Time travel

[lenguy]

Such an interesting topic.

Whats your take on time travel? Possible? not possible? why or why not?

Assuming you did have some sort of time machine. If you could visit the past, which period would you visit? Who would you meet? would you change history? Or maybe you'd like to visit the future, how far in time would you travel? 100?200? and thousand years? perhaps a million? Oh the possibilities are endless. Me? I go back and visit Jesus, see what kind of man he really was. Me and him would be bff lol. I would convert him, so Mr Jesus..have you heard of this thing called buddhism.Can you imagine a world without the bible?

Okay so we got the when where who and why out of the way. Time travel, is it practical? 50 years ago if you mentioned time travel to any scientist would you of been laughed at and ridiculed for the most part. Today, its openly discussed by many scientists. What was once science fiction is becoming more like science fact. But the question remains, is it possible? Well, I can tell you that time travel to the future is relatively easy. All you have to do is go fast...and I mean really really fast, around 99.9% the speed of light. Consider this, space and time together form the fabric of spacetime. That time and space are all interconnected. The faster you travel through this fabric, the slower time becomes. A light beam for example can circle the earth about 7 times in a single second. Now imagine for a second there exists a train track that is built around the circumference of the entire planet. This train has the ability to accelerate towards near the speed of light. In theory, If you accelerate long enough enough,you will be traveling nearly 99.9% the speed of light. When this happens, time slows down as apposed to the people observing you, time remains constant to them. So potentially if you remain at this speed for a few weeks or months it is possible to come of that train,unchanged but possibly 100 years or so in the future maybe further. So time travel into the future is very practical.

Into the past however, its a different story. Scientists theorize that it could be possible if you used some kind of wormhole. As space is is a fabric know as spacetime. They think it would be possible to somehow rip that fabric and open a wormhole next to the earth and travel through it to get to our past or early earth. While in theory, it is possible. It is highly unlikely. The power needed to rip the fabric of space and time is unheard of. You would somehow need to harness the power of an entire star. Aside from the physics, there are those darn paradoxes that prevent time travel into the past almost impractical. One of which that is constantly brought up is the The grandfather paradox. Which suggests one could travel back in time and kill his own grandfather, this preventing the birth of his father and ultimately,himself. Then, how could of the person have ever travel back in the first place?(such a conundrum)Scientists would argue that one could simply travel to a parallel universe and kill the grandfather of that universe while the grandfather of his universe would remain in tact thus saving his existence. So the Idea of traveling in time and changing history is still largely debatable and uncertain at this point in time.

Whether or not time travel into the past is possible or not is still being debated. But Assuming it is, and you had some sort of time machine. Where would you go? who would you visit? Past or future? Gonna change history? who's history? Got your own take on time travel? Feel free to debate all you want.

 

[Mustang Sally]

Since all we can do is conjecture, my own feeling is that we can't visit the past because there's no past to visit. It's as Stephen King depicted in "The Langoliers," which puts forth the theory that events that have happened are immediately erased from existence; that the fabric of time is "undone" as soon as it occurs. It's not as if those events never happened, it's just that they don't remain in existence for us to go back and visit.

Similarly, we can't visit the future because it hasn't happened yet......so there's nothing to visit.

But who really knows?

 

[Hulk Hogan's Brother]

Well this is certainly a very interesting topic of debate. A lot of scientists are of the view that time travel, particularily time travel into the past is not possible mostly due to the grandfather's paradox. Now there are many ways that scientists have explained this but the simple explanation here is that you cannot do something that negates the action itself and hence changing the past might have an impact on the course of events after the point at which history has been changed, thus changing the course of history which will obviously change present day.

Time travel into the future is something that is certainly possible by the principles of time dilation. Something similar has already been attempted successfully at the microscopic level, though extensive research is still going on. There has been an experiment performed by Lijun Wang where he has shown that it is possible to send packages of waves in such a way through a bulb containing caesium gas such that they appear to exit 62 nanoseconds before they enter. A somewhat clear proof that time travel into the future is possible.

However time travel as a concept is still in its nascent stages at the moment. At the moment it is just considered a romantic notion of the novelists rather than scientific fact though I would say that it is one of those things that scientists are working very hard on. Even if it possible I feel that one should not tamper with time as the implications might be terrible even though it might seem that we are doing something in the best interests of humanity.

 

[Serious Mozzarella]

I think it's impossible, simply because time is a human construct. I don't think time is a tangible thing that can be manipulated. I think it just has to do with extremely high tier, complex physics that deals with light, gravity, and things that haven't been discovered yet. I don't think we're anywhere near discovering something that can be used to explore how "time" works, if it even is something tangible.

I simply believe time is something that was made up and used to give the rising and setting of the sun a numerical value.

 

[Xemmy]

Time is merely a measuring system. It's not something we can manipulate, nor is something we truly understand.

But, humoring the idea- Assuming that time were something we could manipulate, I'd hope that NO ONE went BACK in time. The Sound of Thunder is an interesting read if you get the time. Although Back to The Future, provides a more basic idea for the concept, Sound of the Thunder should be enough to scare the shit out of anyone stupid enough to try fucking with the past.

However, going into the future would have amazing benefits for humanity, assuming we could bring back technological advances. I don't see how that could do any real harm that didn't involve human greed.

Also, I've heard the idea of using some sort of light to go back in time, but only for as long as it's been around. (History Channel) I'm not making claims, nor do I know what I'm talking about, but I've never heard of a tangible way to travel forward, like you suggested. Could you provide a link? I'm sure it'd be an interesting article.

 

[Hollywood Naitch]

If it was possible, and I personally dont think it is....then I dont think it should be messed with.

Every single action has a consequence, and going back in timw and doing literally ANYTHING, could change the future (our our present) forever. So when you came back to the modern day, the world could be a very different place than the one you left..

So...for me...leave it as it is. Things happen for a reason, and as much as you want to change the past, I dont think you should due to the unforseen consequences that could happen

 

[The Mark of Zur-En-Arrh]

Going back in time to change something would be futile anyway.

Let's say for example that you're stood waiting for a bus, and you see someone get hit with a car and they're killed. For some reason, you decide to travel back in time to prevent that from happening. How would you do it? If you actually succeeded in saving that person, your future self would never have felt the need to go back in time and change the course of history, so therefore you'd never go back in time and prevent the occurrance, and that person would still get hit by the car.

Anybody watch Lost? Remember when Faraday kept saying 'what happened, happened' and can't be changed? He was right. He couldn't change anything, because he was always supposed to go back in time and have his mother shoot him, because that's what happened in the first place.

If you were able to travel through time to the past, all you could do is take items or people from their respective timeframes, you would NOT be able to go back and re-write history, because if history were re-written, you'd never have invented time travel in the first place, and wouldn't have re-written it.

 

[Davi323]

Except the fact that history did change would prove that you actually did go back in time and change it. Further, since you would be the one who went back in time, your memory would (probably) retain the knowledge it accumulated in the original, unaltered time stream. Meaning, you would still remember why you went back in time, because while you were traveling back to the future, you would necessarily be outside of the time stream, and therefore unaltered by it. Your time machine would still exist, because you brought it with you to the past, and since it exists in the past, you could then re-use it to get yourself back to your normal time. This is obvious, because if it also eliminated the time machine, the time machine wouldn't have gone back in time in order to change whatever it was that changed. No change, then history unfolds as it would normally, which would include the time machine being invented in the original timeline, which would cause you to go back in time, to create the changes, to wipe out the time machine, and we get caught in an infinite causality loop. By virtue of being a time machine, in the act of traveling through time, it, and any passengers inside are excluded from changes to the timeline. They would have to be, otherwise if you changed the past and it affected your future memories, you couldn't exist in the time you went back to, nor could you travel back to your normal time. You would cease to exist immediately upon making the change.

Its more like BTTF II. Biff changes the past, but Marty remembers the original 1985, because he traveled back from the original 2015, that was unaffected by Biff's tampering. Even though Biff messed everything up, Marty was exempt because he came from a different future.

 

[The Mark of Zur-En-Arrh]

Its more like BTTF II. Biff changes the past, but Marty remembers the original 1985, because he traveled back from the original 2015, that was unaffected by Biff's tampering. Even though Biff messed everything up, Marty was exempt because he came from a different future.

See this is one of the big things in BTTF II. Biff actually does what Doc Brown states is impossible to do IN THE SAME FILM!

When Doc and Marty travel back to the altered 1985, Marty suggests that they go back to 2015 to prevent Old Biff from taking the Sports Almanac out of the trash. Doc then explains that they could only travel to the future of the new timeline and that the 2015 they experienced would be inaccessible.

So surely that means that Old Biff would only be able to travel to the new 2015 as well, and yet he reappears in the old 2015.

 

[Mustang Sally]

See this is one of the big things in BTTF II. Biff actually does what Doc Brown states is impossible to do IN THE SAME FILM!

When you think about it, Doc Brown was screaming in the first two movies about the disastrous ramifications of changing anything in the past......then in the third movie, he does exactly what he warned against.

Think about it: He goes back to 1885 and the first thing he does when he arrives is to save the life of a woman who was meant to die (Clara Clayton going over a cliff in a wagon). This way, Clara goes on living and can change so much in the pioneer town of Hill Valley that it could disrupt the entire dynamic of the town. For example, Clara, a young woman, will undoubtedly go on to marry a man from town.....but if she does, the woman who was originally going to marry the man who became Clara's husband will now marry some other man. They'll start an entirely different family and have different children. All of this has a multiplicative effect as more and more "new" families are created. It would be a disaster.

Then, to add to the paradox, Doc Brown and Clara have children! (Remember Jules and Verne?). They are two kids who were never meant to exist. Now, they'll go on to have kids of their own....who will have kids of their own.....all of whom who were never meant to exist. Plus, they will all meet people who were never meant to interact with the Brown's kids in the first place. Lives will be changed from the original history.

Here's one to ponder: In all the interference that Doc Brown creates by existing in a time that wasn't meant for him, what if one of his kids marries an ancestor of Marty McFly......either on his father's side or his mother's. This would break the chain of events that leads to Marty's birth. He would be okay while traveling through time (since he exists outside of time) but as soon as he goes back to 1985, he would wink out of existence because his ancestry had been disrupted.

Doc Brown was right in the first place about a time traveler not interacting with anyone in the past. So how could he do something as stupid as he did? In the third movie, Doc intended to go back to the future and told Clara he couldn't take her with him when she asked to go. But when you think about it, the smartest thing he could do would be to take her out of 1885, since he prevented her from dying as she was meant to do. She didn't belong in 1885 any more than he did.

What a freakin' mess!