If you were able to time travel back into the past, how would you go about proving you were from the future? Is there a set of predictions you could offer that would improve your chances of being believed?

In this week’s podcast, we discuss what it is that makes a person from the future different to those from the present day and what technology or innovation we might replicate to persuade the disbelieving. We also look at the illusion of explanatory depth, the concept of proof, rationality and the Flashman Papers Series. Finally, we disclose our desired guest list for a dinner party made up of historical attendees.

• Javier, alleged time-travelling TikToker
• I, Pencil by Leonard Read
• Why it took so long to invent the wheel
• The Science of Cycology
• The misunderstood limits of folk science: an illusion of explanatory depth

For more information on Aleph Insights visit our website https://alephinsights.com or to get in touch about our podcast email [email protected]

Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast produced by me, Fraser McGruer for Aleph Insights. In this series of podcasts we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm here with Peter Coghill, Nick Hare and Chris Wragg from Aleph Insights and this week we're discussing how you can prove that you're from the future. Peter, how do you prove? How would you prove

you're from the present? That's fairly simple, I would have thought. Stick to the topic. Yeah,

let's, let's, let's, let's not, you know. I'm beginning to wonder now. He's actually, he's being a bit evasive, isn't he? Right, yeah. So how would you prove you're from the future,

Peter, presuming that you're not? So this was kicked off in my brain by a story I spotted and I've lost my notes so I forget the guy's name but there's a crackpot somewhere, I think he's probably from the States. Okay. Who claims he's from the future, he claims he's from a couple of hundred years in the future. Sure. And it's obviously in the sort of the B-side press who are sort of making, covering this, you know, sort of. He means the Sun. Yeah. Yeah. The Telegraph actually. So they, and they're making, obviously making light of this but he's making various sort of pretty vague predictions as offering those as proof as to that he's from the future. And it got me wondering if, let's frame it this way. So if, if you from now travel back in time, Kyle Reese style, so you've got nothing. Who's Kyle Reese? From the Terminator. Oh yes. Yeah. And they arrive completely naked, they're just, just them, no clothes, no equipment, nothing,

right? So you've got. That's a hell of an excuse, isn't it? Yeah, it is, yeah. But imagine you. It's alright if you look like Michael Biehn, you can get away with it. Yeah, that's true.

Or Arnold Schwarzenegger. So imagine, imagine you arrive, I don't know, 200 years

from, go from now, in the past. Do you know that you're about to go back into the past? Well let's, let's. And do you know that you're just going to have naked and nothing. I think we should say you haven't got time to do homework. Yeah, let's say you haven't got much

time. Okay. You just sort of trailer pulled back. So assuming you don't get burnt as a You're going back with your general knowledge. I thought you were going to say something else beginning with Jen then. You start interacting with people, you start sort of integrating yourself into the society then. Yeah, yeah. How do you, how, how, and is it even possible to go about proving that you are who you say you are from 200 years in the future? Nice. I mean you say. Knowing, knowing what you know, all you know, all you've got is what you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's tricky. It is tricky because I was sort of, if that happened to me, I don't really, I'm not a student enough of history to really know some really fine details that I could go right next week, such and such is going to happen. I know roughly when events happen, but yeah, hour, day by day, hour by hour, no chance. Well that's right, I thought, and I was

they quite specific in some of their things? Didn't they say that Russia would invade Ukraine? No, I think they said that a human and a chimpanzee would have the first child together, and it would be able to speak, but that it would have mixed features, apparently, and that that was going to happen in the not, I don't know exactly when they said.

See, the problem is that that actually, that would be pretty cool if they could give specifically, like maybe the birthday or something. Yeah, the chimp. But the thing is that that could happen anyway, couldn't it? I mean, that could just be a good guess. Hold on. Let's think about this in another way. Let's say you were from another country, right? Japan, Germany, whatever. And in the same time, you wanted to prove to me that you were from Japan or Germany, right? I'm not talking about any time travel. You would be demonstrating me to differences, right? And, for example, you might speak fluent German, for example, and I would probably be convinced, for example. So the difference is the knowledge that you have from your country and culture. But I guess what I'm trying to say. You can cross-check it, can't you? You can't do that with someone from the future. That's the intrinsic problem. But also, what is it that's different about someone from the future, right? Than someone now. And you're talking about trying to prove what that difference is. And at the moment, we're concentrated on probably knowledge, yeah? About factual events in history. That's how you would prove it. So how else? I can't think what the other differences might be unless you've got four eyes or something. Oh, no. Well, I mean, this is, I think, everyone's fantasy about traveling into the past, is that you appear in medieval England, somehow get an audience with the king or Merlin or something. And you, because of your vast knowledge of modern science, are able very quickly to generate the internal combustion engine and machine guns. That's what we all think. And then pretty soon you become the king because of your incredible knowledge of modern science. But the fact is that most of us would struggle to make a scarf or a paperclip. Yes. We'd be useless. We'd be worse than. But I feel like we've covered the whole knowledge thing. But I think the interesting thing is, what could we do? What thing could we do? What technology might we be able to replicate? Well, you could somehow talk about the earth being not flat but round, for example, depending on when you travel to. Might be known in those days. I'm going to go back a bit further. But how would you prove that? However Copernicus, whoever it was, figured this out at the time, I don't know. Well, you'd have to spend a long time making detailed astronomical measurements. And they did believe him and they imprisoned him. By the way, sorry to keep coming out. I think it would be much easier to bring someone from the past into the present and demonstrate to them. We're all doing that ourselves. And demonstrate to them that, hey, this is the present. You could prove that. Or this is the future that you've come to. It's more difficult in reverse. Anyway.

You've definitely got the whole world around you and they can see the whole world. They would recognize that.

I think there's something fundamental in that. Is it impossible to do what we're asking? Well, no. So how would you do it? Well, I'll get on to how. I think let's talk about some of the things you might think about though. Sorry, go on.

Well, I was just going to say, I mean, if obviously what you would want is you would want some specific bit of information that is around the time that is something improbable, right? I think there's an, you know, it has to be an improbable event that you tell somebody because otherwise they're going to go, well, that was just, as you say, a good guess. So I think, you know, you said, well, the chimp and the human one is quite a good one because there's no way you're going to say, oh, well, you know, that was going to happen anyway, wasn't it? I mean, you might inspire a few people to go out and try and make it happen. But so, yeah, I think there's got to be an element which is, it's got to be really unexpected as well. So even Russia invading Ukraine, it's like, unless you were able to say, oh, it happens on this date and in exactly this way. And you've got to say that about a year ago, really, to be plausible.

I think also there's a way which you can deliver your predictions, which would help you. So rather than sort of spouting on social media, which is what this guy does. Right. I think if you, if you arrange for a disinterested third party to seal an envelope with your prediction in it, only to be opened on the very moment that the thing was about to happen, that way you could sort of avoid any possibility that your prediction and your, you know, telling people about it has either brought it about or prevented it from happening. So if you could do that a few times, that would be a strongly-

Imagine, right. Imagine what would happen. Everybody would make the sort of Occam's Razory type judgment that, ah, this is like a David Blaine type trip, you know, how did they get, how did they, you know, actually change the envelope in this box that was.

I think that's making pencils en masse though. I think you could make a pretty passable pencil just chiselling out a piece of stick. You could burn a bit of wood. Driving in a bit of graphite if you could find it, or lead would do.

Yeah, that's where I want to go really is, you know, what could we do that would be genuinely, you know, a marvel, a technological marvel of some kind. Well, let's say, Chris, you were going to say something?

I think that suggests another answer, because I've watched the first series of that program. And how she convinces her partner, if I remember correctly, is I think the medical knowledge that she has is kind of incidental. I think how she persuades him is essentially through love and trust and saying, look, and she establishes that bond with him and to the extent where he definitely understands that she is from the future. And so what does it is not the facts, not the knowledge, but that human connection.

My reading was that he didn't believe a word of it, but he loved her. So it didn't matter. He didn't believe her until third or fourth season when he comes to the future. Really? Yeah.

I think he believed her in the first one.

But I think there's an interesting parallel here, which is about religion. Right. And I think if you look at, you know, people turning up and proclaiming things that seem preposterous and unprovable. And you're right. In the end, the thing that wins people over is not necessarily the plausibility of the information, but the trust in the individual or the buying into the...

And also just going a little bit further, because the thing you're trying to prove is probably unprovable. And so therefore, you're not going to be relying on logic to believe that person, even if they can give you facts about who wins the Derby next week. Right. Ultimately, it does require that emotional leap, which is not necessarily related to rationality. Yeah. Maybe I've just diverted us. Where are we? I've not heard from Peter for a while. Pick it up and run with it.

I mean, as well, aside from what you know, there's possibilities of what you are, like your physical nature. I mean, that might not necessarily prove it definitively. But the fact that we're all in our 40s and we're not losing all of our teeth and everything else about it, that might help convince a few people, you know, you're healthy and you can explain that we're healthier in the future. And people coming from to our time, if they could prove that they had surgery or something that was not possible now, like brain surgery of some kind that we just can't do.

It'd be hard to. Oh, that's good, though. Yeah, you can imagine looking or, you know, they say, oh, I've got a microscopic serial number printed on my 3D printer. That kind of happens in the Terminator.

For example, I have a thing called a loop recorder embedded in my in my chest. It's sort of it's like an ECG monitor and it's just below the skin. Yeah. Yeah. Assuming that goes with me as an integral part of my body. Yeah. You're basically dead if it doesn't. No, no, no. It just it just monitors.

But I've got a universal translator in my head or something.

How does that get us closer to proving that we're from the future?

You'll see. You'll see. I'm going to answer. You'll see. You'll see.

It's his nonchalance that convinces him.

Yeah, yeah. But get this, because I've modified this, right? And so therefore you live a life of satisfaction because you do use certain bits of knowledge from the future to make your life easier. So for example, you know about infection, for example. And so you avoid the things that might get you ill. Don't drink out of a puddle. Right. And also like if, depending when it is, if a doctor comes at you to cure your humuses or whatever, your humors, you know, you tend to get away. But also you use your things like knowledge that the world is round, for example, and you use that to your benefit. Okay, go on. One, know the world is round. Two, something or other. Three, become a millionaire. What's the two? What's the step two? No, but bear with me. I'm just sketching out the overview here. Somehow you use your knowledge from the future to build yourself, to make yourself a powerful person, right? So don't have to.

Yeah, yeah. Okay, assuming that's easy, right? Right. And then, assuming the establishment at the time just roll over and let you take control.

Okay. So you build yourself, you make yourself a powerful ruler. And then once you are a powerful ruler, you say to everyone, actually, I am from the future. And if you don't believe that I'm from the future, I'm going to torture you horribly. And you will end up being beheaded, etc. Right. And so you start to build this.

So basically, you make yourself pharaoh.

But I think the issue we've got here, Fraser, is that we're saying it's not as straightforward as it looks to do that crucial step in the middle where you become all powerful. I think you could. What? Yeah, but because you know how to wash your hands. And so step two is your king. I don't, I don't. Here's one. So you build a bicycle. So you can put your warriors on bicycles and make them more mobile. Yeah, but we've established that things like metalworking and, and, you know, machine tools are going to be required first. You can make yourself a wooden bicycle somehow, I'm sure. Yeah, I mean these are details. Details. But don't you think my general concept is a good idea? Yeah, but I think we're saying that the interesting bit is the bit you rather skipped over. Which is what? Becoming all powerful on the basis of modern day knowledge.

I, I, I, I've got a slightly more positive view. I mean, maybe it's because of, because I'm a geeky engineer. So I think you might actually know something useful, Peter. But I think, you know, the sort of A-level, GCSE A-level kind of physics and chemistry that you've got, I think you could do reasonably well. Certainly setting yourself up as a sort of blacksmith slash healer. You would have an understanding of how the scientific method would work such that you could experiment with metallurgy a bit and improve the steel and then start selling that steel to, to, to your, whichever king is in charge at the moment and then work your way up slowly. But it would be really hard. It wouldn't be. No, it wouldn't be easy. Yeah.

It wouldn't be like, you know. I think, I think the best thing to do would be to effectively recreate works of art that you know were successful rather than paint, rather than painting things. I mean, like, okay, well, you know, I know all, all Shakespeare's stories, for example, right. They might not be quite as good as well-crafted as his. I don't know them verbatim, but I'm going to create works of fiction.

You could just go back and find William Shakespeare and say, I'll be, you be my ghost writer. You can put your name on it, but I'll take half the profits.

I think we're getting somewhere. That you identify, you know, people who were famous in the era and you seek them out. You attach them to yourself. At the point of their early.

If anyone were to know where I was going, I'd probably take, I'd go back to the future star and take an almanac of all the sort of race results. It's a history book.

Actually. So this is what you would do. You would take the thing back with you. Not that directly shows, but an arms you with that proof of knowledge.

Yeah. I mean, one of the issues is I suspect our historical record isn't brilliant. It depends what era you end up in.

Well, if you get it wrong and it's that time before they changed the calendars in the 16th century, everybody's going to be like, well, you're two weeks out with that. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

We talked about that last week.

So forget the proof of knowledge then. So then what would be the object that people go, Oh my God, this person is from the future.

And it would have to operate on it. So if you took your phone back, that'd be useless, right?

Because if you came back to our time, you could bring back a sort of portable fusion reactor or something in a briefcase. Something pretty useful. What about a gun? That would be very complicated. I think you'd run out of ammo, wouldn't you? No, but you'd have it for a bit.

The only way you could demonstrate, I suppose you could shoot and deal with it or something. It would astound people. Yeah. But you'd be on borrowed time because the king or whatever would say, oh, this is wonderful. We need 100 more of these, one for each warrior. And you'd be like, well, actually, and someone's going to go, you know what? We can sort of probably work that without Fraser. We probably don't need Fraser in the middle charging a million gold sovereigns every time we use this gun. Let's grab it off him. But will you have proved that you're from the future? Well, yes, I suppose you could. It would be plausible, wouldn't it? With a technology that advanced. But I mean, I think this is where it becomes almost like trivial, proving you're from the future. What is harder is to think of the thing that will be useful to you. And so I think the book is a great idea because you could imagine ways that you could invest in things that were going to be big that year, you know, or lend money to the right sovereign

because you knew he was going to win. Yeah, it's definitely something that you can profit from, like race results, isn't it? Yeah, it gives you both, I think.

Okay. I think we will draw to a conclusion on that part of this. Yeah. So I've got a question to round us off. And it's actually a very common question, but it's this dinner party thing, right? We're at Aleph Insights, or rather at the Cognitive Engineering Podcast. We're going to have a dinner party. Of course, all our usual guests and the people who appear on this are invited. However... The great and the good. Yeah, the great and the good, the good and the great. However, fortunately, each one of us four sitting here can also invite someone from the past to attend this rip-roaring celebration. Who do you want to invite as your guest?

Peter? I'd invite myself and then give myself some lottery ticket numbers. Memorize these numbers. Don't get too pissed. Don't forget them. And then see you later.

This is just not in the spirit of what... Is Peter from the past going back to the past now?

I'm assuming he's going home after dinner, yeah.

Okay. I like your answer.

Or I'd say, yeah, go back, go, go, go...

I'd be really disappointed if you turned up with yourself.

I'd say go back and invest all the money. Sell your house and invest all you can in Bitcoin.

Imagine sitting between the two Peters. It's bad enough with just the one. I think you benefit from this, Peter. I'm not sure if... No, we're worse off, aren't we, because we've got double Peters. What was meant to be a fun event. We're just sitting in the corner plotting about how to become as rich as possible. Okay. Although it's not quite in the spirit of why I like your answer. No, no, no, I like that. That's a good answer. I like that. Let's keep that. Anyone else? Well, it's a party, right? Yeah. And I think history's biggest party animal was probably Lord Byron. Okay. I think he would make a good addition to any dinner party, wouldn't he? It would be substantially more rip-roaring. Plus you'd get some poetry thrown in. You could probably convince him to read his latest poem out and stuff. Yeah, I was wondering between that and getting Mozart to come and do the music. Yeah. But I think I'd go for Byron because there'd be more lols, I think. Yeah, yeah. I think that's about right. But yeah, I mean, I did think, do we want to bring a famous scientist from the past? I thought, no, not really. It's a dinner party. And also, we already know what they know. Yeah, exactly. They've written it all down, the morons. Whereas, take Einstein or something. He's probably not going to want to sit there and talk about physics, is he? Maybe he's just a great party animal. Well, he might be, but then he's no different to inviting anyone else along, is my point. So I think if it's got to be a party, I think you need to find a famous party animal from the past. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Chris?

I think Jesus.

Yeah. Yeah.

Because then you don't have to splash out on the wine. That's true. Or fish or bread, for that matter. Yeah. But no, I think I'd be like, go on then, there's a few of us here. I think I would do a trick. Not do a trick, but convince us.

Well, I think it would be interesting because the Jesus that comes, I suspect, would be a very different Jesus to the one that we know. Yeah. Right? And he'd be, what? You think I can turn water into wine? Are you mental? I think that's the kind of thing you'd be saying.

I think there are probably fewer figures who've had a larger impact on history.

No, I said God was bad, not that God was dad. Yeah. Completely misheard. By the way, our party's turning into a bit of a sausage fest. But anyway, so I would... Well, go on then, pick a historical lady to bring on. No, I don't want to. I... Marie Antoinette. She would be good fun. Yeah, probably. I would invite, oh, what's his first name? Flashman. He's not real. He doesn't exist. Oh, God. So, Fraser, to pick a fictional person. But the thing is, if we're already doing one impossible thing, let's do a second impossible thing. Well, no, because no, that violates the whole point of the first. It's doubly impossible.

It must be just as easy as singularly impossible.

No, it's two negatives, so it's a positive, right? You're right. It's, um... Two impossibles. It's pretty easy, actually. Now you've come to mention it. Come on, learn your maths. So what's his name? Is it, what's his first name? But you know who I'm talking about. Yeah, the one from the, um... From Gordon, is it George Macdonald Fraser? Yes, but he was originally in Thomas Browne's school days. Yeah, he was in Thomas Browne's school days. But you know who I'm talking about. Victorian adventurer of all the great moments in history. I do feel that which fictional character would you invite to your party is going to generate a different answer, and I'm not allowing it. Yeah, because none of the people we've suggested have been fictional. Why not bring the Duke of Wellington or something if you want someone on that plane? I thought about, um, I'd like to meet, um, um, Rachel Nelson. Nelson, Nelson. Oh, Nelson would be good. He was another... But he, I mean, for all I know, Nelson and Byron might know each other, so they might just spend the whole time having a chinwag. In fact, I think they might both have gone out with Lady Hamilton. They might have, this might be a bad idea, actually. No, um... You don't want a jewel on your hands. End up with fisticuffs. That's fine because we've got, so we'll forget that and we'll go back to Flashman. So I've said it, it's happened. So that's what's happening. Flashman's coming to the party and he'd be a laugh. Yeah, well, if he existed, he would be, but yeah. Um, right, we're going to stop there. Thanks as always for listening to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast. I'm Fraser McGruer, being here with Chris Wragg, Peter Coghill, and Nick Hare of Aleph Insights. Until next time, goodbye.