How can anyone time travel to the future if the future hasn't happened yet?

The theory is there are infinite futures happening simultaneously.

THE future or YOUR future? There are tantalizing revelations ahead of us regarding our understanding of time. There are suspicions that we aren’t properly wired to fully understand or define it. But we’re damned sure obsessed with working toward figuring it out. The physicists, philosophers and mathematicians together are closing in on what are probably some unsettling realizations on our perception of time as but a creative adaptation of our own to make sense of existence. The one thing we now understand is that the past, present and future all exist. They are HERE. NOW is in the past as I type it. What to do?

There is a theory that we shouldn’t think of time as a thing moving forward like we do now, but a river that has already been established and is just moving in motion. Therefore it makes sense to just jump from one part of the river to another.

So where are the jumpers? Why is the section of the river encompassing the existence of humanity so uninteresting that jumpers apparently neglect it?

@HP I don’t know why they jump, but I’m sure not all of them jump because they don’t like the present. There are a lot of valid reasons why someone would want to travel to the future other than just being bored, like part of a research, running away from a threat, or just wanting to see a snippet of the future.

I don’t think of time as a thing moving forward. I think of it as something passing through us. It’s not an object of travel, a destination. It’s a state. I don’t believe it has existence in any real form.

Not that I expect to have any real understanding of it, ever, by any means. If Stephen Hawking was challenged by the question of time, I simply bow to it and submit.

So what I’m actually speaking of here is the illusion of time. Our respective illusions of time don’t have to agree any more than our senses of aesthetics or our psychological hangups have to match up. Rather, we just have to agree on which devices of measurement we will hold in common so we can conduct our work and play with some degree of coordination.

Twin paradox

Most to all of the future has already happened.

Imagining 10 Dimensions – the Movie

The link is from YouTube and is 1.44 hours long. Only the first 1 hour is worth watching.

I would think you can travel to the future if you can travel to the past. If the past is happening at the same time as your present, your present is their future. So both are happening at once.

I really doubt significant time travel is possible. I think it will be more on the order of traveling fast enough that we age less than others in the same time frame on earth, or going into some sort of suspended animation for some reason and we wake up in the future. With both scenarios you would miss out on life experience during the time you aren’t present.

You don’t travel to the future instantaneously. You just have to travel in time faster than other people do.

But it has happened.

Just wait a second…

There. That wasn’t so hard was it?

Now it’s the present, and we all love presents.

But wait too long and it’s the past. I miss it already, but pretty soon we’ll forget all about it.

Just wait…

I think there is no time travel other than the usual falling forward everyone does, but if there were such, I think the type that makes the most sense is traveling forward, but what that means is that someone experiences time dilation (which does seem to exist – e.g. if you could accelerate yourself to ludicrous speed and return to where you started, it seems it would appear to you that a smaller amount of time had passed, than had passed at the destination).

The next minor stretch beyond what I believe exists, would be if there were a way for a person to vanish and then reappear later in time, unchanged. That would be time travel. Like the above real situation, the future would wait to happen, until the time traveler arrived. As long as you can’t “go back” in time, there’s no paradox, just technical obstacles (no one knows how to practically travel at ludicrous speed, and no one knows how to disappear and return, or even revive from suspended animation (another way to do it)).

@HP – You’re right.

And life is full in unsettling realizations.

Just knowing that mathmeticians, physicists, and philosophers are getting together and thinking about this is a little disturbing. Chances are I’ve slept with at least two of them, and it could get confusing.

The future hadn’t happened yet and yet I came to it but all I found was this present instant which is all there ever was. There…. It is gone.

The philosopher John McTaggert said that time does not exist‘s_paradox He said there are two contradictory ways of viewing time – either as a division between past, present and future or the way a physicist may observe time as a continuum.

There are infinite futures and the future you might jump into is constantly changing. The past you might jump into on the return trip could be just as varied.

https://www.bbc.com/reel/video/p04s223f/physics-suggests-that-the-future-has-already-happened

Time has already happened.
But I wonder why it does…since variables would constantl chnge the outcomes,wouldn’t it?

^Yes, I would think so.
If someone had stepped back in time and killed Hitler (part of a plot in a Stephen King book), what a difference that would have made! Or if Jack Ruby had been stopped from shooting John Kennedy, America could be a very different place. So many good and bad changes could be made.

I think you just solved the ‘time travel paradox.’

What if you go back in time and accidentally kill your grandfather before he had your father?

@Dutchess_III That problem can be explained by having alternate dimensions. Your grandfather can still be alive in another dimension.

@chyna and anyone else who isn’t totally up to date on US history, Harvey Oswald (supposedly) killed John Kennedy, Jack Ruby killed Harvey Oswald.

^Thanks. I felt like I was getting something wrong.

@kritiper How did Jack Ruby die?

@kritiper I googled it. Pulmonary embolism from lung cancer.

Correct my post to Lee Harvey Oswald. My old brain is getting forgetful!

Maybe some other members have said what I will say now, but I don’t have the time to read what every one has posted so far, so I’ll just write my answer as if it were the first answer here.

The Future hasn’t begun from our perspective. I’ll try to make it easier for you to understand what I mean, by means of this example:

Imagine you can walk inside a movie that you have watched several times. Also imagine that you’re walking into the real time and space that they are playing in, which means you’re entering a time and space that is not just the movie that you know, but their real life, of which the movie only shows some specific details. Further on, imagine you can interact with the characters of the movie ‘behind the stage’, so you never appear in the movie itself.

You enter it at the very beginning.

You know what will happen there, isn’t that right?

But do the people ‘inside the movie’ know it?

No, they don’t. All the coming actions are FUTURE to them, and that’s why they don’t know anything about them. But you do, because you’ve seen the movie several times.

So, for the characters in the movie, the Future isn’t seen yet. From their point of view, the Time is flowing forward and future events are yet to come. But from your point of view, the future concerning that movie has already happened.

What if our whole Universe is somebody’s movie that they have created and seen already?