Greetings children, it's me Captain Disillusion...
or is it? (electronic voice repeats) or is it?
(Normal) Gotta stay on your toes.
You never know what fakery will be sprung on you these days...
Lithium filter scams,
black-market bionic implants,
thumb theft.
Those are just some of the premium topics you can hear me discuss right now
for only $749.99
(under his breath) My monthly two year subscription commitment required!
(Normal volume) But let's move on to today's free topic:
(Captain Disillusion) The time traveler conspiracy. (Woman) Try my buffalo placenta makeup line!.
(Fast electronic speaking)
Back before palm tags and neural interfaces,
people used to carry their communication devices in their hand like a brick.
They called them cellular mobiles
and they were so obsessed with these objects they used to think they could see them everywhere,
even in ancient 2D movies,
like this shot from promotional footage of the
1928 premiere of Charlie Chaplin's film The Circus
where a passing woman appears to be talking on a mobile
or this scene from the Old Western Fort Apache,
made in 1949,
where Henry Fonda appears to check his GPS
on what looks like an iPhone,
or even this 1938 archival shot
where a young lady appears to be finishing her conversation
on what is clearly a Samsung Galaxy S6.
It might sound silly,
but there are people who really take this brand of conspiracy theory seriously.
They believe various photos and films
have captured secret time travelers trying to blend in among the crowd.
Entire online communities are dedicated to tracking down such evidence.
This 1949 photo of a reopening ceremony for a bridge in Canada
made the rounds in the media
because one guy looks too much like a modern day hipster.
Seems more like a ziphead to me.
And for over a decade,
people have followed the posts of a person calling themselves John Titor
who claimed to be a soldier from the future
on a mission to retrieve an IBM 5100 computer
in order to prevent a catastrophic technological problem in the year 2036
...but apparently made a pit stop in our time
to answer some questions on a message board.
I get it.
The possibility of time travel is very appealing.
We could verify history books.
Evolutionary psychology could finally become a science,
but the conspiracy theorists don't care about that.
They just like sci-fi stuff,
and they can stand to zoom out a little...
...zoom out of the tiny world of anomaly hunting
and look at the big picture.
I think this woman is just scratching the side of her head
and not just because we can't confirm there's an object in her hand at all.
I think this girl timidly holds her glasses case against her cheek
and not just because she's passing a documentary film crew aiming a camera at her,
and I think Henry Fonda is looking at an ordinary notepad,
not just because we can see the bottom of it right in the shot.
It's because these devices needed giant metal towers every few miles
and space satellites to work...
...infrastructure that didn't exist in these times.
Also, this one's a movie.
Think about that for a second.
And as we continue to gain perspective,
we might realize that one man's slightly peculiar look
doesn't have to automatically unravel the very fabric of reality
because shielded sunglasses, sports team sweaters,
and miniature cameras all existed by the 1940s.
Give the guy a break. He just wanted to feel cool,
much like that Reddit guy who claimed to have two sonic...screwdrivers,
Or like a group of nerds in Florida
who, perhaps inspired by a Pat Frank novel,
wanted to impress a gullible old man on the radio,
so they put together their various skills and art,
computer science and bulls**t,
to create a mystery figure,
a sort of geek Banksy,
but then they realized they could commercialize it
and started making all kinds of stupid decisions
until the whole thing just kind of fell apart...
...sucks when that happens...
but if you zoom out far enough,
you'll realize that space and time
are an interwoven continuum
in which, as relativity shows us,
perception of time is dependent on velocity and strength of gravitational fields
and even super-intelligent cyborg Stephen Hawking agrees
that, while it's possible to skip into the future by just moving really fast,
travel the other way into the past will most likely forever remain a fiction.
So the next time an anachronistic detail catches your eye,
calm down, step back and take a look at the big picture.
Then, if you still feel an urge to argue with people on the internet,
maybe it's time to take a break and go outside.
It's always a good idea to step out, take a breath of fresh air,
bask in the weather-service regulated sunlight
and rest easy knowing the scientific consensus is clear...
...time travel is impossible.
Huh! A flying Delorean.
Haven't seen one of those in thirty years.
What the hell is going on here?
(groans and gasps)
Oh no...
...this can't be happening!