Detecting time travelers on the Internet is remarkably difficult

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Could there be an indication of visitors from our future lurking in the vast collection of data present on the Internet? That question was tackled by two physicists from Michigan Technological University, Robert Nemiroff and Teresa Wilson, but the answer they came up with was pretty unsatisfying. Within the limit of their ability to check, there's no sign of anyone with knowledge of the future living among us. But the limitations are so large that the search doesn't really tell us anything much.

It turns out that physicists have a bit of a history of trying to find out if a future human has sorted out time travel. In one of the more unusual article introductions I've ever read, Nemiroff and Wilson note:

In May of 2005, then graduate student A. Dorai at MIT publicized and held a convention for time travelers. No one claiming to come from the future showed up. S. Hawking did a similar experiment in July of 2012, holding a personal party for time travelers, but sending out the invitations only after the party. No one claiming to be a time traveler showed up.

They decided to take a more general approach and see if a time traveler has accidentally left some information behind on the Internet by mentioning a topic that hadn't yet occurred. This proved to be much more challenging than you might imagine. For starters, they had to identify events that hadn't yet occurred but were likely to still be memorable in the distant future. One of the ones they came up with is Pope Francis. This makes sense in that Jorge Mario Bergoglio is the first Pope to choose that name, and records of papal nomenclature have been preserved for millennia.