# Time Travel?



## Setzertrancer (Aug 12, 2005)

Just thought I might try and start up a disscussion which the topic of Time Travel.

heres the question

"In relation to the science fiction theory of time distortion at light speed or extream gravity do you think that in the far far future time travel might be posible?"


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## Setzertrancer (Aug 12, 2005)

oops! could someone do me a favour and move this to the SFLOUNGE.


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## Foxbat (Aug 12, 2005)

Your thread has now been moved as requested  

As for your question: I think the idea that by travelling beyond the speed of light and then returning to your point of destination, then you are effectively travelling into the future. I suppose the real question here is 'will we ever achieve faster than light travel?'. Given that you would attain infinite mass as you approach that point (and probably would require an infinite amount of power to get there) the answer is likely to be no. There are other possibilities which might be available (and probably lie in that dark art of Quantum mechanics) so there may be possibilities for travel into the future from this obscure angle.

As for travel into the past - I really don't know. I suppose the first thing you would need to do is to establish that the past still exists (in some form). Perhaps it's just my own limited imagination but I find this concept difficult to visualise. 

My thoughts for what they are worth


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## PERCON (Aug 13, 2005)

The past and future don't exist so travelling to them is impossible.

The present is all there is, just because someone can remember something in the past doesn't mean it exists in the past, they just remember it when it happened in the present and at that moment it is described as the past.

I stand by my statement; travelling into the past or future is impossible...


_PERCON - 'The Mental Innovator'_


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## Stormflame (Aug 13, 2005)

"Dry land is a myth!!!"-
oh, sorry, that is from the movies Waterworld.
-
Time travel is a myth.  It is cool to dream about and think about.  I believe the idea of such a theory was made out of sheer humanity wanting to go back and change the past, and all the regrets and misfortunes and pain and opportunities that the 'past' holds.


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## ron amtt (Aug 17, 2005)

What plagues my mind is the question 'if it were possible to travel forward in time, then are we to assume that the universe exists already in that future. If the universe exists in the future then does it also continue to exist in the past?' OR is the universe that will be in the future in a constant state of inventing itself and .conversely, diassembling itself once it is finished with 'the past'. OR, is it possible that the past, present and future all exist simultaneously. Thus negating the need for time except as a reference point for conciousness? If you travel forward or back in time, wouldn't you still be in the present
existentially speaking?


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## Ash (Aug 17, 2005)

I'm reminded of a cartoon of a scientist at the Patent Office trying to patent his time machine. The clerk tells him "Sorry, someone's already registered it yesterday".

A little obscure, but it made me laugh.

Time travel intot he past is and always will be impossible. Time travel into the future is kind of impossible. Instead the effects of relativity might emulate time travel. But all that is happening is that someone is moving through time at a different rate to someone else. They just get to the future a little faster


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## AmonRa (Aug 17, 2005)

time travel to the past is possible, just not quite so literally.

firstly: we could be put under a form of hypnosis where you regress back to a memory which is so vivid you are sure you are in that time period.

or: we could design a computer programme with perfect graphics (i.e. look real.) which is a simulation of EVERYTHING that has ever happened from the dawn of time up untill this point. then all we need to do is rewind or fast forward and you wont know the difference .

ofcourse those arent technicly time travel, but theres no way of telling - how can you tell if this is the present or a simulation of the past?


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## Foxbat (Aug 17, 2005)

> or: we could design a computer programme with perfect graphics (i.e. look real.) which is a simulation of EVERYTHING that has ever happened from the dawn of time up untill this point. then all we need to do is rewind or fast forward and you wont know the difference .


 Interesting. Then we could make a decision, try it out on the simulator and then maybe try it in real life (or try a few more simulations until we manage to find an acceptable permutation of decisions that allows us to fulfill our dreams). You wouldn't be travelling into the future then - only shaping it to suit yourself. Hmm, maybe there's a story in there somewhere


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## cyborg_cinema (Aug 17, 2005)

AmonRa said:
			
		

> or: we could design a computer programme with perfect graphics (i.e. look real.) which is a simulation of EVERYTHING that has ever happened from the dawn of time up untill this point. then all we need to do is rewind or fast forward and you wont know the difference .


...what an interesting idea, an idea for a story no less[like Foxbat said].


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## Jaxom_Ruatha (Aug 17, 2005)

I think that time travel to the future may be possible, but not into the past. Like cryogenics freezing people and then thawing them sucessfuly at a later time or something like that. I think traveling close to the speed of ligt may be possible in the far future. I doubt that physically hopping about in time will ever be possible; however, wouldn't it be true that if you somehow did gain access to the past or future that it would then become your present?


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## Setzertrancer (Aug 24, 2005)

Interesting answears another mind boggling issue involving time travel is paradoxes pretending for a minute that time travel was common place what kind of disaters or benefits might the actions of traveling to the past and causing the present to change cause? also while i'm here has anyone read Stephen Baxter's Time Ships and If so does anyone know of a book like it?


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## Foxbat (Aug 24, 2005)

I've never read Timeships but one of the finest time travel novel's I have read is _No Enemy But Time_ by Michael Bishop.

I've always wondered what would have happened to the 20th century if you were to go back and prevent the assasination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand (which led to WW 1 and - ultimately - through the treaty of Versailles to WW 2). Would the powers still have gone to war on some other point? Would Bolshevism have found its chance? Would Hitler have risen to power? Our world might look quite different today.


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## NSMike (Aug 24, 2005)

Purely physical FTL travel is not possible according to the current laws of physics.  FTL travel (or superluminal, whichever you prefer) may be acheiveable via other means, but what those are, we don't know yet.  Time travel doesn't seem likely backwards, because there seems to be no note of anything like it, historical or otherwise (barring the fraudulent John Titor debacle).  Time travel into the future may be possible at some point in the future, but then we wouldn't know until we accomplished it.  Even then, travelling in to the future is just like fast forwarding in time, because there'd be no means to go back in time.  So there'd be no point.  Yawn.


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## Setzertrancer (Aug 25, 2005)

A freind of mine came up with a good point about how time travel is impossible in the future because otherwise someone could come from the future and mess with our present, I'm sure we would know if something like that happened.
I myself am neutral on this topic because I'm someone who beleives it is impossible to ovexaggerate what could be posible in the future for example people used to think the earth eas flat and that going faster then 20km/hr would kill you. So who could know what we could surprise ourselves with in the future. Has anyone read I' Cyborg by Kevin Warwick It's a Biography about how he did some truly amazing things 2 years ago that I didn't think was posible in 10 years. He actually made himself into a partial cyborg and did a number of incredible things including sending movement brain messages over the net to a robotic hand he also gave him self a sixth sense of supersonic projection and reception allowing him to move around blind folded and move about blind but still able to feel his surrounding through supersonic sense. So my point is who knows what could be posible in the future.


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## SciFi_Short_Story (Aug 25, 2005)

PERCON said:
			
		

> The past and future don't exist so travelling to them is impossible.
> 
> The present is all there is, just because someone can remember something in the past doesn't mean it exists in the past, they just remember it when it happened in the present and at that moment it is described as the past.


 
The words 'past' and 'future' are both vestigial words for something that human minds can't understand. I dont' man to imply that aliens can understand it, I simply mean that at present time, our mental capacities can't register the whole idea.

What I mean to say is this: you say 'past' and 'future' don't exist, but instead, they MUST exist, simply because time is a dimension. Our existence in the 3-D world is linear with time in the 4-D world. There is, in fact, a Timeline that we exist on (unlike the HORRIBLE 'scifi' movie of the same name), and our perceiving the three does not mean the fourth isn't there.

Two illustrations for my point: 
1. We can't see air, but it exists. We can see the effects of air, and, similarly, we can see the effects of time. Somewhere, I exist as a 4 year old, and somewhere I exist as a 40 year old. I tend to be hurtling away from the former, and towards the latter, at a constant rate which we have named 'regulated time.'

2. Just because I can't see through the wall in my living room into the wall in my bathroom doesn't mean the space behind said wall does not exist. Just because we do not see ourselves as four-year-olds any more, does not mean that time (an existing dimension) does not exist.

As a result, it would be possible to find some way to have time travel, but I imagine it would be similar to the old short story "The Manhattan Project" than anything else (in fact, that's my favorite story having to do with time travel; I highly suggest it).


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## SciFi_Short_Story (Aug 25, 2005)

Setzertrancer said:
			
		

> A freind of mine came up with a good point about how time travel is impossible in the future because otherwise someone could come from the future and mess with our present, I'm sure we would know if something like that happened.


 
I again refer you to "The Brooklyn Project," by William Tenn. It's a quick read, only 10 or so pages, but it it a rather realistic account of what would happen should time travel prove possible.

(Earlier I mistyped 'the Manhattan Project' in err. whoops!)


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## dreamwalker (Aug 25, 2005)

SciFi Short Story, your discription of space/time is very accurate and use full. For those who wanna know more, im pretty sure theres a post somwhere in the science part of this forum in which discussions on dimentions are talked about.


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## AA Institute (Aug 25, 2005)

I've always viewed time as something that's eternally existing. I mean just because yesterday has happened and gone into the past, doesn't mean it's 'finished'. It still exists, but only it's out of one's reach. If you could traverse the corridors of time to the time when you were at school, you could see yourself still living that experience there - today.

Time and place (X and Y) can be matched simultaneously to give you a slice of your existence at a specific point, irrespective of whether that point happens to be what we perceive as the past or the future.

AA


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## NSMike (Aug 26, 2005)

Actually, I think you'll find that time is not a constant.  It's a measurable effect, but how do you explain time that passes quickly, like an hour passing like a few minutes one day because it was fun, and then an hour that passes like three the next because you were bored?  Not to mention, if you reach the speed of light, time passes more quickly for others than you.

And actually, I think it's quite possible that yesterday does exist, but not in the form that we remember it.  Time is actually just the passing expenditure of all energy that exists on earth.  Since energy can neither be created nor destroyed, they all exist, but in the form of another moment or second, or to the least amount of measurable time to humanity.  If you honestly think about time passing, there is no perceptible difference from moment to moment, yet possibly billions of moments are passing you by.  Possibly trillions.  Possibly infinite.  Hence the basis for quantam theory.  Oy, I'm getting rambling.

My original point is that time is not constant without a measuring device to take note of it, and even then, it's different based on what speed we're going.  Think about absolute zero (Which we're not sure is acheiveable, but Carnegie Mellon University has been like 2 hundredths of a degree away a few times) and how something at or near that temperature appears to not be moving at all through time, yet something at light speed can travel 92 million miles in 8 minutes (One AU).  In both cases, time is relative to their speed.  

Okay, I'm rambling and I don't know if anyone's following me, so I'll stop.


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## They (Sep 4, 2005)

Time travel is possible. Einstein proposed that time is like a river, meandering throughout the universe. When time is near a large gravitational feild it speeds up. When near low gravity it slows down.
 Of course time machines have their problems. What if you went back in time and killed your grandfather? Would you disapear, or would something else happen?
 Though the question is not if, but when we will create a time machine. Then will we be mature enough to use it. You and your children must decide.


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## A1ien (Sep 5, 2005)

Id like to believe in time travel but i dont think it will ever happen. 

If it is ever discovered at any point in time in the universe, it will by its nature be discovered at every point in time in the universe because if there is an infinite length of time there will be an infinite number of time travels back to every single point in time. hope i havnt confused anyone :-S


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## sanityassassin (Sep 5, 2005)

people say nothing is impossable as for time travel im not sure weither time travel is possable in the future and no one has altered history is possable if strict guidelines are adhered to or maybe they have changed things but we did not notice. personally the biggest problem I have with time travel which no ones seemed to have mentioned is that we are travbelling in time as we speak as we travel in 4 dimentions length x bredth x hight x time if theoretically time travel was possible then we would have to travel in 4 dimentions as the world is revolving on its axis and the earth is circling the sun the solar system is revolving around galatic central point and our galaxy is expanding from the big bang in our universe and possably the universe is some part of the larger cosmos the universe could be moving too then travelling in time would mean we move to another part of the cosmos would we not?


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## A1ien (Sep 5, 2005)

sanityassassin said:
			
		

> the universe is some part of the larger cosmos the universe could be moving too then travelling in time would mean we move to another part of the cosmos would we not?


 
the problem with that is that moving to a different part of the cosmos would mean we were just movin in the first three dimensions. to travel in time we would have to be able to control our direction in the 4th dimension, time


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## NSMike (Sep 6, 2005)

They said:
			
		

> What if you went back in time and killed your grandfather? Would you disapear, or would something else happen?



Actually, this little paradox is a good bit more complex than you would think.  

If you went back in time on the same timeline and killed your grandfather, then logically, you would never have existed.  However, if you never existed, then you never went back in time in the first place and you _couldn't_ have killed your grandfather.  So therefore you _would_ exist.  

However, if you went with what is now becoming the more popular way of thinking about time travel, using quantam physics, you would be traveling to different, slower-moving dimensions to go back in time with very similar quantam signatures to our own universe, and faster-moving ones to go forward in time.  So in this case, killing your grandfather would actually be killing a man in a parallel universe who was extremely close to your grandfather, and you eliminated all chances of there being another you in a parallel universe.


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## AmonRa (Sep 6, 2005)

heres a time line:

1900
-
granfather born - 1910
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father born - 1940
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you appear from future and kill grandfather - 1960
- 
your born - 1970
-
you time travel back in time - 1990

but u dont disapear


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## cyborg_cinema (Sep 6, 2005)

AmonRa said:
			
		

> ...you appear from future and kill grandfather...


...you left out the part where the grandfather returns to take revenge.


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## NSMike (Sep 7, 2005)

AmonRa - Not sure what your timeline proves.  My line of logic follows an infinite loop of improbabilites.  If you do exist, and go back, kill grandpa, then you never exist, but if you never exist, then you never kill grandpa, therefore you exist, go back and kill, etc... If this is even possible, it would probably cause damage to, or possibly destroy, the space time continuum.


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## Stalker (Sep 7, 2005)

All right, we exist in 3D-space + one more dimension -time-according to Einstein.
While being able to move all 3 spatial dimensions this way or that, we, by ourselves, are able to move time only in one direction - from the past to the future. Why is that so? Why do we need a kind of a machine (Time machine) to travel along the timeline?
Why time is linear? If we presume variative realities, or alternations, why then not to presume same 3 dimensions of time? Has anybody any ideas about it?


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