Time Travelling

Note: I'm talking about both "forms" of time travel i.e. backwards and forwards.
Basically this debate is about whether if it is really possible to make all these theories of time travel into reality for humans since the most we can do for time travel is if we had a ray of light that went faster than the speed of light (speed of light = 300,000,000m/s).
This is described basically as gate A sending the signal, gate B will receive it and send a "reply" back to A. Now if the signals being sent are travelling faster than the speed of light then gate A will receive the reply before it is even sent. This is because of the non-linear frames the light will go through. (Think of it as a frame by frame replay). So basically in the gate A to gate B "experiment" the light or signal is said to have travelled back in time since the end happens before the start.
There are also various paradoxes such as the "Grandfather paradox". Basically suppose a man traveled back in time and killed his biological grandfather before the latter met the traveller's grandmother. As a result, one of the traveller's parents (and by extension, the traveller himself) would never have been conceived. This would imply that he could not have travelled back in time after all, which in turn implies the grandfather would still be alive, and the traveller would have been conceived, allowing him to travel back in time and kill his grandfather. Thus each possibility seems to imply its own negation, a type of logical paradox.
This paradox is used to refute the idea of backwards time travel along with the fact that if you did go backwards beyond when a time machine if created then it wouldn't work because the time machine wouldn't have existed before it was created.

If time travel were possible, why aren't we getting visitors from the future?

Maybe because the future hasn't started yet.

It has if time travel is possible.

But we are in one time zone, time just can't keep going and going, the Dinosaurs can't be racing along right now. This is one life and one life only. We have to WAIT until 3450 or whatever untill the amazing amount of science might possible.

The dinosaurs are alive sixty-five million years in the past. Just about to be extinct at that time, though. If time travel is possible, then they are. If time travel isn't, they really are dead. They are dead anyway, of course, but if time travel is possible at any time, they would still be "alive" sixty-five million years in the past.

« Last edited by Wizmo Gizmo on Dec 25th 2007 »

I think it might be possible if we actually were going to make one of those gateways. But of course they could already be invented and a country's government could be just keeping it secret.

Anyway point is, if the ray of light goes faster than light itself it may be possible but that's very unlikely going to happen.

And , lets say, we officially produced one of these 'gateways' the furthest we'd be able t go back would be to the day it was made. So for example, the year 2010 produces the first time travel gateway. It can't travel back in time exactly from that second can it? Because there'd be no gate on the 'receiving end'. This means that, lets say, within the year 2100 the furthest they could travel back would be 2010 so they'd have a gate B to go back to gate A.

They could go back even without the gate, although they would be stuck there. They would be placed in the exact location of the gate (even if it doesn't exist) at what time they went back. So they would be stuck in that time if they went before the gate was created.

Even so, the first famous thing that will go through the gate will be an apple or something...

Considering the fact that it would change the future (or past) to send anything through the "gate", it would be wise not to create the "gate" in the first place.

If we send an apple through the gate in the past, it could be the first apple ever and make apples exist much earlier than before, causing a chain-reaction of events that could paradox something. Same if we sent it into the future, what if apples were gone by then? What if they made a "gate" in the future to stop our gate from being created so the apple could never have gone through so they wouldn't have made the gate so the apple would have gone through, ect.

On 25-Dec-2007 Wizmo Gizmo said:

If time travel were possible, why aren't we getting visitors from the future?

Quite possibly, because of paradox. Let us assume, for the sake of discussion, that time travel IS possible. Now, let us assume that its first successful occurence happens in the year 3000. In their test, they send a man back to the year 2500 and have him change something minor to see how the future is affected. By freak accident, the minor thing he changes causes the person who first drafted the blue prints of a rudimentary time machine... to die. Because of this minor change, the blueprints are never drafted, and then the time machine is never created. Therefore, the man could never have been sent back in time. Therefore, the past would never have been altered, so the time machine would be created, the man could go back in time, cause the past to change, so on and so forth in a loop. Every time he goes back, it is immediately impossible for him to do so, and once it is possible and he does it, it is immediately impossible. Basically a parallel to the aforementioned Grandfather Paradox.

Now, theoretically, this cycle would loop infinitely without any time passing. I'd say it takes but a split second, but that'd be inaccurate. It does not take time. As Kenny pointed out, each option immediately causes its own negation. So we'll be stuck in an infinite loop that does not end and also takes no time whatsoever. It lasts forever... without time passing. Basically, the universe becomes totally impossible, and is rendered near non-existent.

... But, also theoretically, the universe is only caught in this paradox during and after the year 2500. We might experience time normally until the point in time when time stops happening. If they are, in the future, caught in a loop of unaltering cycles that take place without the passing of time and yet through time, they can't exactly send somebody back to warn us about the time paradox, can they? And even if they did, that'd prevent the creation of the time machine and cause the same paradox again.

Confused? You should be. If time makes perfect sense to you, you aren't thinking about it hard enough.

On 25-Dec-2007 Gamerad said:

Maybe because the future hasn't started yet.

For time travel to make ANY sense whatsoever, you've basically got to think of every second as a page in a book. If you're halfway through the book, the first and last pages still exist, you just aren't currently experiencing them. I mean, the end is happening simultaenously with the beginning: they're both on paper, you're just reading about them at different times. If you look back in the book for clarification on something, you'll have renewed understanding when you return to the present page. Such is backwards time travel. And if you look forward for spoilers, you will experience the book differently than someone who didn't look ahead. Such is forward time travel.

"And that is why we will not make a time machine."

Or we will, and the universe will stop existing after a while. Who knows?

I do.

But if we do not actually interact with other beings, it would be possible to do without destroying the universe. If we had a "viewing gate" so to speak, where people could view events of the past without directly interacting with the things in that area, it would be pretty cool. Also pretty hard to make considering that it wasn't made at the beginning of time so it could only record all events happening after the point it was made.

Technically speaking, we lookin into the past almost every day. This strange object that allows us to see the past, in named... the mirror.
Imagine that light is a save file. Every fragment of light contains an image that never deteriorates. The only reason that we think we see ourselves in a mirror is because light travels so fast, and there is so little difference between you and the mirror. Between the movements there is practically a fraction of a millisecond of difference.
Now imagine that we can slow down light and we place a person exremely far away from a mirror, but still clearly visible on it's surface. That person would then wave, and due to the fact that light has been slowed and has a greater distance to travel the image in the mirror could wave after a noticeable amount of time.

So you see, a "Viewing gate" is possible. The way to see into the past would be to capture an exact fragment of light that contains that certain image. This light could of course be lightyears away from our planet, but if we somehow overtook it and placed a mirror in front of it, the moment that light strikes the mirror we would see that event in the past.

Not so sure if I explained that too well.

On 25-Dec-2007 Wizmo Gizmo said:

If time travel were possible, why aren't we getting visitors from the future?

Maybe we are living the future, it sounds weird but it could be true.

Whether or not Time travel would be possible is irrelevant. Because we simply couldn't release it to the public. Who wants a bunch of tourists taking a bullet for JFK or something? It just screws up the world. However. If we were to head back in time, and then recreate what we see in a controlled environment for people to be a part of - seperate from actual history - then that would be awesome. Alas, that's Grade A science fiction.

EDIT: To make it clearer:
Get some select people in there, witness an event, recreate it and allow people to take fantasy trips into the "past" or the "future" whereas in reality, its just a very realistic sim.

« Last edited by TestVirus101 on Dec 26th 2007 »

On 26-Dec-2007 jord-t said:

Maybe we are living the future, it sounds weird but it could be true.

Compared to the past this is the future, but compared to the future this is the past. The present really does depend on the perspective.

Well, the future is in work already but we could be the future

I don't think time-travel will EVER be possible because we'd be messing with the space-time continuism causing massive black holes and rips in space fields. Anyway, our scientists will never be that smart.

On 25-Dec-2007 Wizmo Gizmo said:

If time travel were possible, why aren't we getting visitors from the future?

Read the last sentence of my first post in this thread.
It stated basically that the reason why we don't get "future tourists" as Stephen Hawkings put it is because you can't go backwards beyond when a time machine was created because it didn't exist at that time.