Darby;
My thoughts went along that line also when I first found out about this, but it is the skyscraper cut & paste work which seems to spoil this otherwise attractive theory. In the supposedly "original" fax we have:
---------------
"Most of the time the changes are subtle. The oldest one was a skyscraper that don't exist in New York."
While over here we have:
"Sometimes I will notice car models that don't exist or books that come out late. The oldest one was a skyscraper that wasn't built in a near favorite store of mine in New York."
---------------
To me it's quite obvious that what Pamela said is exactly correct and the misplaced "don't" seems to be a dead giveaway, but this is not the only oddity here.
Well, as you probably have noticed there are still differences even if we leave out most of this timeline damage stuff. In fact, this is exactly what one would expect of a less developed archetype story. The plotline of his first story was built around Y2K related disasters and it wouldn't be particularly convincing later when those predicted events failed to take place. I imagine that later he would have to ditch most of the original plotline and rearrange his story.
Here's one thing that I curiously noticed only after reading your last post:
---------------
"Dear Art,
I had to fax when I heard other time travelers calling in from any time past the year 2500 AD. Please let me explain."
---------------
There were "travellers" calling in from many different times in this very show, but why did John specifically have to fax when he heard that some of them were (supposedly) from beyond the year 2500? He next offered to explain why this was, but if you read further down he never actually gives any explanation! Instead he goes on telling us how time travel was invented in 2034, how Y2K glitch devasted most of the modern world and so on.
Previously I couldn't see the forest for the trees, but this loose end only makes sense if you add in his real mission to: "...discover the reason why there is no apparent future after 2564."
Speaking of similarities; there is this certain data point that caught my attention about six or seven months ago. In one part of the fax John says:
---------------
"Unfortunately it was also discovered that anyone going forward in time from my 2036 hit a brick wall in the year 2564. Everyone who has ever been there has reported that nothing exists when the machine is turned off you find yourself surrounded by blackness and silence."
I got this deja vu feeling when I read this, because there was something familiar in it. In January 10th 2001 John wrote:
"The measurement for worldline divergence is an observation variable isolated to the distortion unit. An effective analogy would be a "gravity radar". The unit's sensors take a "snapshot" of the local gravity around the unit before a flight. During travel, this baseline is periodically checked to make sure there are no major changes in the environment that would cause a catastrophic mass failure (brick wall appearing from nowhere)."
---------------
It could be a sheer coincidence that a reference to brick wall appears in both segments where he is describing some problems with timelines/worldlines and his time machine. Still, it's tempting to think that this might be a case where he was making a subtle reference to his old story just for giggles.
My final point relates to the second fax. On the old Art Bell website (accessible through Wayback Machine) you can actually read some program descriptions and the (in)famous second Titor fax seems to be listed there also. This was a day after Art had returned from his first retirement:
http://web.archive.org/web/20010616035021/http://artbell.com/topics1098.html
10/29/98 Thursday / Friday
* Glenn.... John Glenn is back in space after a successful launch.
* Time Traveler.... Art reads a fax from a time traveler with quite a lot of info in it about what you will see in the future.
.....
However, the available transcript doesn't seem to contain any such information. John only briefly alludes to Russians somehow "saving" US citizens. This is not necessarily a smoking gun, but at least an indication that there might be something wrong here.
PS. Sorry, assembling this post took longer than I expected
My thoughts went along that line also when I first found out about this, but it is the skyscraper cut & paste work which seems to spoil this otherwise attractive theory. In the supposedly "original" fax we have:
---------------
"Most of the time the changes are subtle. The oldest one was a skyscraper that don't exist in New York."
While over here we have:
"Sometimes I will notice car models that don't exist or books that come out late. The oldest one was a skyscraper that wasn't built in a near favorite store of mine in New York."
---------------
To me it's quite obvious that what Pamela said is exactly correct and the misplaced "don't" seems to be a dead giveaway, but this is not the only oddity here.
Well, as you probably have noticed there are still differences even if we leave out most of this timeline damage stuff. In fact, this is exactly what one would expect of a less developed archetype story. The plotline of his first story was built around Y2K related disasters and it wouldn't be particularly convincing later when those predicted events failed to take place. I imagine that later he would have to ditch most of the original plotline and rearrange his story.
Here's one thing that I curiously noticed only after reading your last post:
---------------
"Dear Art,
I had to fax when I heard other time travelers calling in from any time past the year 2500 AD. Please let me explain."
---------------
There were "travellers" calling in from many different times in this very show, but why did John specifically have to fax when he heard that some of them were (supposedly) from beyond the year 2500? He next offered to explain why this was, but if you read further down he never actually gives any explanation! Instead he goes on telling us how time travel was invented in 2034, how Y2K glitch devasted most of the modern world and so on.
Previously I couldn't see the forest for the trees, but this loose end only makes sense if you add in his real mission to: "...discover the reason why there is no apparent future after 2564."
Speaking of similarities; there is this certain data point that caught my attention about six or seven months ago. In one part of the fax John says:
---------------
"Unfortunately it was also discovered that anyone going forward in time from my 2036 hit a brick wall in the year 2564. Everyone who has ever been there has reported that nothing exists when the machine is turned off you find yourself surrounded by blackness and silence."
I got this deja vu feeling when I read this, because there was something familiar in it. In January 10th 2001 John wrote:
"The measurement for worldline divergence is an observation variable isolated to the distortion unit. An effective analogy would be a "gravity radar". The unit's sensors take a "snapshot" of the local gravity around the unit before a flight. During travel, this baseline is periodically checked to make sure there are no major changes in the environment that would cause a catastrophic mass failure (brick wall appearing from nowhere)."
---------------
It could be a sheer coincidence that a reference to brick wall appears in both segments where he is describing some problems with timelines/worldlines and his time machine. Still, it's tempting to think that this might be a case where he was making a subtle reference to his old story just for giggles.
My final point relates to the second fax. On the old Art Bell website (accessible through Wayback Machine) you can actually read some program descriptions and the (in)famous second Titor fax seems to be listed there also. This was a day after Art had returned from his first retirement:
http://web.archive.org/web/20010616035021/http://artbell.com/topics1098.html
10/29/98 Thursday / Friday
* Glenn.... John Glenn is back in space after a successful launch.
* Time Traveler.... Art reads a fax from a time traveler with quite a lot of info in it about what you will see in the future.
.....
However, the available transcript doesn't seem to contain any such information. John only briefly alludes to Russians somehow "saving" US citizens. This is not necessarily a smoking gun, but at least an indication that there might be something wrong here.
PS. Sorry, assembling this post took longer than I expected
"Imagine your in the first week of 1970." Hmmm