Time Travel

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Inspired by the thread in CS which was inspired by the thread in SS...

Is time travel achievable, and is so, what effects would it have? What could people do with such technology, what would happen, who would control it?

(waits hoping that someone will launch in and direct the discussion)

 

Time travel isn’t just achievable. It’s necessary to life. If you existed in the forth dimension in the same way as you exist in the first three. You could not live. Because everything you will ever and have ever done will be done. Even your birth and death. All you could do would be to perceive it all, all at once, and without any way of effecting it. That’s not life.
You are travailing forwards in time right now. Living. And if your velocity in relation to everything else, was ever to be grate enough you could travel back. However the vast amounts of mass required to create the necessary gravitational forces to propel you ant exactly readily obtainable. You would also have the problem that you couldn’t got back in time farther then when your time machine was first assembled.

 

The only even plausible method I have read of travelling through time is wormholes. But the problem there is of course creathing one with a stable mouth (getting the requisite "exotic matter" to hold the hole open is enough of a problem) and linking the other end not far off in distance but in time. Instead of creating a wormhole that reaches 3 light years away, you could instead put it in the same spot but 3 years backward in time. Of course then we get into multiple universes and all kinds of fun stuff like that. For a good hard scifi book on this, check out The Light of Better Days (i think that is the title) by Arthur C. Clark and Stephen Baxter. For actual science reading on this, i recommend Black Holes and Times Warps: Einstein's Outragous Legacy by Kip Thorne. Its about the best book I've read on the subject by one of the most respected physicists in the field.

 

Time travel is not real or obtainable. It makes for fun fiction, but the underlying essence of time is not changeable.

What I enjoy are the fictional accounts of time travel that are so incredibly flawed as to make them laughable. For instance, take a hard look at time travel as presented in the first Terminator movie...there is a discontinuity to the theory that makes it self defeating.

It's fun to pretend, but time does not exist as a medium to be transversed, it is the lone element in existence that itself transverses.

I guess in a sense, we are all "time travellers", as the life we lead carries us forward with the progress of time, but that is the only travelling that we are ever destined to do.

 

Ummm, hacken slash, you need to read the science on this. While the possiblilty of human time travel is almost certainly fiction, science does allow it. There are several good books on the possibility of doing it. Like any of the dimensions, time can be just as easily warped. Heck, technically time travel to the future is easy. Just take a hypothetical space ship that can go 99.9999999999999999etc% speed of light and guess what - you don't age but everyone else does.It has been already proven that time can be warped. I doubt that it would be possible ever for a physical object to travel in time simply do to enar infinite if not infinate power requirements but energy or information of some type is another matter entirely. The science technically allows that. Would it ever be feasible, thats a totally different question.

 

You from Tralfamadore, cctc?

Time travel is certainly possible, even achievable. In fact, I'm doing it right now. Very shortly, I'll be in the future. What a ride.

 

In Theory

If all possible outcomes of any given situation you are in now exist then timetravel is theoretically percievable, since you wont stumble into loops that become selfdestructive. A selfdestructive loop is nonsense and illogical by definition, see? Like arguing only one timeline exist and you're still able to travel back and kill your ancestors forever eliminating your parents birth and therefore your own and hence you couldn't have travelled back in time to kill your ancestors, saving your parent and your birth so you again could travel back continuing the paradox.

So in order, to not be selfdestructive, the loop on one timeline has to end in another "highway" of time and the original timeline you came from goes on unaltered.. Ok, on with this; Since this timetravel can have any outcome and there are no limits to the number of timetravels, there must be or be created an unlimited amount of timelines to loop into at any point in time. In short every second any possible reaction you could have made, has its own new universe. For instance the 1000++ ways Arabwel might press the J key evolves into new universes...

The practical consequences
But still if theory does not disallow timetravel it still provides some mind dazzling puzzles in practical, just from observing our presence. If timetravel gets invented and usable in the future it would undoubtfully be used by a villain a crock to travel back in time and cause havoc and power and destruction and be fought by good intended people. Since a necessity of timetravel is that all steps in time are dynamic(explained below), we must have witnessed all the dire consequences of all timetravels within our own timeline already. Perhaps all gods are timetravellers stacked up from our future? Perhaps the big bang was somekind of mishap or deliberate action. I'll leave it to your imagination.

Just as a note timelines have to be dynamic in all periods of time for timetravel to be theoretically possible(or at least not end in a paradox), else active time periods would bump up in passive time periods causing illogical blobs, and what if we travelled back in time and it had become in-dynamic, would it become the second active time period and why? Or stay as a world where time was stopped? No air to breath since your metabolism is stopped.... illogical, but probably interesting for a sci-fi writer to create a story about.

On some wormholes
All this does not interfere with the wormholes existing in a single timelined universe, which are bends and contractions in space, which allow us to travel trough shortcuts in space, making it seem we cheated time. Like holding a balloon and squeeze to sides closer together making the distance shorter between the sides.

[ January 14, 2004, 16:43: Message edited by: Nobleman ]

 

In fact, the multiple universe theory is quickly becoming the favorite among many scientists as more studies support it.

 

A good point to make.

Stop beliveing what the physicists tell you, I know, I am one, it's bunk.

Ok, hold on, that's not what I'm saying, relax fellas.

Time travel via wormhole/lightspeed travel. I don't know, possible in theory, impossible in practice. Also, none of this means there are multiple universes, but hypothetical and untestable theories are more interesting to physicists.

Now, taking travel to the future via lightspeed out of the equation, for that is not time travel but essentialy a sort of pseudo-stasis, and travel to the future via wormhole seems to contain no interesting dichotmomy, this leaves us with travel to the past.

We go to the past, we do whatever it was we wanted to do, thus there is no-longer a reason for us to go there, so we never went. Simple. Of course it's wrong, but it sounds good. We cannot complete the classical 'Grandfather' scenario, for if he were dead, there would not be one of us to go back and kill him. As has been said, it is impossible and nonsensical. Us doing whatever it was we went there to do happened before we went back to do it.

Of course, this messes with Fate. It doesn't change it, Fate by defintion is unchangeable, what it does is create an event in the past which originated in the future in order to create a certain event, possibly in fact a self-fulfilling prophecy, possibly simply an unrelated event, but it happened. Once it has happened, it has happened. If it could have happened differently, it would have.

But we can do that now, we can cause an action right now that can have an effect in the past (or the future if you like), one that we or another allready remembers (I know, I've done it). We do not travel ourselves, but something does. The question is, did they remember it before you did it? I mean, have you actually changed anything, or was that what had happened all along. Think about it. We cause a reaction in the past, therefore it has allready happened. So of course we would allready know about it. We cannot change it because we have allready changed it. That event was as much a part of the past as any other, only the point of origin changes.

[Edit]Nobleman explained this better than I in his edited post, I am saying the same thing.[/Edit]

Time is not so hard a concept to grasp.

The reasons for this are perfectly clear. Time is truly a material concept as much as the spatial dimenesions are, at a certain point, all this breaks down and no-longer holds any meaning.

This is how people may have prescience, or some unwarrented knowledge of the past (memory put aside -which is what most of these cases in fact are), most parts of our being are not tied down as are our earthly avatars. A fraction of this may be grasped through psi or mysticism, but in time [ ] we shall know this in its entirety.

Seeing as no-one else here has likely had any experience with time travel, I shall congratulate myself on solving any dilemmas any of you might have had.

 

Hehe, thank you Manus for taking the the faith/destiny and deja Vu aspects of this on your shoulders, I wouldn't want to get my mathematical reputation tainted with mysticism. In return mysticism is just down your alley

 

Manus and Nobleman have already covered this pretty well, but I can't resist adding two cents on a physics-related topic.

Time travel works perfectly and creates no paradoxes if (and it's a big if) you accept the multiverse theory. In a multiverse, every possible outcome already exists; every time there are multiple outcomes to a situation, the universe takes all of them. Imagine such a decision-making point as a proverbial fork in a road.

If you go back in time and kill your ancestor, you are simply travelling back to a particular fork in the road and creating a different path forward, one in which you never existed. This is no paradox, as the death of your grandfather would have no effect on the branch of time from which you came.

Another intersting question is not so much what happens if you travel backwards, but what happens if you try to move forward. Since there are an infinite number of universes, would you even travel to one that is connected to your timeline? If so, which one?

Like I said, though, this hinges on acceptance of the multiverse theory. Whether that is correct or incorrect is another discussion altogether.

Besides, when has Kirk ever been wrong?

 

Last time I checked the closer you are to the speed of light, the slower time will travel. Techinically you time travel whenever you move, but we are talking about amounts that are barely noticable, even by the most accuruate clocks.

 

We all travel through time, its just as one approaches the speed of light, your mass increases which in turn warps space-time and time, reletive to you slows down. Lets take a hypothetical space ship that can instantly reach light speed and you travel to travel to the closest star, Proxima Centauri which is 4.26 light years away. Round trip would take 8.52 years which will pass by for everyone on earth but for you will take no time. Of course you would need near infinite energy to reach even close to light speed. The only (relativly) energy way is to observe past times by creating a very small wormhole that reaches back in time but not space. This would allow light (energy) to pass through, you don't have to worry about altering the time line, but you could observe history. This is the only even remotely feasible solution that i have heard mention by any reputable scientist. Of course generating and keeping enough exotic matter to ring the wormhole mouth to keep it stable is the only sticking point. Anything involving large amounts of mass, the power requirements are so large as to be likely prohibitive.

 

There is a problem with light speed though. You are forgetting Einstines biggest blunder. Light speed isnt fixed. It has been shown to be veriable. Einstines origeonal equations, were correct not his amendments. This was only descoverd to be the case about five years ago and I dont think any one has realy conciderd the implications this may have when calculating what effects aproching it may have.

 

Actually, the maximum speed of light IS fixed. While it is possible to slow down the speed of light, it is NOT possible to speed it up. This has been demostrated thousands of times in thousands of experiments. Objects with mass simply cannot go faster or even reach the speed of light period.