Thread: How to prove time travel will or will not exist

What if the future person doesn't want to travel backwards to you? Think about it - if time travel becomes a feature of daily life in the distant future(compared to now), couldn't it be so far distant that a potential traveler might think of our time as being boring? I certainly wouldn't care to visit anything before the Middle Ages, except maybe Rome or Greece...

Good point, good point, but if time went on forever (another thing we must assume), then there would be a sure chance that someone were willing to return.

I'm not sure why one would choose to, but there would be a 100% chance of it happening

The way I see it, assuming time manipulation is possible, going backwards in time would cause everybody's perceptions and brain matter to go backwards as well. Time is a linear thing, and reversing it would cause everything to reverse. Time traveler included. Once back to normal things would progress the same way they already did in the past, without even a tiny difference anywhere, time being that linear thing that it is.

I don't know how well I got my point across, but I'd like to hear some feedback. I'm no expert on time so any input's appreciated.

Originally Posted by marcc

Good point, good point, but if time went on forever (another thing we must assume), then there would be a sure chance that someone were willing to return.

I'm not sure why one would choose to, but there would be a 100% chance of it happening

You assume that you would know if someone answered your note, but given the your possibility 3) that only the present exists, might not your note find its way into the hands of some future being who will mine you out of their present and recreate the whole context of your existence, with you, here, now all the time unaware, the proof being therefor absent?

The past and future are mutually exclusive in that they are made of the same parts which must hold only one alignment at a given time, but locally old patterns may reassert themselves or new patterns be extrapolated.

Originally Posted by Speesh

The way I see it, assuming time manipulation is possible, going backwards in time would cause everybody's perceptions and brain matter to go backwards as well. Time is a linear thing, and reversing it would cause everything to reverse. Time traveler included. Once back to normal things would progress the same way they already did in the past, without even a tiny difference anywhere, time being that linear thing that it is.

I don't know how well I got my point across, but I'd like to hear some feedback. I'm no expert on time so any input's appreciated.

It's an odd feeling, right?
This is just like a short cut, 'cutting through infinity' if you will.
Just wait for a couple of infinityths of a second, and *bam*, mainly instant time travel!

Taosaur, if it happened infinitely and each 'parallel universe,' then extended into a different reality where your life continued, then it could work, I'm saying. It wouldn't be the same mind or universe, but it would still work as the same reality.

But might you not be inhabiting one of those realities predicated upon your note to the future, and therefor be the cause of your own existence?

If time travel would become a common thing in the future, where are the time travelers now? Why aren't we seeing them?

Also, you can't do exactly the same thing twice. Try to drop a pen for example in exactly the same way - it'll land differently each time. Imagine how many things would be different if reversing the time was possible. IMO, only traveling to the future may be possible, but getting back wouldn't.

Let me tell you something about time.

For something to exist in the future, you need to add momentum to a thought. I'm trying to tell you that, for example, the light bulb wouldn't exist if we didn't need one ("Necessity is the mother of invention"). Now, how about the opposite?

If I wrote a note on a piece of 'time-proof' (i.e. would remain as is for millenia) paper, ordered the reader to come back to my time when it is possible, and let me join them in a fantastic, cosmic and intergalactic journey, I'd have one question to ask you; how would it not work?

Mainly because your whole argument makes no logical sense at all?

If in the future you are able to travel backwards in time, I think it wouldn't be allowed.
Like someone else has already said, going back in time will without a doubt change the course of history and alter the human race.

For example, lets say that the future is a peaceful place where people of all races and cultures can share existence without war or violence. Yet someone goes back in time and alters everything, now the peace has gone. Therefore I would back time traveling illegal.
To protect the present

If time travel would become a common thing in the future, where are the time travelers now? Why aren't we seeing them?

Also, you can't do exactly the same thing twice. Try to drop a pen for example in exactly the same way - it'll land differently each time. Imagine how many things would be different if reversing the time was possible. IMO, only traveling to the future may be possible, but getting back wouldn't.

One theory is that time travel will only be possible from the point that time travel is invented. So all time leading up until that point is inacessable to time travellers in the future. That's one possible explanation for lack of evidence of time travel holiday makers in our current timeframe.

Another would be that time travellers view us from some kind of invisible standpoint and are unable to involve themselves in our affairs, for risk of self annihilation.Something akin to a 3 dimensional being looking down at a 2 dimensional world.

Another would be that due to the various problems involved with time travel, and potential paradox situations, that you can only travel in one direction... ie they will come pick you up, but they wont drop you back to tell us all what you saw... one way around causing a paradox would be to download your memories/personality at the point of your death, and take those memories forward into the future - to perhaps live in some kind of artificial body. This would leave the past intact whilst allowing you to visit the future.

Everyone knows time travel is really dangerous, therefore why would someone try to invent it? Inventing such a thing could mean destroying your own existance.

Also, it could stop future from ever existing. Imagine a criminel trying to rob a bank. He'd go do it. He'd get caught so he'd go back in time and do it properly this time. He would do it right and the bank would call the authorities which would go in the past to catch the criminel. He'd realise what's happening so he'd go back in the past when no one was trying to arrest him then it would all restart. There could also be more simple things like cheating on a test. In brief, people would keep going in the past to make everything perfect to them which would stop us from ever going foreward in time which would end up in the inexistence of the future.

Besides, if people could travel, they'd probably come to our time and sell us futuristic objects to become millionaires and then go back in their time, OR people that study history would come back and ask us questions about are civilisation... In brief, we would know if that will ever be possible.

All this talk is just hypothetical of coarse.

But if time travel was possible, and you could travel back in time I don't think it would be possible to interfer with the present. If you wen't back in time and changed the events, (which is impossible not to do) then you would just be creating an alternative reality. Like a pathway that splits at the moment you enter that reality or time.

If time travelling is possible it means the future already exists. If the future already exists, anyone who would eventually travel back in time already did so and the ramifications of such travels are already in effect.

So if time travelling is possible, it's impossible to change history.

Actually, how can we say things about what it would be like if we could time travel like "We couldn't change history", "we could only go one way"? How can we say what time really is? How can we say "Time is linear" when we do not actually know anything about time? The only thing we know about time is that it never stops, it just keeps going (or that's what we think).

Originally Posted by SleepyCookieDough

Actually, how can we say things about what it would be like if we could time travel like "We couldn't change history", "we could only go one way"? How can we say what time really is? How can we say "Time is linear" when we do not actually know anything about time? The only thing we know about time is that it never stops, it just keeps going (or that's what we think).

Originally Posted by Scatterbrain

If time travelling is possible it means the future already exists. If the future already exists, anyone who would eventually travel back in time already did so and the ramifications of such travels are already in effect.

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Originally Posted by Scatterbrain

If time travelling is possible it means the future already exists. If the future already exists, anyone who would eventually travel back in time already did so and the ramifications of such travels are already in effect.

So if time travelling is possible, it's impossible to change history.

Unless all possible futures exist and what we experience as linear time is actually translation along multiple non-spatial dimensions.

Originally Posted by Taosaur

Unless all possible futures exist and what we experience as linear time is actually translation along multiple non-spatial dimensions.

I agree, we cannot say anything about time for a fact. Time is maybe not just a line.

There's something we haven't talked of though. Psichic. My godmother is one, that's why I believe in them. She predicted things about my mothers life which were things my mom would have never predicted but that were reall acurate. But then she got it somehow wrong with my dad. Is the fact that someone can predict the future of proof of time traveling somehow? i guess that small things can change the future and that when a psycic predicts, they can only predict a possibility and not what will happen for sure. If that is true, then time travelling isn't as linear as you guys seem to think.

Time is a perceptual illusion. The closest thing to time travel is related to perception also, but therefore it is only relative to the "perceiver." You cannot travel in the objective world, besides.

I don't think time travel will ever exist, because time is just an illusion.

traveling in to the future may be possible via such things as someone described like downloading your memory....but I dont think traveling to the past would ever be possible...because the past is no longer real. Those events happened...but are not still happening in the past.

Originally Posted by marcc

Let me tell you something about time.

For something to exist in the future, you need to add momentum to a thought. I'm trying to tell you that, for example, the light bulb wouldn't exist if we didn't need one ("Necessity is the mother of invention"). Now, how about the opposite?

If I wrote a note on a piece of 'time-proof' (i.e. would remain as is for millenia) paper, ordered the reader to come back to my time when it is possible, and let me join them in a fantastic, cosmic and intergalactic journey, I'd have one question to ask you; how would it not work?

But, I see there are three things stopping us:

1. Time-proof paper
2. Where to put the note so it remained unharmed, but would be discovered after time travel was a daily commodity
3. Does anything other than the present exist?

Discuss

I noticed too many assertions in this piece.

Originally Posted by SolvedSnake

I don't think time travel will ever exist, because time is just an illusion.

deep, man

Originally Posted by Taosaur

Unless all possible futures exist and what we experience as linear time is actually translation along multiple non-spatial dimensions.

like back to the future

Goddamn, triple-post Carou.

I'm going to go Sagan on this one.

If time travel is real, why haven't there been any time travellers visiting us?