Time Traveler's Convention Options

[CommieBastard]

The Time Traveler's Convention

Interesting idea, neh?

But what would the ramifications of time travel be? Why haven't they visited us already? Wouldn't that make time all weird?

Thoughts?

[MrTeapot]

Well I know that I wont attend it now, but if its a good do then I'll travel back to it someday.

[pgrmdave]

Sorry, but I know too much about relativity to accept that time travel, as we know it, into the past is possible. And even if it were, wouldn't we have never heard of Hitler, seeing as someone would have killed him to prevent the Holocaust? Of course, if we hadn't heard of him, then nobody could have remembered to go back and kill him, which, of course, would mean that he lived, and we did hear about him, which caused somebody in history to travel back in time to kill him, which of course made it so that we hadn't heard about him, which...

[CommieBastard]

I think Einstein said that, should time travel ever become possible, one would not be able to travel back to before when time travel was possible...

[pgrmdave]

My thinking usually goes along the lines of, "If time travel is possible, then it shows that all 'present times' co-exist, and thus if we go back in time then we've already done it, so we can have no true effect on the past because we've already had an effect."

However, I do not believe that time travel, backwards, can be possible. According to relativity, it would require MORE than infinite energy to push something beyond the speed of light in order to get 'time' to seem to reverse.

[CommieBastard]

Mmm, there are persuasive arguments against it. But I think it's terribly hubristic to claim we are absolutely certain it's impossible. Many of today's commonplace things would have been dismissed as utterly impossible by previous ages.

[moop]

However, I do not believe that time travel, backwards, can be possible.  According to relativity, it would require MORE than infinite energy to push something beyond the speed of light in order to get 'time' to seem to reverse.

As the velocity of an object tends towards the speed of light the mass of the object tends towards infinity.

Force Required to Accelerate an object = Mass of Object * Accelleration Required

Extrapolating, this means that once your object is at the speed of light it has infinte mass the therefore requires infinite force to change its velocity thus it cannot be possible to either push it past the speed of light or to decellerate it afterwards (which is dangerous in itself).

[Chronotub]

Doesnt going near lightspeed only make time slow down for the object traveling? If so wouldnt going faster than light mean that time is going backwards for you but forward for the rest of the world, so you will still be in the future?

[pgrmdave]

That is a difficult question to answer, partially because we can't travel that quickly. However, I would tend to agree with you, but I don't understand the mathematics of relativity very well, so I'm not completely sure.

[Greeneyes]

I think that the faster one travels, the slower one's time goes in comparison to slower moving objects. I believe this was proven with two very sensitive and accurate clocks set to the same time. One was placed in a low area (a mine shaft or suchlike) and the other somewhere high (on a plane). Since the high one was travelling fast compared to the ground, and the low one was going slower than an object at ground level, when matched up, the slow (travelling) one was further on the the fast (travelling) one.

[Museum Girl]

Maybe time travellors have a non interference policy like they do in Star Trek when they find time warps.

[I_am_the_best]

This is just my guess, but we can't travel through time because it's a dimension and makes us what we are. It's quite confusing to write down what I'm thinking so this may not be of much sense to anyone but you can't really travel through something that makes the world or the universe be what it is. It's like making something 2D, or maybe that's been done, I'm not sure.

I wonder if you could break the speed of time...

[Greeneyes]

I wonder if you could break the speed of time...

I'm not exactly an expert on the subject, but time isn't dead solid as a wall is. It's different for everything. You get two twins, put one on a fast moving (and hypothetical) spaceship, they will age very differently.

[pgrmdave]

Time, in my understanding, is a spatial dimension, similar to left and right, or up and down, with the only special case being the direction of chaos, which causes events to tend toward disorder, and produces what we perceive as a "flow" of time.

[Faerieryn]

Time travel has always fascinated me. I think JAneway on Voyager best described ny thoughts "Leave it be and don't try to understand it" or something of that ilk! Time travel as we think of it requires a linear time line, a known quanitity of some sort ie: why could we not travel into the future- because there is too much we don't know and some sort of stabiliser to enable us to observe without causing difficulties. Time travel sounds cool but in reality it could be very dangerous. I say leave it to the experts!

(P.S if this post makes no sense please ignore it!)

[Greeneyes]

Something that people might be interested in is a book called The Light of Other Days. Basically, a method of creating wormholes that can be loked through is created, which allows people to look into the past (but not the future). Anyway, this allows, among horrific invasion of privacy, learning the truth about past events, such as what happened to Jesus, but it also allows every crime to be solved. Simply look back in time at the right place, and get a nice viewing of a murder, or suchlike. Basically, ruins society as we know it.

[Jonman]

All this talk of relativity is probably irrelevant (pun fully intended) when talking about future-tech time travel.

If time travel were to be possible, it'll use technologies, and probably physics, that we're completely unfamiliar with. Like quantum baubles, or qarktastic underpants. For example, your QT underpants will contain a single confined quantum bauble, which, upon relaxation of the exotic matrix which confines it, warps the flux gradient of spacetime such that the flow of time not only inverts, but exverts, thus allowing the wearer to pop out anytime, anywhere, like a giant temporal waterslide.

I'll be at home awaiting my Nobel prize.

</spam>

Assuming that time is some kind of linear doohicky, the suggestion that time travel is possible brings up a modified Fermi paradox, as Commie points out - wouldn't they already have visited us? And more to the point, assuming a near-infinite amount of future after time travel is invented, then that would mean a near-infinite amount of time travellers would be appearing in every single bit of time. So, therefore, if time travel had been invented in our future, we'd know about it, as we'd be knocking elbows with people in silver one-pieces left, right and centre.

Anyway, as we all know, time travel is only permissable if you're either a robot from the future, or somehow involved with a robot from the future. It's like one of them incontravertable thingamies.

[PsychWardMike]

Well, I must say that I think time travel is a very interesting subject that I don't quite understand.

You see, as far as reprocussions go, I think it's safe to say that there are two different schools of thought: fooling around in the past will alter the future (think Back to the Future if you will in which messing with Marty's parents' first meet alters his existence.)

The second is a (I think) less probable school of thought which says that anything that happens in the past was required to make the future as the time traveler knows it (something like I go back to the age of the dinosaurs and accidentally sneeze which spreads a virus that kills said dinosaurs off and blah blah blah which all leads up to PsychWardMike typing on Matazone as we know it.) It's a rather Buddhist way of thinking, I suppose.

I, however, would say the first is a tad more probable.

Now, on the subject of the ability to travel through time. Sure, I think it's possible. What kind of sci-fi dork would I be if I didn't? However, I'd wager it's got all sorts of strict laws in the future restricting its use (assuming.) Added to that, I'd wager that it's fairly expensive so that not many people could afford it.

But those are just social issues.

I don't know enough about physics to really comment, so I won't. Suffice it to say that I think it's possible because I firmly believe that when humans want to do something (for better or worse) they'll eventually do it.

I'd like to say though, that I think pan dimensional travel would be better than going through time. If the theory that since one dimension can exist everything has to exist (the infinite dimensional theory) is true, then logically there would have to be a dimension that one could travel to and mess about there.

I dunno. I'm probably rambling, but it's early and I've not had a lot of coffee yet. It's a half baked theory, but at this point, so is time travel.

[pgrmdave]

That's not a bad point, the multiverse theory could, somehow, allow us to travel to other universes, each of which could have different laws of physics...which, I'm sorry to say, is impossible for me to imagine at this moment. I simply can't imagine a universe without protons, or energy, or inertia...it would be so different that we wouldn't be certain of getting back to our own home universe.

[Mata]

Maybe time travellers have visited us but the process unfortunately renders their memories completely blank, so not only can they tell us nothing about the future they are also can't remember how to get back there.

Time travel backwards is probably too risky, but I'm not talking about the grandfather paradox (kill your grandfather in the past, you father isn't born, so you're not born, so you can't kill your grandfather, so your father is born, so you are born and you kill your grandfather etc.) but the risk that changes that you make would render your future unknown. You might be able to go back in time, but when you go forwards again it's possible that everyone you've ever known or loved would be dead or strangers.

I came up with a solution to the grandfather paradox when I was about 14, and it turns out that it's the same one that Steven Hawking suggested. He's always been copying me, the scallywag... Anyway, essentially you become a single point of view and your reality creates its own timeline. The instant that you travel back in time you create a new timeline for yourself that differs from the past. Even if you only travelled back one year then immediately came forwards again without doing anything else, the reality that you are then living in is actually distinct from the one that you left even though you personally cannot tell the difference. To take this further, you could easily travel back in time and kill your grandfather because the timeline you are then in is not the one where your grandfather lived and continued your family tree. You as an individual have moved between timelines in a continuous motion, but you would be living in a different reality. Time travel is more about motion between realities than times.

I wouldn't recommend thinking about this too much. It makes your head go bendy.

[CommieBastard]

The principle problem, I think, with discussing time travel is that English simply isn't up to the job. Which tense do I use when discussing an alternate future that I visited in my personal past? It all goes a bit mad after a while.

[pgrmdave]

Another problem, if I travel one year ahead in time, or one year behind, where should my physical coordinates be? The earth is moving, the sun is moving, the galaxy is moving, and space is expanding. All those calculations would make my head hurt.

[funked)out_frog]

Mata, I think I get what you last post is saying: Is it that like that parallel universe theory in a way? Because if it's what I'm thinking it makes total sense to me. I really would like to get more engaged in this thread, I just have reall trouble writing down what I mean in a clear and understandable way. Dagnamit.

[CommieBastard]

Another problem, if I travel one year ahead in time, or one year behind, where should my physical coordinates be?  The earth is moving, the sun is moving, the galaxy is moving, and space is expanding.  All those calculations would make my head hurt.

But those things all move predictably, don't they? So that just requires brute processing power, which nobody denies we'll have in abundance

[pgrmdave]

The sun and earth move predictably, I'm not so sure about the movement of the galaxy, nor the expansion of space. The problem is that there is no absolute reference, so we can't fully know how we are moving through space.