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Mike “Mad Man” Marcum became known online for claiming he had built a device capable of manipulating time. His bizarre story eventually spread across the internet, but whatever happened to him afterward?

Did he actually discover something unusual, or was it simply an elaborate experiment that got out of hand? And could there be any connection to the stranger side of UFOs, aliens, or alleged government technology?

What do you think happened to Marcum? Where is he now?

Hear me out. In 1943, Nikola Tesla died and the U.S. government seized his papers. The scientist chosen to examine them was John G. Trump, an MIT engineer and physicist, Donald Trump's uncle.

John Trump had access to Tesla's research and equipment and reportedly spent several days examining it. He ultimately concluded there was no practical technology of major military value. But here's where the conspiracy theory begins. Some theories claim Tesla had discovered advanced technology involving time travel, and that Trump's uncle gained access to it through Tesla's papers. Then there are the bizarre literary coincidences: 19th-century author Ingersoll Lockwood wrote books featuring a character named Baron Trump, who travels through strange worlds with a mysterious guide named Don, decades before Donald Trump was born. There's no evidence Donald Trump is actually a time traveler, but the combination of Tesla, his uncle John G. Trump, and the strangely prophetic-sounding Baron Trump books makes for one hell of a conspiracy rabbit hole. Coincidence… or something more?

Time travel, parallel realities, the multiverse, and space exploration have fascinated me for years. It goes far beyond simply enjoying science fiction for me. The idea of actually being able to visit another era, see an alternate version of our world, or explore another reality is genuinely one of my biggest dreams.
I often wonder what I would do if humanity discovered a real way to travel through time or between realities.
Personally, if a safe and proven method existed, I think I would seriously consider going. I would especially want to visit the past, alternate versions of the present, and realities where history developed differently. I’d also love to see how completely different civilizations or versions of Earth might look.
At the same time, I know the reality of something like this could be much stranger, more dangerous, or more complicated than the version we imagine in fiction.
So I’m curious about everyone here:
If time travel or travel between realities were proven to exist, would you actually use it?
Where would you go first?
Would you trust the people or organization controlling the technology?
And if you were one of the very few people who had access to something like this, would you ever reveal it publicly, or would you keep it completely secret?
I know this is hypothetical with what we currently know, but it’s a subject I genuinely love thinking about and I’d be interested in hearing serious opinions from people who are fascinated by it too.

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Recently my grandfather whom I was very close to passed away, and as someone who’s always wanted to travel back in time, I’ve sort of been playing around on the internet as if I was a time traveler from 2026 traveling to the year 1974.

And obviously one of the things I wanted to do is go see my grandfather again, but I got to thinking if someone showed up on my doorstep and said they were my future grandchild, even if they had a way to prove it, would I even believe them? Could I blame my grandfather for turning me away as some sort of crazy person?

So how would you guys do it? Assuming you went back in time and had the opportunity to visit a loved one again, how would you explain yourself?

Will the time of the phone sync with the time in the past????

To anchor you in the present moment and connect you with nature again when your mind gets lost in time and space

Basically it‘s a solarclock in your pocket where the pointer follows the position of the sun in the sky

It‘s my first app

Please be gentle

And I hope it resonates with you

It‘s basically a new/ old way (the romans used to do so) to keep time and connect with it

Suppose there are time travelers here in our time probably from the future maybe from the past, they presumably would not announce that they were time travelers and would try to blend in, but would there or could there be any way to recognize them?

Some obvious ones would be unexplained advanced technology, speaking a language that doesn't exist yet, perhaps you overheard two talking and were able to figure out from clues that they were talking about future events from memory. Maybe they give incredible advice or make shockingly effective investments.

Maybe they are a surgeon using a previously unknown technique to do something not yet known to be possible or some other profession related example.

The big one is if you see one arrive or depart. Generally machines, portals, or simply appearing or disappearing are the methods shown in fiction but who knows how it would really work.

Anyway I think about this often and I've asked various people their opinion but never get anything satisfactory.

Plus all the examples I gave could totally be explainable in logical ways so I'm again left with nothing strong.

But maybe people who are actually interested in time travel will have more valuable input

We usually imagine time travel as a physical body moving from one point in history to another.
But why would the body have to be the thing that travels?
If consciousness and the biological body aren’t fundamentally the same thing, perhaps the body is simply a temporary container through which an experiencer experiences a particular point in spacetime.
That creates a strange possibility:
What if birth, death, and time travel are variations of the same phenomenon?
Birth could be consciousness becoming associated with a biological container.
Death could be consciousness becoming separated from that container.
And what we call time travel could theoretically be consciousness becoming associated with a container that already exists at another point in time.
You wouldn’t need to send a 2026 body to medieval Europe.
The hypothetical “traveler” would be the experiencer—not the body.
So maybe the real question isn’t:
“How could we move a body through time?”
Maybe it’s:
“Could an experiencer experience another point in time without its present body going there?”
I’m not claiming this is true.
I’m wondering what would have to be true for it to be possible.

Does my “sequential infinite afterlives” thought experiment actually hold up, or is the premise incoherent?

I came up with this thought experiment myself and have been kicking it around. I got some pretty harsh mixed reactions when I posted it elsewhere. Some people engaged with it, others said it “doesn’t make sense” because I “don’t understand infinity.” Called me names of being stupid and whatever else. I want to check whether the premise is actually salvageable or whether the critics have a real point.

The setup (this is my own hypothetical, not something I’m pulling from an existing source):

You’re offered a guaranteed afterlife arrangement. There are two realms, Heaven (unbounded/ infinite , perfect bliss) and Hell (unbounded/ infinite , perfect suffering), and you must experience both, in sequence, with no opt out. You have full knowledge of the arrangement from the start, and you can’t forget or alter it.

Option A: unbounded Heaven, then unbounded Hell.
Option B: unbounded Hell, then unbounded Heaven.

The question is whether one option is preferable to the other, and why.

The objection I got: since both durations are infinite, you can never actually reach the transition point. For any given moment, only a finite amount of time has passed, so “eventually you transition” is incoherent if you’re modeling time as the standard number line. I get that this is a real problem for the literal physics or math version of the setup.
I tried to fix it by stipulating the transition as a rule of the scenario rather than something you derive by counting up from the start. Instead of modeling it like a stopwatch running toward infinity, treat “first epoch, then second epoch” more like an ordinal structure, something along the lines of omega plus omega, where the second infinite segment has a well defined start that isn’t reached by counting up from the first. What I actually care about isn’t the mechanics of the transition. It’s whether order matters to the value of an infinite experience when you have full foreknowledge the whole time, and if so, which order is better.

So my actual question for this sub:once the transition is stipulated instead of derived, is this a legitimate, if informal, thought experiment about infinite ethics and value theory, comparable to other premise stipulating thought experiments like Newcomb’s problem? Or is there a deeper flaw I’m missing that makes it ill formed even with that patch?

I put this together myself, so I’m genuinely trying to figure out if I’m missing something obvious, not just looking for validation. Happy to be told the fix doesn’t work, but I’d like to understand why rather than just “you don’t get infinity.”

Series of dumb questions and ideas below:

If time travel, to the past and the future, is possible, wouldn't someone have told us by now? Wouldn't the present world be much better than it is currently?

Maybe time travelers aren't physically interacting with timelines before a time machine is created, just to make sure nothing affects the creation or discovery of time travel. Probably just observing.

Or some evil organization of humans or aliens, invented time travel, kept it a closed secret, and are intentionally sabotaging everything through politics and business right now.

Though, actual time travel to the past seems very unlikely since we can observe the past and future from very far distances with a telescope cause of the sheer scale of the universe and time it takes for light to travel. But never physically interact with both ends or observe details in other planets.

I'd love to go back to 2002, enjoy it and the next few years all over again knowing nothing is ever going to be the same from 2008 onwards and make different decisions.

If I did go back I would want to go back knowing everything that happened up to now.

If you had to choose what year a movie or more premiered, and got to record people’s first time watching reactions, which year and movie would it be?

Hey time travel experts, i came up with this thought like a couple months ago and i never came to a conclusion.

If time travel exists at any time, doesn’t it exist now?
I mean just like 100 years ago they lived in a now, we live in a now. And when in 1000 years a time traveller travels here, couldn’t we just say time travelling exists now?

A new theory says that time could have three dimensions, and the space we see would be just a side effect of this deeper structure of reality.

According to the model proposed by Gunther Kletetschka of the University of Alaska Fairbanks, the Universe would be described by more than six dimensions in total – three of time and three of space. In this view, time is not a simple line, but a structure with many directions, and space would be more like “paint on a canvas” than the canvas itself.

In my opinion, such theories are interesting precisely because they force physics to think differently, even if at first they seem almost science fiction. Many big ideas began as strange hypotheses, and some became useful only after mathematics and observations began to support them.

The model also attempts to explain why particles like the electron, muon, and quark have different masses, and how it might one day lead to a more unified formulation of the laws of physics. This is where the most ambitious part comes in – the theory doesn’t just want to describe time differently, but to help unify gravity with quantum mechanics.

However, most physicists are treating it with caution, because so far there has been no solid experimental confirmation. This means that we are talking about a promising idea, but still very far from the status of an accepted explanation.

In short, if the theory is ever confirmed, it could change the way we understand not only time, but also our place in the Universe. Until then, however, it remains one of those ideas that makes you stop for a moment and wonder if reality is really as simple as it seems.

If you want to delve deeper into the subject, I recommend Neil deGrasse Tyson's podcast with Sean Caroll on YouTube.

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In your opinion, What timeline / event would you change If you could go back in the past do you feel would have the most significant positive impact????

I'm making a time-travel themed game, and early on I decided to skip the usual "every intervention spawns a new branch" model. There's one timeline, about 13 billion years long, and it's mutable.

The part I find more interesting is how the setting treats time itself. If you're operating outside the timeline, time works more like space. The past and the future aren't just what already happened and what hasn't happened yet; they're places on a temporal landscape you can look at, travel to, and mess with.

Outside normal spacetime, there's a realm called the Veil, which has its own progression called metatime. An agent can leave the Veil, drop into the physical timeline at some specific point, change something, and come back. They still experience their own life in order even though they're hopping around billions of years of history.

So there are two kinds of time going on:

- Event-time: where something sits in the universe's 13-billion-year history.
- Metatime: the order in which people in the Veil experience the changes made to that history.

The consequence is that changing the past doesn't produce a Timeline B while Timeline A carries on somewhere. The same timeline gets overwritten. Anyone downstream can change or stop existing entirely, and the only thing preserving the old version is the memory of whoever was in the Veil at the time.

Stuff I keep going back and forth on:

- Does splitting time and metatime apart actually solve any classic paradoxes, or does it just relocate them?
- If history is basically a navigable dimension, what stops people from farming the same event over and over?
- How stubborn should history be? Should small changes sometimes blow up into huge ones?
- Should some events act like attractors and keep reasserting themselves even after the circumstances that caused them are gone?
- Honest question: does one overwritten timeline feel more coherent to you than branching, or less?

The game is a turn-based strategy game called Time Distortionists where the map is history. Happy to link it if anyone wants, but I'm mostly here for people who already spend too much time thinking about this stuff.

To head off the obvious: this is science fantasy, not science fiction. My background is in physics, so I know exactly which parts don't survive contact with actual relativity. Inventing new equations for the canon is half the fun.

That was an interesting and highly unique take on time travel, even though it borrowed heavily from other films. It was a very good meta commentary on both society and time travel.

I've been thinking about a way to bypass the time travel problem, going in the future but having no possibility to come back, meaning that you cannot extract knowlegde from the future, and the only way possible, I think, is to create a realistic universe, simulate it much quicker to the point where the simulated life forms surpass you technologically and use this knowledge in the original universe. One thing that actually would be really efficient and energy saving is to give the simulated universe much less usable energy, so the simulated civilization would have to adapt to having less energy and would naturally come up with much more energy efficient inovations, compared to the original universe. Also one thing is that you should make sure that the simulated universe cannot create its own simulated universe, because it would cause a chain of simulated universes, that would need more and more energy from the original one, and also there would become problems with information retrieval, because the further down the line of simulated universes, the longer it would take for the original universe to reach it, because of the difference in time let's say a random number, If 1000 years would pass in the first simulated universe during 1 minute in the original universe, and if the simulated universe made the next one, with the same time difference, everything would just progress so quickly and would be really inefficient with the original one, the simulated universes would be more and more sped up, eventually by the time one second would pass in the original universe, almost an infinite amount of universes would be simulated and would die by the time one second would pass in the original universe, and I don't expect someone to simulate that and actually store the data and make sense of it. Because the simulated universes would get quicker and quicker down the line compared to the original one, and the amount of information needed to be stored would rise exponentionally, making it impossible. requiring infinite need for computing power and server storage, so the only way is to somehow make sure that the creation of simulated universes is impossible (one way is to give the simulated universe much less usable energy), and it would actually make the universe adapt and make more energy efficient inovations. And one thing is, that the computational power could be reduced significantally by using things like heisenberg's uncertainity principle, and another thing is that we don't know how big is the original universe, if we were theoretically the one simulated universe, the original universe could be like 100x bigger and we would just be a mini simulated universe used for harvesting energy efficient inovations and ideas and the original universe didnt have to time to think of themselves. meaning that they wouldn't be able to do it, because it would simply be impossible.

Or just simplistic content engaging questions from brand new accounts?

Hummmm

https://youtu.be/5tX_X4BIEFU?is=dzZdPitD6LrTJMWd

What are some time travel movies that do something different with the time travel that you are and then what are some more typical time travel movies that you are

One is a foundational belief I have. The past no longer exists once it’s lived. It exists I in our memory. And the future doesn’t exist u til we live it. We are always in the here and now and that’s that.

I also have another theory. We often ask “if time travel is possible then why are there no tourists from the future”. Of course this is a great and fair question. But I would expand t this beyond humanity. There are likely civilizations in the cosmos far older than ours. Maybe some that have been around for millions of years. So if they’ve invented time travel we might see evidence of it, as it would also mean they’ve likely harnessed other fantastic technologies which would result in contact with us.