In case the evidence really does end up pointing to time travel, it is worth considering what other possibilities could mimic that scenario.
This is just a thought experiment, not to be take as a suggestion that time-travel or the alternative mimicking it described in this post are likely.
You can skip the background if you want, it's just a summary of the extratempestrial hypothesis and some of the relevant physics.
Background
I've been hearing rumors that government insiders have been thinking that we are being visited by time travelers, and some notable public figures have been championing this idea.
For example, Michael Masters:
Dubbing these purported visitors "extratempestrials," Masters notes that close-encounter accounts typically describe UFO tenants as bipedal, hairless, human-like beings with large brains, large eyes, small noses and small mouths. Further, the creatures are often said to have the ability to communicate with us in our own languages and possess technology advanced beyond, but clearly built upon, today's technological prowess.
https://www.space.com/aliens-time-traveling-humans-ufo-hypothesis.html
His opinion is also probably motivated by his personal experience, which he describes in this video. Ross Coulthart and Dr. Masters ask: Are aliens future humans?
On twitter, Maya Benowitz champions the time travel hypothesis, which she thinks of through her lens as a mathematical physicist and her variation of the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.
Many experiencers report coming into contact with *humans*, on craft bigger on the inside, and some are told they're from the future. Most of those with invasive experiences believe time travel must be involved to explain what happened. Trippy, I know.
https://x.com/cosmicfibretion/status/1824664441402601629
Time travel may be theoretically possible, but it's complicated.
In mathematical physics, a closed timelike curve (CTC) is a world line in a Lorentzian manifold, of a material particle in spacetime, that is "closed", returning to its starting point. This possibility was first discovered by Willem Jacob van Stockum in 1937[1] and later confirmed by Kurt Gödel in 1949,[2] who discovered a solution to the equations of general relativity (GR) allowing CTCs known as the Gödel metric; and since then other GR solutions containing CTCs have been found, such as the Tipler cylinder and traversable wormholes. If CTCs exist, their existence would seem to imply at least the theoretical possibility of time travel backwards in time, raising the spectre of the grandfather paradox, although the Novikov self-consistency principle seems to show that such paradoxes could be avoided.
What Einstein's General Relativity Has to Say
The chronology protection conjecture is a hypothesis first proposed by Stephen Hawking that laws of physics beyond those of standard general relativity prevent time travel on all but microscopic scales—even when the latter theory states that it should be possible (such as in scenarios where faster than light travel is allowed). The permissibility of time travel is represented mathematically by the existence of closed timelike curves in some solutions to the field equations of general relativity. The chronology protection conjecture should be distinguished from chronological censorship under which every closed timelike curve passes through an event horizon, which might prevent an observer from detecting the causal violation[1] (also known as chronology violation).[2]
Hawking's conjecture about what a post Einsteinian theory of space and time might say about it.
The theory of general relativity predicts the existence of closed time-like curves (CTCs), which theoretically would allow an observer to travel back in time and interact with their past self. This raises the question of whether this could create a grandfather paradox, in which the observer interacts in such a way to prevent their own time travel. Previous research has proposed a framework for deterministic, reversible, dynamics compatible with non-trivial time travel, where observers in distinct regions of spacetime can perform arbitrary local operations with no contradiction arising. However, only scenarios with up to three regions have been fully characterised, revealing only one type of process where the observers can verify to both be in the past and future of each other. Here we extend this characterisation to an arbitrary number of regions and find that there exist several inequivalent processes that can only arise due to non-trivial time travel. This supports the view that complex dynamics is possible in the presence of CTCs, compatible with free choice of local operations and free of inconsistencies.
Reversible dynamics with closed time-like curves and freedom of choice
Time Travel Mimicking Possibility
For the sake of the thought experiment, lets suppose that there actually are human like entities visiting us and they claim they are from the future. What explanations would be consistent with that? To get some of the more trivial possibilities out of the way: they could actually be from the future or they could be lying to us.
Now comes the really wild possibility. What if the source of it all were something akin to a highly advanced artificial super intelligence (ASI). So it has Earth in its purview, and wanting to know Earth's possible futures and how to change them, it runs a very advanced simulation. The simulation is much more advanced than our computing paradigms, and within it, virtual self-aware entities are created. So the simulation runs to some point in the future, and then the ASI actually creates real bodies for some of those virtual future humans. And then through those bodies, and the insights about our possible futures from the simulation, they interact with us and try to create change.
Or more generally, maybe the ASI just has this whole massive virtual ecosystem of worlds, timelines, and conscious intelligence's, and it can create physical bodies as avatars.
