I was musing about being able to warn people / authorities about upcoming events, and how they would be received. After all, people like the US Secret Service no doubt get many warnings of Presidential assasination every day. I'm not sure if this is the right sub-board for it, but here goes...

In the best TV sci-fi fashion, let's say you suddenly find yourself transported back in time (pick your own method of occurance - wormhole, mad scientist, etc). A time before a major event in history, in which you now have the ability to alter.

How would you do it?

For example, let's say you find yourself transported back to 9 SEP 01. How would you warn of the 9/11 attacks?

You could simply ring the FBI / Secret Service, and tell them there would be an attack on 9/11 (giving the pertinent details). Would they believe you? How many other reports had they received? How would your stand up against them? How much creedence would be paid to you?

Think about it. If you said "Well, I'm from 2007 and I know this guy who is genius with physics and he built this rig in the basement, and he told me not to touch this gizmo but I did then ZAP... I found myself here in 2001..." they'd likely thank you for your time and put the report into File 13.

Perhaps it would be better to lie? Say you were part of the group but had had a change of heart, and wanted to turn yourself in?

So:

Pick a situation and give your opinion on how you'd warn people.

(I am assuming here that you have no warning of your time-travel; you don't get to pick up history books, reports, advanced technology, etc. You just end up there on your lonesome - perhaps even naked, Terminator-style)

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"For ignorance to reign, all it takes is for knowledgable people to say nothing"

Lonewulf

Nobody would believe you, until after the event, at which time you would be assured of a quick trip to camp Gitmo, and some rather nasty interrogation. I have thought about this scenario myself obviousman, and can think of no way of getting the relevant authorities to take your warning seriously.

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"Ah go on Ted they have a spider baby"

"How do you know its a baby, does it gurgle or something"

"Er no, they keep it in a pram"

what if you were sent back in time to the hospital that Hitler was born in 5 minutes before he was born. would you make your way to the delivery room and kill the small child immediately after his birth?

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"blacker than the blackest black... times infinity."- Nathan Explosion
The.. Best.. Thread..Ever...

I thought about that, but it depends on the individual concerned; that's why I've said to pick the time you'd go to.

For instance, if Gravy from JREF were to find themselves at that date, they'd be able to provide enough information (based on facts discovered after the attack) that would give his warning credibility. He might not say HOW he knows, but if they were to check certain people they'd find hits on known persons of interest. That would raise the warning from above the 'average kook' level.

Another example might be Pearl Harbour. You might demonstrate knowledge of events which were not public knowledge, or were indeed classified.

Of course, the Pearl Harbour scenario leads on to the "what if": what if the US hedded warning and repelled the attack? How would that have affected the war? Would the US have declared war on Japan? (I think so, since the Japanese declared war on the US just prior to Pearl, so they were at least committed)

The "what if" scenarios are fasinating and deserve seperate threads of their own. I'm just interested to hear how various individuals would conduct themselves if they were placed in the situation of being able to warn of an event but not necessarily being able to make themselves credible.

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"For ignorance to reign, all it takes is for knowledgable people to say nothing"

Lonewulf

Heh. To save Kennedy, tell Oswald's boss at the School Book Depository that he was a defector. That would probably get him fired, taking away his opportunity.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

The KEY Is to Arrive Early ...

That Way you Can Be Deep Throat, you Can Be The Infantry Privates Who Found Lee's Special Orders, you Can Be The Guy Who Discovered Fire ...

In Other Words, Only By Being In Place and Useful, Long Before The Actual Event, Can you Ever Have a Hope to Change History!

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If you Ignore YOUR Rights, they Will go away.

Well in terms of 911 I would call in a bomb threat to each building. I would say the bombs would be high up - 80, 90th floor. Hence those above the 2 impact zones would moved out till the area was checked.

Not perfect, but I believe it would have lessened the casualties. Especially in the second tower hit

That's actually exactly what I was thinking. Then as I typed this, it occured to me that making a threat against 4 particular aircraft might be a better choice. Calling in a bomb threat against 4 different aircraft might seem a little like a hoax though, so maybe a general, there is a bomb on a United OR American 757 OR 767. It is being carried by a passenger who is also armed with a knife of some kind.

If security actually acts on it, they get 4 different planes with guys with knives, but no bomb. By then the planes have been delayed and someone should have checked out at least one of the guys.

Short of that, break a gas line in WTC plaza.

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I'm not evil.
An evil person would do the things I think up.

Slightly off topic:
Just after Sept 11 the store where I work got a few copies of a book about Nostradamus, The Man Who Saw Tomorrow. It was published in the early 70s, so I read through it to see if there was anything that happened after the translations that could be considered hits. I found a few, but nothing that could be considered anything more than someone writing down a deja vu experience, no matter how optimistically you looked at it (and stayed rational).

That got me thinking about a way to make accurate predictions about the future which led to an idea for a story, the majority of which would be about how the person would go about gaining acceptance. This is what started this thread on the Ethics of Precognition. In my fictional/fantasy version there are a total of 6 events. A dream of something specific on day X. A second dream of something related on day X+A, and a third on day X+2A. They could happen every Monday, or three nights in a row, but the interval between 1 and 2 will be the same as between 2 and 3. Later, the events will play out in real life, exactly as they did in the dream. The actual interval will be different than the one between the dreams, but it will still follow the X, X+B, X+2B pattern. The third dream is never complete, so the outcome is unknown. It would be like turning off a news broadcast before the end of the story. "Tonight a plane suffered a brake failure at O'Hare Airport an was unable to stop in the length of the runway, resulting in..." The plane smashing through the fence, or the pilot hitting the gas and going around? If the pilot had been alerted to the possibility of a brake failure, he may have been quick enough to throttle up and get back in the air. Because of the first two events, which are VERY specific, a exact date can be determined for the event, possibly even the time. The news showing the plane coming in to land at about Sunset, for example.

This is also why I've been interested in that other thread of late. It looked like it had some odd parallels.

Anyway, how this all related to the question at hand. Two days is not enough time, but a few months, and a decent memory might allow a person to pull off an "I'm a Psychic" scam and get decent results. If you were to make specific predictions about events prior to Sept. 11, and make enough of them publicly for even the skeptic to take notice, you might be taken seriously when you make the call on the 10th.

The TV show Psych sort of does this. No one believes the guy that he simply notices things and remembers them very well, but they do accept that he's psychic, so he pretends to be, complete with buzzwords and over the top theatrics, to lead the police to the bad guys. It's on the USA Network, and actually not too bad.

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I'm not evil.
An evil person would do the things I think up.

your speculation has now made me wonder
about the Meriad of ODD things people do

Like breaking a gas line at WTC.

you cant SAY why you did it- and on the news- would be some crazy guy that for some reason- breoke a gas line at WTC....
well that happens on the news all the time

I remember the Movie ....Minority Report.... its where they can predict when a crime is in progress.. and prevent it before it happens.....

Well.. if that can be possible in real life ... it can prevent the 911 from happening....

Reporting a plot would probably get you into trouble nowadays. It´s akin to trying to report a software vulnerability.

We wanted to be good citizens and help prevent the exploit from being used,(...)But two months later, in April, the same physics department website was hacked. A detective approached Meunier, whose name was mentioned by the staff of the vulnerable website during questioning. The detective asked Meunier for the name of the student who had discovered the February vulnerability.

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If you're careful enough, nothing bad or good will ever happen to you.

Well, if I arrived naked, that would be enough to scare everyone in the world, but I guess that's a different matter.

This is a great concept -- thanks for posting it.

Would time and circumstances permit me to get to one of the airports from which a 9/11 plane departed, get a ticket for one of those flights (hopefully the first one that departed), and then just jump one of the terrorists in the concourse or the departure lounge? "Officer, I saw him handing out knives to that guy and that guy and that guy over there." "And, they were talking about "the other planes." "I heard one of them say the words 'Flight 93', and the way they were talking it sounded like it was more than just one other flight".

I suppose there would always be the option of calling in bomb scares. Perhaps a number of calls from different phones (maybe some of those pre-paid, untraceable cell phones?).

I'd like to say that I'd call that FBI agent out in the midwest (Minneapolis?) who warned of a problem but was rejected by her superiors, but I don't remember her name/location off-hand and without pre-warning of the time travel I wouldn't be able to look it up.

I wonder what would happen if you contacted the chief of security at BOS or JFK, or maybe a local FBI office, tell them that you converted to Islam a few years ago and were attending services at a mosque (pick a mosque, any mosque -- but maybe one in Brooklyn close to where the people who carried out the 1992 attack were from) when you heard some people talking about a mass hijacking. You did some further listening and checking up and so far what you've found is: there are 15-20 of them (DON'T be specific), they were going to enter the system in Portland and JFK (I don't recall, but I don't think any of them actually entered the system in BOS), they were boarding flights to ..., they had all been to flight schools, and they were carrying box cutters, etc. Could you have convinced someone to at least check and find three or four arabic names on each plane with one way tickets, and would that have been enough that they would have sent someone down to check those particular passengers? If you gave enough details, would someone have listened at least enough to check out those passengers?

I'm thinking the "go to the airport and jump one of them" answer might be the only one that had a chance.

Nice!!!

AH yes, the joy of reporting software vulnerabilities.......

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Sic Transit Gloria Mundi

The best way would be to arrive a few days before and correctly predict an event (or events) in the build up to the day before an event. Such as predicting the horse racing results on 8/9/10th sep 2001, winning yourself millions in the process. They'd sit up and take notice then!

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Of all the things I've ever lost, I miss my mind the most!

Now that's a good idea!

Eh, The Direct Approach ALWAYS Works Better ...

Arrive a Few Years Before The Event, Join The FBI and Earn an Appointment to their Counter-Terrorism Squad; Once There, Gently Steer Them Into Making Key Discovies that we Never Got a Chance to Fiind in The Original Tiime-Liine ...

As 9/11 Draws Nearer, Either your Efforts Wiill Have Thwarted them Already, or you Wiill Have Assets in Place to Catch them When they Try it or Somethiing Liike it!

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If you Ignore YOUR Rights, they Will go away.