Boy there is a can of worms if I ever saw one!
Of course! We are all traveling into the future together right now! But seriously, science both argues for and against the possibility. And even those who say we can admit the energy requirements (possibly along the lines of all the stars in a galaxy’s worth of energy) make it pretty tough to do so.
But some people claim there is evidence! Is a compact disc truly depicted throughout history? See for yourself at World Breaking Discoveries. Did Charlie Chaplin catch a person talking on a cell phone -in 1928? Search YouTube for this one. There are so many entries, I can’t find one not too ridiculous to link to, sorry. Above Top Secret reports evidence of a Swiss watch found in a 4,000 year old Chinese tomb.
I couldn’t find an original source for any of these stories. Are they hoaxes? If so, they are not the only ones. Wikipedia has a great list of what are called Out Of Place Artifacts. Things like the Coso Artifact, once thought to be a spark plug thousands of years out of place Throughout the years, many of these things have been cited as evidence of unexplained something or other. Most are have been proven to be misidentified, misunderstood, or actual hoaxes. They are fun and interesting though, you should take a peek.
The biggest problem with these kind of things are a) validating them, and b) convincing true believers it was misidentified in the first place. Always watch your sources! Never trust anything too good to be true. Never argue with a true a believer unless you have all night and trust them not to get angry and smack you.
Anyway, if you are ever looking to write a time travel story, so many of these can get you kick started! Use your imagination! How did it get there? Why was it left behind?
There are still one or two things that leave people scratching their heads though, so don’t let it get you down! Could the Antikythera mechanism be something special? It is special enough to have a research group working on it! Believed to be for calculating astronomical positions, it is an amazing mechanical piece! Could the Piri Reis map, from 1513, and supposedly copied from earlier maps, really show the Antarctic coastline, not only 300 years before Antarctica was discovered but as it is under the ice, a sight not seen for 4,000 years? The debate goes on…which side will you chose?