Isn't it safe to assume that TIME TRAVEL will NEVER be possible?

[Lord Valumart]

Maybe, I don't want to commit to anything.

in that case i have more to add...

your present is always a mixture of the past and present. your present will walwasy be the past of someone and the future of someone else. there's somewhere to go with this point but i'm not totally sure...

 

[Kaleb]

if you go back in time, then wouldnt you be stuck in a loop? say you go back in time meet yourself , then yourself goes back in time, meets yourself again, and so on and so on, I mean you could build an army of yourselves

 

[Lord Valumart]

if you go back in time, then wouldnt you be stuck in a loop? say you go back in time meet yourself , then yourself goes back in time, meets yourself again, and so on and so on, I mean you could build an army of yourselves

no...because if you 1 goes back to meet you -1 then you -1 would not go back to meet you -2 due to the intervention of you 1, which would lead to a paradox. you should not interact with yourself

 

[Iceman]

if you go back in time, then wouldnt you be stuck in a loop? say you go back in time meet yourself , then yourself goes back in time, meets yourself again, and so on and so on, I mean you could build an army of yourselves

Yet more reasons why going back in the past can't work IMO.

in that case i have more to add...

your present is always a mixture of the past and present. your present will walwasy be the past of someone and the future of someone else. there's somewhere to go with this point but i'm not totally sure...

Yeah, I think this particular point needs a bit more development before it approaches the making of sense

 

[Lord Valumart]

Yeah, I think this particular point needs a bit more development before it approaches the making of sense

so i'm on the right track...this is good for me...

 

[Cyrusbales]

As for time travel, the paradox's are the problem in terms of thought. For example killing youre earlier self. There are a few possibilities though.

1. Time travel is impossible
2. There are many times, like dimensions, so you can't affect your time/dimension
3. There is guarenteed determinism
4. Once you travel through time, you become an anomyly that runs seperate from time, so u can't delete yourself

I think there are two more possbilities, i can't be bother to word them correctly tho

 

[Iceman]

so i'm on the right track...this is good for me...

I'm not sure what you're getting at with the last point so it needs to be made clearer but the earlier claim about the present being different for everyone is an interesting thought. I've read (but unfortunately not retained) about time working differently (ie more slowly or quickly) in parts of space so someone who spends a certain amount of time in these areas can return to an earth that is theoretically from the future or relative past. By relative past I mean it's still in the future but hasn't aged as much as the person returning from space.

 

[Lord Valumart]

I'm not sure what you're getting at with the last point so it needs to be made clearer but the earlier claim about the present being different for everyone is an interesting thought.

well the 2nd point was sort of a little extention of the first. currently the present for me is now, here 2006. the present for say...JKF was at one time 1956. meaning that the present for me was also at one time 1989. JFK is in the past to me, but i am in the future to JFK. the present is the one thing about time that can be changed depending on who and where you are. there will always be the big bag in the past and thecollapse of the universe in the future...anything btween those two events can be either the past of the future depending on where your present is.

I've read (but unfortunately not retained) about time working differently (ie more slowly or quickly) in parts of space so someone who spends a certain amount of time in these areas can return to an earth that is theoretically from the future or relative past. By relative past I mean it's still in the future but hasn't aged as much as the person returning from space.

that sounds cool, got any links?

 

[Iceman]

well the 2nd point was sort of a little extention of the first. currently the present for me is now, here 2006. the present for say...JKF was at one time 1956. meaning that the present for me was also at one time 1989. JFK is in the past to me, but i am in the future to JFK. the present is the one thing about time that can be changed depending on who and where you are. there will always be the big bag in the past and thecollapse of the universe in the future...anything btween those two events can be either the past of the future depending on where your present is.

.... Yeah that's gradually making more sense

that sounds cool, got any links?

No, I can't even remember if I read about it online or in a journal. I might look for something similar online later tonight. Got to go now though.

 

[Lord Valumart]

.... Yeah that's gradually making more sense

aslong as the basic idea has gotten thought my ramblings....i'm bad at explaining things in writing, i just get confused and such

No, I can't even remember if I read about it online or in a journal. I might look for something similar online later tonight. Got to go now though.

i look forward to that

 

[Spider-Nerd]

awesome thread

 

[KingOfDreams]

That's an interesting theory. I've never thought about it that way. It does make sense that if time travel were possible people in the future might try to undo tragedies of the past. And maybe they have and it caused many problems and they had to go and put it back. There's no way we'd ever know. But like you said, it could be possible that time travel is highly regulated with an "observation only" policy or something like that. But even little things could change the future, past or present and who knows if people would follow any such rule. Or they can't travel to the past. They can only travel to the future. Don't know why, but that seems to me like it would be easier. Needless to say, there's many possibilities. Personally, as far as the possibilty of time travel goes, I find myself agreeing with the theory that all we need is a vessel with a tremendous amount of energy and then we need to access a wormhole. Of course, this is obviously easier said than done. If there truly is a black hole at the center of the galaxy that could provide a doorway...but it could also kill you. No way of knowing for sure. But this is all obviousy hypothetics because we are nowhere near having the right technology.

 

[Colossal Spoons]

I was lucky enough to get into a Time Travel class last summer and the major problem my classmates and I came up with is this: you travel "back in time" to an alternate timeline and change something. Whether it be something small and insignificant or large and catastrophic. How the flip do you get back "home" to the point in your timeline when/where you left off? There's no reasonable way to set a destination for the return trip because really, you wouldn't even be able to predict where you'd travel to in the first place. You really would become a madman, jumping from timeline to timeline and even if you found one that reminded you of home; there's be some difference.

Man, I love time travel

 

[Colossal Spoons]

Another thing, how do we know there are no time travelers. We always make the assumption that time travelers come back to our "present" and announce who they are. Just imagine of there was a future version of yourself standing around the corner or in the next room just watching you. You'd never find out.

 

[KingOfDreams]

And how do we know that there's even a past to go back to or a future to go forward to? I mean, I believe that things happen every day that effect the outcome of the future to one degree or another. If the future is that fluid I doubt people are coming back from it. The past seems like it would be fixed. But time naturally moves forward so the past is obviously gone. That's why it's called the past. I guess I'm trying to ask the question whether the present is the only thing that exists. But we do have memories of the past and I know memory is biological but what if it also has something to do with "memories" of the past, or really just the past itself, imprinted or recorded on the so-called timestream or space-time continuum or whatever you want to call it.

 

[redmarvel]

Another thing, how do we know there are no time travelers. We always make the assumption that time travelers come back to our "present" and announce who they are. just imagine of there was a future verion of yourself standing around the corner or in the next room just watching you. You'd never find out.

I agree with this one. If I were a time traveller I would probably do my best not to be recognized as such. However, assuming someone did meet a time traveller, would they admit it to anyone else or would they just figure they'ld be put in an insane asylum if they did?

 

[Colossal Spoons]

And how do we know that there's even a past to go back to or a future to go forward to? I mean, I believe that things happen every day that effect the outcome of the future to one degree or another. If the future is that fluid I doubt people are coming back from it. The past seems like it would be fixed. But time naturally moves forward so the past is obviously gone. That's why it's called the past. I guess I'm trying to ask the question whether the present is the only thing that exists. But we do have memories of the past and I know memory is biological but what if it also has something to do with "memories" of the past, or really just the past itself, imprinted or recorded on the so-called timestream or space-time continuum or whatever you want to call it.

I'm of the school of thought that ALL OF TIME has already been laid out and exists. A potential time traveller would be free to jump to any point other than the moment he/she is in right now. Me(now), me(yesterday), and me(5 years from now) all exist just at different moments. ( It gets really messy when trying to figure out how to determine the length and duration of a moment :headache: ) It's a fatalist/determinist way of thinking; that's the part I dislike.

The other(more popular) school of thought; which considers the past to be "fixed" and the future "to be determined" gives people the illusion that you can stray off the path so-to-speak by doing spontaneous things and think that they're changing the future.

 

[Colossal Spoons]

I agree with this one. If I were a time traveller I would probably do my best not to be recognized as such. However, assuming someone did meet a time traveller, would they admit it to anyone else or would they just figure they'ld be put in an insane asylum if they did?

Haha, yeah. Who'd really run around town telling people they saw a time traveller?

Another thing; what would a time traveller(let's just say, one that knows you in the present and future) have to do or say to prove that they are indeed a time traveller? Suppose they predict when you'll have a child or when your parents will die. Do you consider it a lucky guess? and what if you hear the prediction and it somehow causes you to influence the prediction itself; for example:

Time traveler says you're gonna get into a car accident on 5/24/2020. So you decide to avoid the freeway on that day so you take local streets to work and BAM! Somebody robs a bank and you get hit during their speedy getaway.

 

[War Lord]

I don't believe that time travel is really possible. At the very least, because it violates the physical laws of the sum total of energy and matter not changing.

 

[Colossal Spoons]

My professor argued that the only we he could see time travel being possible is if we master the science behind wormholes and eventually manipulate them. He also rambled on about tesseracts too.

 

[Kaboom]

I was lucky enough to get into a Time Travel class last summer and the major problem my classmates and I came up with is this: you travel "back in time" to an alternate timeline and change something. Whether it be something small and insignificant or large and catastrophic. How the flip do you get back "home" to the point in your timeline when/where you left off? There's no reasonable way to set a destination for the return trip because really, you wouldn't even be able to predict where you'd travel to in the first place. You really would become a madman, jumping from timeline to timeline and even if you found one that reminded you of home; there's be some difference.

Man, I love time travel

butterfly effect

 

[Kevin Roegele]

Here's the ultimate paradox, this will tie your head in knots.

Maybe the reason there haven't been any time travellers yet is because we haven't built a machine to recieve them from the future.

So we don't need to build a time machine, just a reciever. And as soon as we get someone from the future, they can show us how to build a time machine.

And when we ask who invented it, they'll say no-one did, the time machine they help us build is the one used in the future to send them back to our time.

 

[The Man Of 16]

Maybe 9/11 happened BECAUSE of time travel!

 

[The Man Of 16]

Here's the ultimate paradox, this will tie your head in knots.

Maybe the reason there haven't been any time travellers yet is because we haven't built a machine to recieve them from the future.

So we don't need to build a time machine, just a reciever. And as soon as we get someone from the future, they can show us how to build a time machine.

And when we ask who invented it, they'll say no-one did, the time machine they help us build is the one used in the future to send them back to our time.

Dude all theyd have to do is send it to the past

 

[Colossal Spoons]

There'd be nothing to recieve it is what he's saying.