodes as of today, and with that many episodes multiplied by the fact that each episode usually has at least 2 plots running- that's over 1400 different storylines. With the style of their show being satirical, it's just bound that they were going to predict some things along the way.
But yeah, employing a time traveler on the writing team probably helps too.
#8
#9
Wadsworth_McStumpy:
The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.
Somebody throws a grenade at his car, and it blows up behind him. That's the first incident of time travel, stopping the assassination. Later, as he goes back, the driver realizes that he's on the same route where the grenade was thrown, and they try to turn around. The whole procession of cars stalls, and a guy who just happened to be sitting there, goes over and shoots him. That's a second time traveler, fixing what the first had done.
Since the whole thing lit off WWI and led to the rise of Hitler and then WWII, I kind of wonder what Ferdinand would have started if he hadn't been k**led. It must have been pretty bad for them to send a second time traveler to put N*zi Germany back into the timeline.
anonymous:
Archduke Franz Ferdinand bleeding out from an assassin because the suit he had been sewn into for the perfect fit couldn't easily be cut off him fast enough to stop the bleeding. Cue WWI.
In a particularly intense gravitational field, like a black hole, we would age slower, too. As astrophysicist at the University of York, UK, Emma Osborne explained to The BBC, "Your head is ageing quicker than your feet, because Earth's gravity is stronger at your feet." However, time doesn't stop at the edge of a black hole, but passes slower relative to an observer far away.
So, given all this scientific evidence, it's true that we sort of can time travel to the future, even if by a few milliseconds. Scientists theorize that it's possible to travel to the future: we either have to move faster or close to the speed of light or spend some time in an intense gravitational field.
#10
Digby and A Company managed to travel 8 miles in 7 hours while also taking prisoner 150 German soldiers including members of the SS. During the battle, Digby wore his maroon beret instead of a helmet and waved his umbrella while walking about the defences despite heavy mortar fire. When the Germans started using tanks to cross the bridge, Digby led a bayonet charge against them wearing a bowler hat. He later disabled a German armoured car with his umbrella, incapacitating the driver by shoving the umbrella through the car's observational slit and poking the driver in the eye.
Digby then noticed the chaplain pinned down by enemy fire while trying to cross the street to get to injured soldiers. Digby got to him and said "Don't worry about the bullets, I've got an umbrella". He then escorted the chaplain across the street under his umbrella. When he returned to the front line, one of his fellow officers said about his umbrella that "that thing won't do you any good", to which Digby replied "Oh my goodness Pat, but what if it rains?"
#11
#12
Every single assassination attempt failed, sometimes because of wildly miscellaneous circumstances, including a sabotaged diving suit that somehow got “miraculously switched” with someone else, who ended up drowning in his place.
Dude holds the world record for over 600 attempts, I believe.
But traveling back to the past is a conundrum physicists haven't yet been able to crack. So far, there have only been theoretical models with no evidence. One possible way to travel back in time is to create a closed curve. "Depending on a trajectory you take around a black hole, you can come out and end up in the past of when you started," astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson explains. "But that takes extraordinary setup to make happen."
#13
#14
They went on to destroy the heavy water plant as well as sink the ship carrying what heavy water had been produced, effectively ending any chance N**i Germany had of developing atomic weapons.
The story is even crazier and less plausible than I've described, but I'm on mobile so I've left some things out.
#15
Survived both the bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Reads like a satirical time-traveler story where the protagonist screws up his dates.
Although real time travel isn't possible (yet!), that doesn't mean we can't have a little bit of silly fun and imagine that some historical events happened because of a time traveler from the future. Which of these do you think are the most probable? And are there any historical events that always seemed too sus to not be the work of a time traveler? Let us know in the comments!
#16
#17
However that's not even the craziest part of her story. The craziest part is she managed to convince Charles of Valois to give her an army to battle the English AND HE DID. Like imagine if a 5'3 girl from the poorest neighborhood in the US who can barely read or write goes to the president and asks him to give her command of our military to fight in a war and he just agrees.
Then on top of that she manages to win a major battle that turns the tide of a war that's lasted already a century. It's almost like a time traveler posed as a peasant girl and won the war. It's always felt super bizarre to me.
#18
#19
Sometime between 200BC - 100 AD. the Ancient Greeks had invented a early prototype steam engine (Aeolipile). But they really didn’t give it much further thought. The Ancient Greeks were clever, but somehow, no one seemed to realize the potential of this invention. It never developed beyond being more than just a curiosity.
Had these Ancient Greek designs been more widespread. There is a good chance the industrial revolution could have happened 1,500 years earlier.
But honestly, it seemed like someone was intervening to prevent these designs from being disseminated.
#20
Who knows if it would've changed the course of the Crusades, but it definitely screams "Uhhhh did we try knocking him off the horse?" By a time travel team.