What do you think about time travelling?

I’ll defer to the experts:

“Stephen Hawking once suggested that the absence of tourists from the future constitutes an argument against the existence of time travel—a variant of the Fermi paradox.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_travel

We’re all time travelers, sadly we can only go forward =(

I agree with RandornMrdan but my question is about controlling time travelling

I recall reading, or hearing from someone that if you move away from an object, like a clock at the speed of light, you will notice the clock’s arms are not moving because the light cannot catch up with you to show the changes being made. And if you moved faster than the speed of light away from that object the arms would move backwards since you’re catching up with previous traces of light….

So maybe time travel is possible, but you’d have to travel faster than the speed of light to travel backwards… and well forward, we already do that, but only in real time.

I guess we’ll find it all out once we achieve light speed travel.

I like to believe that time travel is possible, but that we don’t know how to do it. I also like to believe in alternate realities, similar to Hawkins theory.

I’m a big fan of the UK’s “Dr. Who” show. I also like “Fringe” and “Life on Mars”. These shows deal with time travel and alternate realities. Fun!

Without any scientific background without any references the only way I can answer this question is using the Superman Movie when Lois Lane died and Superman went out into the atmosphere and spent the earth back on its axis. The only thing is everything went backwards not just the one event.

I’m interested in knowing how do you feel that one person or persons can achieve this without affecting everyone?

random – there was a PBS special of Einsteins theories and the clock analogy was used in that show.

It also pointed out that if two people were on a bicycle, traveling through time, the time would appear to fly by the person in front, but the person on the back of the bike would not notice anything unusual. Traveling faster than the speed of light would be a killer…..

I like to believe that if there is a Creator, he has mastered time travel. Therefore creating the world in 6 days actually would have taken 6 billion years….

Meet me last Thursday to discuss this in greater detail.

Stock markets and sports books?

To travel in time, we must fully learn what time is. We’re still doing that. It’ll take a lot of time before we truly understand how our universe works. Until that time, real speculation is better left to those who really understand the issue, and faux speculation to authors and creative people alike.

Like @RandomMrdan said if you travel faster than the speed of light you can see into the past. However, you would not be able to control or interact with it. The other problem is we are unable to generate enough speed to go faster than light and even if we could the speed would probably kill anyone that tried

its a pipe dream if that. nothing with mass can travel at the speed of light as it mass would become infinite. so unless you can create enough energy to move your infinite self, you are not moving anywhere but in the present. but if you find a way come say hi in the future

I wish I could time travel. I think it would be fun.

I think that if you were a quark, time travel might already be possible. Through a wormhole, you know.

@daloon his lobes get in the way.

I just time travelled!

Last time I looked at the clock it was 11:15, now it’s 2:44.

I am surprised nobody mentioned the grandfather paradox. If you go back in time and kill your grandfather before your parent was born then you would not be around.

Along similar lines, if we assume only one past then any alteration of it has already happened.

One way around these problems, and I do not claim any knowledge in this area, is the multiple worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. According to this view, quantum mechanics does not have to be determined in terms of probabalistic interpretation events. Instead, it is assumed that each possible quantum value generates a separate universe.

kind of the like the Butterfly Effect…one small difference creates an echo, or ripple effect. Or Back to the Future II, where Marty McFly created an alternate present day by changing the past. Or an alternate timeline.

once we achieve time travel capabilities and travel to another time…the present no longer exists. that scares me. the entire time spectrum is open and free, therefore leaving NO real present. that’s terrifying

Hawking makes a point, but the problem is:if they can travel into the past they can also probably achieve the ability to wipe memories and/or blend in to a degree that we don’t know the better.

i say, have a towel handy just in case.

If you watch Lost, you’d know it gives you a bloody nose!!

I was pretty impressed with how they ‘folded’ space in the movie Dune. I wonder if you could apply that same concept, somehow, to time travel.

After all, the space-time continuum idea is pretty easy to understand right? It’s not overly complicated like that whole theory of relativity thing.

theoretically speaking, it may be possible. But we’re millenia away from practically achieving it. Also, seeing as we haven’t met any time-travelling tourists coming back to us yet, there are various conflicting (and very complicated) explanations.

The most reasonable of these is that, even if you go back up the “trousers of time”, you change the reality of the universe in which you find yourself, and it follows a completely different course from that moment on. So you could never really go back to your original time.

It is like loading a saved game on your PC. Even if you have the “load” option, you’d be replaying the game from that point on, and eventually reach a different reality, however similar to the one you left when you loaded. You could reload the game again and again, but you’d never be able to return to that point at which you did the first load.

@dynamicduo I am certainly not an expert – I fall under the category of a creative person or a speculator. Nonetheless, I will give my opinions: I don’t think it’s possible at all in the way described by the question. Time is just a human concept – a way that we measure and rationalize the goings on of the universe.

@RandomMrdan I agree with the idea of moving backwards exceeding the speed of light, but to what extent is that possible? Would it just be a perception of the arms or time travel? We see stars at night that might have already burned out – we are seeing what they were like in the past.

If we were able to exceed the speed of light it would affect more than just a single object (clock). Everything around us would be from the past. However, we would not be able to interact with it because it would just be the image of what had already happened (not to mention it would be incredibly far away). The things in front of us on our trip were already just images of things in the past, so we are just approaching the present, but the present of a different thing in space. If we started to go back toward the things that were behind us we would be approaching the present version of what was going on while we were making our trip.

Extra question – What would something moving faster than the speed of light look like (other than light itself as in the glow around nuclear reactors in water)?

If people in the future could time travel, wouldn’t they come back and say hi?

@toomuchcoffee911 nah, they’ve got playstation 10 and direct-to-brain netflix downloads. they’re busy watching the 3rd remake of Batman.

Good point

@eponymoushipster i think i was the only one that caught that lol

@Noah_D i appreciate it, thanks :)

I used to time travel but I just made things worst so I destroyed the prototype leaving me stuck here. You don’t want to see the future – trust me it only gets worse.

I never have had the luck of being able to go backwards in time yet. I really wish I could. I seriously doubt if I ever will be able to accomplish that one.

Ok, not sure how related this is, but I have often felt my life has gone in 7-year concentric circles. I don’t mean things happening exactly the same all over again, but finding myself in similar situations at exactly 7 year intervals. Which means 2009 will be a year to recuperate, 2010 will be very creative for me and 2011 will be unbelievably wonderful. Whereas 2008 was every bit as bad as 2001 and even worse than 1994.

I don’t even think this way consciously, I just look back and realise it later. Really feels like loading the same saved game every 7 years.

And I find myself in the same places, taking the same journeys. I was driving through the very same cities as I do now exactly 7 years ago (and at no other time in between). It was even the 12th of February (this time I did it on the 10th).

I like the tourist from then idea. If we ever do find time travel they would have been back already.