Is there not a time travel conundrum?

It’s not a conundrum, you’ve just posed an oddly worded reason why time travel isn’t possible.

And today’s Word of the Day is…

Your argument doesn’t make sense. Why wouldn’t the current solar system be able to go on without our planet there? Sure it would change it’s balance due to the gravitational changes, but there’s no reason it wouldn’t just keep going.

And why can’t you have two identical solar systems existing in one “time stream” as you called it? Obviously if you put them in the same spot they’re going to start colliding with each other (their respective stars and planets)... but there’s no reason they couldn’t exist together.

If you can accept the possibility of the multiverse theory, time travel makes a lot more sense. I think.

The multiverse theory says that our universe is just one of an infinite number of universes, and there is a universe for every possible combination of events. Anything that can happen is happening somewhere in some universe.

So when you go back in time and influence events in such a way that “changes” them, you’re not really changing anything in your universe. You’re just going to another universe in which things are different. Of course if this were possible there would have to be a way to reconcile creation/destruction of mass in any given universe which, as we understand things right now, isn’t possible.

Although, @Mariah, you already exist in the alternate universe, so if you don’t physically go back in time, what travels in time? A soul? Something else? And if it does travel, what does it do to your soul that is already in your body in that alternate universe?

@Hypocrisy_Central Time travel is impossible, or at least extremely unlikely. As unlikely as God. The reason why we have the trope of time travel is that it allows us to explore certain ideas about alternate history, or finding out what really happened in the past.

Of course, then sf writers got hung up on justifying the means by which time travel could happen, and all this silly logical stuff started happening. It’s nice for mental masturbation, but it’s hard to take anything seriously that can’t happen. Well, for me it is. There are, after all, plenty of believers in God.

@wundayatta Actually as far back as Einstein scientists have theorized ways in which time travel is indeed possible.

Einstein himself came up with a model. Basically, it is known that time travels slower when you are close to a source of gravity. The more gravity something has, the slower time travels. The closer you are to a gravity source, the slower time will travel for you. A pair of nuclear clocks synced together, and separated, with one on an orbiting space shuttle, and one in the center of the planet… would eventually start to differ in the time they told… the one in the center of the planet being slow.

So to travel through time, Einstein theorized all you would need is to take a wormhole (piece of currently unobtainable technology #1), and put one end of that wormhole at Earth, and the second end… at a black hole (which is the largest gravity source currently known, and also unobtainable piece #2).... If you took a space ship (final unobtainable piece of puzzle) and flew into the wormhole on the Earth side of the wormhole, you would emerge on the black hole side at the exact moment you placed that end of the wormhole there (theoretically meeting yourself dropping off the wormhole).. and effectively traveling “back” in time.

“The universe is like the human body, there is very little you can remove without effecting the rest.”

There are little parts that you can remove without affecting the rest: brushing your hair, clipping your nails, etc. all have little to no effect.

If the universe is the human body, an individual or group of individuals is like a few stray atoms.

My brain just ‘sploded.

@tedd Why wouldn’t the current solar system be able to go on without our planet there? Where did I say the present solar system would be destroyed? I said it would be out of balance, and it would. It may correct itself fine, or some shifting of orbits or collisions can happen. That if Venus and the asteroid belt fill in the gap left by present Earth and Moon? When you want to put them back, how are you going to recreate the gap? If you sent back just the Earth and Moon, where are they going? The past solar system already have an Earth and a moon.

@Mariah So when you go back in time and influence events in such a way that “changes” them, you’re not really changing anything in your universe. You’re just going to another universe in which things are different. Exactly, you are not really traveling time in the classic way Hollywood wants to play it, but jumping dimensions. So, all that ”butterfly effect” would not have any effect, because if I were able to do that, and I smothered Hitler in his crib, it would have no effect here, when I returned, just in that alternate universe.

@wundayatta Time travel is impossible, or at least extremely unlikely. I believe it is impossible for many of the points I mention that can’t be fully reconciled. To do so you would literally have to take the whole known universe with you, man has no power to do that, only God. –believe it or not, is quite capable, and do not need our approval, but that is another issue—. Hollywood seem to think they have it down, but they are not thinking about all the loose ends. Which is understandable, man thinks he is the center of the universe, so why waste time figuring out what would happen to all that we just look at but will never actually see.

Consider the fact that the Earth is hurling around the Sun at the tremendous rate of about 1.6 million miles per day. If you were to go back in time just one day then your location would be 1.6 million miles from Earth. Yes you would be out there flapping in space while Earth would be a couple of million miles away and rapidly moving away.

The idea that the whole universe could be put into reverse to go back in time is insane but hey who knows?

I love the idea that there may be infinite parallel universes going forward and backward in time and being able to travel trough them all with some sort of machine. That would be so way cool.

@Hypocrisy_Central Venus and the asteroid belt would not fill the gap. Earth leaving if anything would leave them pulling further away from the gap as there would no longer be a gravitational pull from our planet. And even if some other celestial body did take our spot in the solar system, that would have no effect on our ability to put our planet back where we took it from… it would just slam into whatever has been placed there. For that matter, if we’re already traveling in time, why wouldn’t we just place it back at the exact moment we removed it from, so it was like it was never gone at all?

Same goes for sending us back in time. If the past Earth was there it would have no effect on our ability to send us back… we would just smash into the past Earth.

@tedd And even if some other celestial body did take our spot in the solar system, that would have no effect on our ability to put our planet back where we took it from… it would just slam into whatever has been placed there. That would essentially destroy the Earth. It would have the same effect if I had a localized X-ray time machine, and I trained it on your lungs and sent them back to when you were in high school. They would have to be somewhere, if they were not in your body, they would die because they have no blood to keep them alive. The present you would die with no lungs to provide oxygen to the brain, or you would have to live on life support. The past you would die because if your future lungs ends up in your past body, which already has lungs, those four lungs would take each other out. And your past self would be dead, unable to go back in the past from the future anyhow.

For that matter, if we’re already traveling in time, why wouldn’t we just place it back at the exact moment we removed it from, so it was like it was never gone at all? The time experienced by the present solar system would have to different from that experienced by the past Earth. More than likely, time in the past Earth would pass quicker than the present as to be gone in such a short time, the present would not know it was gone, and orbits would change etc.

Most stories, books or movies involving time travel usually use that loophole as a concept. The big idea usually is to change something, alter something, do something back in time that affects the present, or the future, at least while you’re back then. I don’t think many sources are really preoccupied as to whether or not it’s actually feasible, or if it makes any sense at all.
Unless it’s strictly a means/excuse for people to have adventures and using time travel as an easy way out of figuring out how the people get to such wild places, this loophole is what adds a lot of fun to time traveling stories.
I guess there are other reasons too why time travel would be involved, that isn’t an adventure for the sake thereof, or to mess around with theories and exploit them.

But to answer the question…I think…there is indeed a lot of problems with the idea of time travel, but I don’t got the brains to really exemplify as to why, or how. Mostly it’s because, for starters, I don’t even think that time is something that exists as a matter of itself, rather than the passing of something, which can never be, once it’s gone. So you couldn’t go back to get drunk and fuck shit up. Because like, it isn’t something that exists anymore. What is left behind that tells us something happened before is probably a whole entire sack of goodies to begin with.

I mean hell, even the first Star Trek series was all like, yeah you know what, fuck it. Let’s just make a buncha planets that, for some reason, are all different time periods that once existed from planet Earth.

Anyways, at least based on what I understand of stuff, and from what I understood of your question. Was a too bit complicated. XD

Time travel is possible.

#1… We’re all heading towards the future together.

#2… Cryogenics allows a person to jump into a box, and without any apparent time passing, predetermine when they will exit.

@tedd Like I said, “very unlikely.” Not to mention that the things that can travel through wormholes, I believe are sized at the quantum level. I’m not sure anyone theorizes that anything larger can travel through the wormhole. In addition, doesn’t the other end of the wormhole have to be physically taken to whereever else you want it?

I think the best we could do would be to get messages from places light years apart. The would be messages from the deep past, I suppose. But it might be interesting. Say there was supernova somewhere near the communication source. It could give us notice years in advance of when the supernova would be visible here. Or you could place such a device on some closer stellar object and maybe you would get more useful information. Like if we put it in orbit around the sun, we might be able to 8 minutes warning about solar flares.

@Hypocrisy_Central Whether or not the planet would be completely destroyed by a collision has no effect on the ability to move it. Of course that scenario you laid out about my lungs would largely play out, but the consequences of time travel would not have an effect on the ability to travel time. The only question mark you present even is if my past self died, would my future self exist (a paradox). But popular theory is that many infinite universes exist, based on every single different outcome of an event.. and that we as “things” exist independent of those timelines. In essence I would still exist in the future in the time line the lungs came from, but a new timeline would be made that didn’t contain me… yet my dead “future” lungs would still exist.

@wundayatta Oh yah this is 100% theoretical stuff at the moment. But having talked at end with a buddy of mine (who I kid you not, is in the running for a nobel prize in physics) and haphazardly researching it… it’s still very possible.. just not yet.

Your suggestion, using light speed to place warning sensors of some kind, is much more likely to occur first.