Great points. I call shenanigans on time travel, because I think it is highly unlikely, but I will never say it is impossible. Humanity has been proven wrong too many times by saying one thing or the other will never happen.

I do call extreme shenanigans on the hologram theory in the OP. So going back in time makes us ghosts?

 

  yeah the ability to go anywhere undetected would be a really, really bad idea in geekland.

I saw it. I loved it. I moved on  

 

Everyone posting in this thread needs to rent the movie Primer. An extremely indie movie made with a very small budget, it's a well-done story and the most plausible depiction of time travel -- at least, time travel at its inception -- I've ever seen.

 

That's been sitting in my Queue forever, and I just kept moving it down. But based on your recommendation (after proving yourself with your Sunshine sig), it just got bumped to the top.

I'll report back.

 

Look at the advancements we've made in the last 1000 years, or even the last 100 years. We've gone from horses, wood buildings, steam power and the telegraph to the space shuttle, skyscrapers, atomic energy and the internet. If anything, I would say our advancement has been exponential, not linear. Granted, time is a tricky concept, especially considering its really just one we made up to try and make sense of the universe.

But who's to say we won't understand it a couple centuries or millenia. Even then, time travel might not be possible, but there might be other ways of "seeing" the past. Or for all we know, time travel IS possible, and they're just really really good at preventing tampering with history (I mean, if its possible, you could just keep going back and fixing things until you get it right, right?) Or maybe the alternate timelines/universe line of reasoning holds true. There's no way of knowing, but it doesn't necessarily make it impossible.

I think the best thing about time travel as a concept right now is the ideas that people come up with about it, especially in pop culture. Things like Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure or even that episode of South Park. It doesn't matter if its possible or not, its a great thing to talk about, BECAUSE its so hard to wrap your head around it and there's so many unknowns.


Oh, and one more "They were wrong" quote.

"64K of memory ought to be enough for anyone" - Bill Gates

 

Heh, yeah. Meant to include that in my last post, but forgot.

<3 Sunshine. Glad to hear you enjoyed it.

On Primer, be aware: the time-travel shenanigans toward the end can take a bit of stewing to get one's head wrapped around. But that's part of why I like it.

 

i sorta like cheated and jumped to the end of the thread but has anyone said about traveling far enough away from Earth and looking back at us? with a decent enough telescope you would be able to look into the past of Earth, and thanks to time dilation you wouldnt age too much, though Earth might get alot older though by the time you get back. Pity it will kinda require faster then light travel.

the anime series Gunbuster deals very well with time distortion if your interested.(its 6 episodes too)

 

First I ate the chicken, then I ate his leg. /Beastie Boys


I've always thought this is an easy one, the first chicken or chickenesque creature would have come from a bird-like dinosaurs' egg, gradually evolving into the modern chicken. Hence the egg came first.

That's a pretty simplistic explanation I know, but in more depth it seems to hold water.

 

I concur completely.

 

Improbable, given our current understanding of time/space, sure. But like you said, that doesn't mean impossible.

Since DC did it, did everyone miss this? 'Cause it's MITastic!

(See what I did there?)

Jux said it well already, but yeah. I'm not sure. I'm just sure that we can't be sure, which I'm pretty sure is the only thing about the future we can be sure of.

 

Not reading threads is cool, but doing so and then asking people to fill you in isn't.


And yes, that was brought up long ago.


(See what I did there?)

 

Ok, I may enjoy this, because I have had lengthy discussions about this. Ok, here we go.

Time travel does have possibilities, the only issue is, we shouldn't...and allow me to explain why. One word, PARADOX! The problem with time travel is that you have the chance to alter history, from a tiny bit, to a large bit. Now I will add references from movies, but believe me they will make sense.

Let's look at Back to the Future...the boy goes back to the past and prevents his parents from meeting, problem 1, in theory doing so would ultimately cause a disruption, instantaniously making Marty dissapear because now the parents wouldn't have met. Theory 2, while he disrupted them, his actions, have a probability of making them still become his parents in a future sense(a week later) does have a plausible ideal, but at the same time, would still have a chance that the first problem theory 1. The main issue is the instantanious probability of things changing, hense making it impossible to fix. Only in theory, until proven. Next we have the part where because of Marty, Johny B Good song gets created, Frisbee, Clint Eastwood name, various things like that, which if he never went to the past in the first place, how could they have been created without him. Merely introducing the things before they were meant to be.

Now, the Time Machine movie(2002). This is where the talk of Paradox also gets heavily into play. He goes back in time to save his wife from dying, and each time he does, she dies a different way. Later on he goes waaaaay into the future to try and find out why. A man of the future who I forget his name, explained to him, if is wife didn't die, he would not have made the time machine, hence not going back in time to save her, hence causing a paradox. By changing things in the past, which would cause you to act different in the present/ future, ultimately disrupts the actions that were supposed to happen. Now, you may think well, what if you go back in time to save her and say you will still make the machine...doesn't work that way, because you made the machine specifically because of her dying, and being you won't have the knowledge of the occurance, you won't make the machine, hence why you can't save her.

Now movies aside for a moment, I have taken deep thought into this, and that is disruption of time because of objects. Say you wanted to go back to 1984, when Transformers figures were released. Sure, you would get a jump upon that... Say you grabbed an Optimus Prime, that was meant to be purchased by Jeffy...Jeffy wouldn't get that one, while he may grab another one, that means the next kid down the line who DIDN'T get the Optimus, changes his lifestyle. Meaning the way that child lived, even by the slightest item, would change the course of time. Maybe it taught him to be a collector, meaning every figure he got from there, meant someone else doesn't get it...but if that was disrupted...and he doesn't become a collector, someone else gets it changing all sorts of stuff. Like, say in 2000 I went to Toys R Us to grab a Alternator, now, with everything normal, and I found it, I would buy, meaning the next one doesn't. But let's say that because of a change in the past, I got to the store and it wasn't there, means I would of tried going to another store, taking more time to do so, changing what I did the rest of the day, and possibly the rest of the week, to month to year, and so on. A single disruption could possibly be catastrophic.

Now, back to a movie, Millenium, a movie of people in the future coming to the past to take people off a planes that are gonna crash. What they did is just take the people who were gonna die, and take them to a time way beyond when they would be dead, replacing the soon to be dead people with fake bodies...more or less taking something that wasn't gonna be there after the crash anyways. Eventually they kept travelling back, and actually lost parts of a gun, which caused a paradox that was destroying their future time. Eventually the parts of the gun were found and united, and a person killed themself with the gun that shouldn't of been there. Causing a enormous paradox tidal wave ultimatley destroying their future. Now, you see why you can't go back and kill Hitler before he started the war, could really screw up our present reality, trust me, even though it would save people, it would ultimately cause people not to be born, and change the present so bad, there is no telling what may happen.

How about Timecop, more or less a Presidential candidate went back in time to steal money for his campaign in the future. Which one instance he kills someone in the past in order to make him rich, and well the cop in the future has to go back and set things straight. The way certain characters acted changed. For instance, the computer nerd guy who was a crazy computer guy during the normal timeline. When the candidate goes back and makes himself rich so he becomes President, the nerd guy turned into a computer genious who acted more...I guess you would say, normal, not a crazy nerd.

One last thing I would like to add as far as movies go...the timeline of Terminator doesn't make an ounce of f*cking sense!!!!

My assessment, leave the past as it is, the present as it is, and the future as it is...time travel will more than likely cause more harm than good.

 

you forgot about a recent sci-fi channel movie

forgot the name of it but anyway, a time machine was built, and used for a time safari type thing

where rich customers can travel back in time and kill an allasourus(spelling)

anyway, precautions were taken so that the dino would be killed at the exact moment it would of normally died. so that the future wouldnt be changed

until one trip where the guns malfunctioned and one of the customers stepped off the path and onto a butterfly

which caused everything in the future to change in waves

but all was fixed so no worries

 

Hasn't it been theorized that there are actually 9 dimensions. Or 13, or something...

Couldn't one of these contain a definition of time that we just cannot understand yet?

I know string theory is kinda old, what's the new one? Ya know, unified theory.

 

It breaks my heart that Grandmaster of Science Fiction Ray Bradbury's classic short story "A Sound of Thunder" is identified today as "a recent sci-fi channel movie."

Hear that? It's the sound of tears striking my keyboard.

 

With the understanding of time we (or at least, I) have today, I do not believe time travel will ever be possible. Time is a perception. We are able to measure and experience the effects of time's passage, but not what causes it to pass.

Another way to look at it is to compare it to being three-dimensional. Nothing that we know of is two-dimensional; everything has a length, width, and height, no matter how miniscule. It is a fundamental aspect of existence. Similarly, time, the 4th dimension, is also a fundamental aspect of existence. We cannot make something three-dimensional two-dimensional, and we cannot alter time. It is just how our existence operates.

I realize that it is possible that, at some point, mankind could learn something new about the nature of time, so that it could be altered. I also realize that it is possible that everything I have said thus far makes absolutely no sense and/or is completely wrong.

 

I just have one thing to say about this topic.












Great Scott!

 

Oh yeah, I remember seeing that movie. But I think I avoided mentioning it because I was already rambling on and I kinda went over similar points.

 

Here's my pseudo science contribution to the discussion...

Via the principle of relativity we know that the faster an object is traveling the slower it moves through time relative to everything else. You could time travel FORWARD in the backwards sense that everything around you ages much faster than you. For any noticeable effect you would have to be traveling very very very very fast. That's very 4x.

Now then, so far as we understand the laws of physics the closer one gets to achieving the speed of light, the greater the energy demand. Now, theoretically lets assume that we have an engine capable of propelling us beyond the speed of light without regard to its energy requirement. If we can cross the threshold and travel faster than the speed of light then theoretically time outside our machine would now be passing in reverse allowing us to travel BACK in time.

The tricky bit here is that as we accelerate up to the speed of light everything around us slows down more and more until, at the speed of light itself, time around us comes to a complete stop. At that threshold is it still possible that our time machine even is functioning or has it too succumb to the effect. Probably its immune because its moving as fast as us or this wouldn't work at all. Still, if time outside our machine has stopped are we in fact still moving at all?

To me this thought reminds me of the old explanation of decimal numbers in mathematics. Imagine two points in space, points A and B. Walk half way from A to B and call that point C. Now walk half way from C to B and call it D. Now walk half way from D to B and call it E. This goes on infinitely and you never get to B. I think that as you approach the speed of light time around you slows more and more infinitely but you'd never actually cross the threshold.

Whew.....