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| Is Time Travel possible ? LHC points to Yes
Posted: 5/10/2008 7:21:04 AM | Time travel is not only possible, it's happening right now, as we speak !
Why, we're hurtling through time at the rate of 24 hours every single day !
Aside from that, everything I've ever read on travelling through time says sure, it might be possible but in theory at least we don't have the energy to do it. Well, more to the point, if you want to actually 'travel' through time , you need to be going backwards. Going forward and 'skipping' time is the part we know how to do (or at least, it's the part we have figured out. We still can't actually reach light speed without turning into pure energy but even if we could get around that, there's that pesky energy requirement thing to deal with in the first place) Anyway, the real trick is to pass the event horizon without turning into energy and staying that way.
So can we actually head back to tomorrow ? Who knows if it can really be done. This is even more complicated than it at first seems though because if we can actually go back in time the question becomes one of whether we've gone back in time or entered into a another dimension/parallel universe.
Think of it this way : Here you are right now sitting at your computer. If somebody goes back in time a day and blows the Earth up, then how are you sitting here right now ? You shouldn't exist. Yet here you are. This is the kind of problem that stops evil robots in their tracks according to old sci-fi movies. It's all very chicken/egg until you consider the possibility that perhaps the Earth that got blown up isn't the same Earth you're living on right now. Somebody 'skipped' into another dimension and blew up some other, identical Earth. And they did it yesterday on that identical Earth. Tricky stuff.
Faster-that-light travel might be possible. Currently the theories don't really consider 'speed' as the best way to get around the universe but rather getting the universe to come to you sounds more feasible. Wormholes and all that. Yup, get out your Klingon to English dictionaries folks because now we're entering science-fiction land anyway. The truth is that until we actually send somebody back in time we really don't know if it's possible or not. | |
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| Is Time Travel possible ? LHC points to Yes
Posted: 5/10/2008 9:28:37 AM | If someone in the future could travel back in time, surely they'd go to visit themselves in the past & explain how to do it so they could build the machine in the future to enable themselves to go back & explain it?
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| Is Time Travel possible ? LHC points to Yes
Posted: 5/10/2008 9:00:26 PM | Yeah, I don't think there can really be a paradox because like Gotapulse mentioned, the reality that you left wouldn't change, but the reality you were now in would be different.
In other words, if you went back in time and killed your grandfather, you wouldn't cease to exist because the past cannot be changed -- however, if you traveled to the future you would either return to your own future in which your grandfather was not killed, or you'd travel to a future in which you didn't exist and no one would know who you were. Either way, you don't simply pop out of existence.
Of course, its all conjecture, and none of us (to my knowledge) are theoretical physicists.
But it makes for some great sci-fi! | |
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| Is Time Travel possible ? LHC points to Yes
Posted: 5/11/2008 2:21:32 AM | i like the thread...some great points :>
except the god types and miss stop wasting your brains on such silly talk
lol
cant wait for the LHC to kick in | |
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| Is Time Travel possible ? LHC points to Yes
Posted: 5/11/2008 2:40:25 AM | The best reason Ive ever come across for why time travel (at least in the backward direction) is not possible came from rotten.com
Universally hated since World War II, Hitler is our best evidence for the infeasibility of time travel. The obvious killer app for a working time machine would be to murder this guy before he could set the Third Reich in motion.
[Handy tip for would-be chronoassassins: Don't bother trying to infiltrate the fortified bunker; instead, plan on catching him asleep in that Viennese flophouse during the homeless years.] | |
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| Is Time Travel possible ? LHC points to Yes
Posted: 5/12/2008 8:43:47 PM | ^Actually, that's not a very compelling argument against the possibility of time travel either.
I mean, why even bother going after anybody ? Why not just see to it that Hitler's dad never meets Hitler's mother ?
And what about Stalin or Pol Pot ? Ghengis Khan killed far more people than Hitler did in a way : Khan murdered the living but also killed their line. If he killed one person in his time, that person might have been equal to a couple thousand by now. Who knows really.
Then of course there's the fact that anybody smart enough to build a time machine should also be smart enough to realize that altering the past in any way might have disastrous consequences. "The devil you know...." argument basically. Sure, let's say that somebody could go back in time and they decided to kill Hitler. Okay...but the conditions that allowed Hitler to start his run at power would still be extant. Hyperinflation, a suffocating indemnity for the entire nation of Germany to keep paying indefinitely, and the humiliation are just three things that Hitler's premature death wouldn't solve. In the meantime Stalin's version of communism grows ever stronger and resistant to outside influence. The race for the atom bomb would still take place but without the exhaustion brought about by WWII , would we have plunged headlong into nuclear war ? There were no graphic movies to show us what a nuclear holocaust would look like. There was no internet for people to search for images of maimed war victims on. Propaganda was far more direct and influential when applied to nationalism then so without Germany as a 'distraction' would the great powers have clashed over other matters ? Almost certainly.
The possibilities are endless and it's entirely conceivable that killing Hitler would , in fact, have been worse for humanity considering the other characters on the world stage at the time. Things could have turned out better of course but who's to say ?
There's one other problem with the idea of going back in time and changing the one simple historical fact of Nazi Germany : Whatever else followed WWII wouldn't have occured in the same sequence (if at all) In other words , if you killed Hitler it's entirely possible that you'd also be killing the sequence of developments that ultimately lead to the creation of the time machine you used to facilitate said murder. That's the paradoxical aspect of time travel. Or you subscribe to the theory that it can be done but in doing so, another timeline is created. In that case, nothing has really been changed at all because in your original universe, Hitler launched WWII while in the 'new' one, Hitler never gets a chance to unleash Nazi aggression on Europe and the world. It's simply two different 'universes' as opposed to an altered one.
Lastly, there's always the possibility that we live in a universe where the timeline has already been altered. We wouldn't know it anyway. | |
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