Time travel

[Dthoughts]

What are your views on this? Is it possible? Anyone tried it?

[Zhaylin]

When I was about 12 years old, I tried to build a time machine. It consisted of lawn chairs on the foundation of a very old military building. It didn't work, of course, but I had fun trying. When I was about 14, I tried switching places with imaginary person I thought lived in a DragonLance type era. That didn't work either and I was depressed over that one In short, I think time travel is only possible in science fiction. It would be cool if it could actually work, but I think it would be too dangerous. Too much history and such could be altered.

[StonedApe]

It is not possible to go back in time but we all constantly move foreward. It may be possible to move faster in time but it certainly isn't with our current technology. What do you mean anyone tried it? How>?

[DrunkenArse]

[Philosopher8659]

Relation to self is inadmissible.

[DrunkenArse]

WTF does that even mean?

[Descensus]

WTF does that even mean? Who fucking knows what the majority of his posts mean.

[anderj101]

I found a Delorean on eBay, but I can't seem to find a flux capacitor. I've tried all the major electronic suppliers and they just laughed at me. I'm going to go with "NO" on this one...

[Spartiate]

I found a Delorean on eBay, but I can't seem to find a flux capacitor. I've tried all the major electronic suppliers and they just laughed at me. I'm going to go with "NO" on this one... Wow, I read that post while watching back to the future... ... SUPERMOON???

[SpecialInterests]

It's known that you can travel faster through time. The greater your velocity the slower time passes for you. The effects are only noticeable at significant fractions of the speed of light however. The same is true for gravity. Being in the presence of a massive gravitational field will also slow time for you. Generally the effects are only noticeable if you were to orbit a blackhole or something but some effects are even noticed on earth. Periodically scientists on earth need to adjust the time on GPS satellites that orbit us in order to keep them in sync with the clocks on earth. They run ever so slightly slower up there in space.

[juroara]

I remember watching a program, can't remember what channel maybe NatGeo, and it basically said it ain't gonna happen. I'm a DoctorWho fan but traveling back in time the way The Doctor does can't happen, because for there to be two of you within your own time line, well that would be a paradox. And its not that paradoxes are impossible, its just they can't happen not without the fabric of reality falling apart. So the Universe has laws in place insuring that paradoxes, like you traveling back into time, can never happen. Or something like that. And traveling to the future is nothing more than you traveling through time faster. What good is that? You can't go back the way you came and all you accomplished was missing out and crash landing into a future you had no hand in creating, except maybe through your lack of existing. I think that maybe what is possible is to watch the past and see potential futures. Light carries information, such as when a camera captures the light and transforms it into a static image. Well maybe in the future we'll have a technology that can capture the information of the past and translate it to us as real time imagery. Because of cause and effect we should be able to foresee potential futures and forecast them like the weather. But for that you would also need to know every present cause taking place, including simple ants building a nest. Maybe one day possible, but not very likely.

[SKYEzinger]

Well when you read a book on string theory chaos theory and quantum mechanics then you see that time as we know it is just imaginary. Real time is multidimensional and has to do with the energy footprint of the physical partials residing in that string. So in essence linear time travel is impossible but if you were to somehow tap into the time string knots you could be sucked into a completly new dimension.

[LucidJuggalo]

I unintentionally went back in time to when I was 13/14 years old and highly suicidal, in a dream, once. Apart from that, naww.

[MindGames]

A forward time machine could theoretically be created if you had access to large gravitational forces or a spaceship with the capability to move at a large fraction of the speed of light. Gravity's effects are seen in satellites, as SpecialInterests said. Satellite clocks are faster than earth time, though, since their spacetime is less dilated. A backward time machine can't exist, unless if you were to figure out a way to enter a parallel universe along our universe's timeline. In that case, I would imagine that the parallel universe you entered would fork off and create a new history. It's pretty mind boggling. I say you just build a time machine in your dreams. Equally fun.

[SpecialInterests]

You're right, my mistake - they do actually run faster up there.

[Sornaensis]

But a few thousand years from now we will probably have the computing power to simulate the universe, thus allowing us to go 'back in time' by observing the virtual universe at a given moment.

[MindGames]

That could be possible, but I doubt any computer could simulate the apparent free will of humans, so the virtual universe would probably end up being different from ours.

[Dthoughts]

WTF does that even mean? I guess what he's saying is that you can time-travel somehow with your mind alone. But i already had such a suspicion and i still don't believe its true. This post wasn't helpful no ^_^

[Sornaensis]

That could be possible, but I doubt any computer could simulate the apparent free will of humans, so the virtual universe would probably end up being different from ours. There is no reason to believe that an exact recreation of the universe from the beginning would yield a different universe.

[MindGames]

An exact attempt at recreation would theoretically yield a very similar universe, but the nature of the unpredictability of quantum mechanics and human nature would result in a non-identical universe as a whole.

[Sornaensis]

And why would you possibly think that?

[MindGames]

Well, I know this is the case because subatomic particles behave randomly. Even if you were to recreate the universe with the exact same starting conditions, when subatomic particles form and interact with each other they interact in random, unpredictable ways. This randomness creates a butterfly effect, creating a completely random end-result universe. Therefore any attempt at recreation of the universe would only be able to recreate the starting conditions, and anything after that cannot be accurately calculated. Forget my argument that humans are unpredictable. Particles themselves are unpredictable. However you could re-simulate a previously simulated universe if you only used a pseudo-random generator. But you can't re-simulate our exact universe from the beginning.

[Sornaensis]

Since when are subatomic particles random?

[MindGames]

Since quantum physics was invented. You can go ahead and learn about it if you want.

[Signet]

I've found it logical to say that, if we could time travel, that whenever we landed there would be no Earth to land on, because it's most likely made of just 3 or 4 physical dimensions and travels in the dimension of time, having no measure within that dimension. Therefore, if we went 'back in time' or 'forwards in time', we would instantly die due to a lack of matter around us. Depressurization and suffocation all at once. Kind of like sending yourself into the middle of deep space. Also, if we could send ourselves forward in time, and have our physical world be in the future, it still would be a bad idea. Think of it this way: if I were to travel five days into the future, then when I appear five days later, in the same place, the Earth will have moved in its orbit by five days, or... how many thousand MILES? Again, lost (and DEAD) in space. I think I'm just going to stay away from time travel, thank you.