Lets Talk About Time Travel

[4RM3D]

A few questions come to mind...
Do you believe it could be(come) possible?
And if so, how do you think it would work?
And what about the paradoxes?
Any (good) movies, series or games that use time travel in an interesting way?

Or anything else you want to add about time travel

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From a scientific standpoint I believe time travel could become real, just like FTL travel. However I do not really see a way how time travel could work or could be regulated. I see time travel as something like a nuclear bomb, that is, a dangerous power that should never be used, but should still acknowledged that it could be (ab)used.

Also, it's possible the world has already been affected by time travel. But it's something we could probably never say for certain.

 

[Rylee Fox]

My version of time travel is that the past can't actually be changed. Everything that has happened in the past, happened. If you travel into the past, and try to change things, you'll end up only making history the way it already is because your travels through time had already happened.

If I explained that poorly let me know and I'll clarify.

If you try to travel into the future, it will be impossible to meet your future self since you went through time in the past and were gone from the world entirely until the point in the future that you came to.

Is time travel possible? Yes. We are all doing it right now. Every second that passes is us traveling one second into the future.

 

[Tahaneira]

To my mind, these are the possibilities for time travel.

1. It isn't possible.
2. It is possible, but it is not possible to change anything.
3. It is possible and things can be changed, but it's so heavily regulated that it hasn't happened.
4. It is possible and things can be changed, but there's no way we can know because, well, things have changed. If someone went back in time to assassinate someone to change some event, then that person was assassinated and that event didn't happen. It's not like we'd be able to remember what did happen and what didn't happen at the same time. Hell, for all we know, someone already went back in time to prevent WW2 and Hitler being charge was the results of their attempt to stop it. There's really no way to be sure.

I'm not really what you could call an expert in science, but from my understanding, this is all theory anyways. We don't know anything about it because, let's face it, we don't exactly have practical experience in the matter, do we?

Anyways, the point of my theory is that possible or not, we have no way of knowing until either someone succeeds or we have exhausted all methods of attempting to do so.

EDIT: Unless someone travels into the future, I suppose. Then that could be supported through information or technology or resources of some sort.

 

[Quaxar]

Well, personally I time travel twice a year. They call it daylight saving but really, it's just time travel to an age of better sunlight.

 

[Esotera]

From my basic understanding of physics I think there are two major ways that time travel could occur - from something bending spacetime so much that it acts as a wormhole to another point in the continuum (i.e. a blackhole). The second way would be through quantum entanglement as instantaneous communication implies information can travel faster than light. Then again, I don't really understand it that well, and until time travel is actually demonstrated this is all just guesswork.

Also travelling to the future is easy, everyone is doing it right now

 

[Little Woodsman]

I would love to discuss this but I can't right now.
Can we talk yesterday instead?

 

[TWRule]

Not a logical possibility. For starter's, it would lead to a moment when you'd have to be experiencing the world from two unique perspectives and yet you could only actually experience one perspective at any given time - paradox. Of course we've all seen movies where someone travels back and meets a past self, but that doesn't really make sense if you imagine it from the first-person perspective.

I assume that's the sort of 'time travel' we are talking about anyway. It also relies on a really problematic understanding of what 'time' is and how it works...

 

[TimeLord]

Yes. [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/18.201912-A-Discussion-about-Time-The-Blinovitch-Limitation-Effect] Let [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/18.203130-A-Discussion-about-Time-The-Illusion-of-Time-Time-Streams] us [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/18.204135-A-Discussion-about-Time-Travel-to-the-Past] talk [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/18.208546-A-Discussion-about-Time-Travel-to-the-Future] about [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/18.218644-A-Discussion-about-Time-Time-Tracks-Time-Friction] time [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/18.224218-A-Discussion-about-Time-Time-Loops] travel [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/18.231707-A-Discussion-about-Time-The-Laws-of-Time]

Yes I do think its either possible or has already been invented in the future. I hope it would involve some sort of Police Telephone box and a two-hearted alien

 

[Jacques Joseph]

From my basic understanding of physics I think there are two major ways that time travel could occur - from something bending spacetime so much that it acts as a wormhole to another point in the continuum (i.e. a blackhole). The second way would be through quantum entanglement as instantaneous communication implies information can travel faster than light. Then again, I don't really understand it that well, and until time travel is actually demonstrated this is all just guesswork.

Also travelling to the future is easy, everyone is doing it right now

I have only a very basic understanding of physics in this regard but some points that occurred to me:

- creating wormholes is most likely something the requires so much energy that it may never really be controllable by mankind - I mean if I remember correctly, blackholes are created by collapsing stars, I can hardly imagine mankind reproduce that, at least in the foreseeable future
- I´m not sure any of the options you mention allows traveling into the past, strictly speaking. In both cases it´s more like traveling into the future but faster than light which seems completely different from the sci-fi trope of a machine that takes you into the past...
- I´ve read somewhere (I think it was a book by Feynman) that anti-matter can be seen as matter traveling back through time. According to that theory, FTL speed is possible, its unattainability under normal circumstances is explained by there being a huge energy peak required to get past that speed - an amount of energy possible to obtain through total annihilation. For example, you have an electron and a positron traveling through space until they meet, at which point their "total annihilation" occurs; or you can interpret that as an electron traveling through space that at a certain moment passes the FTL-barrier (that would be the moment of the "total annihilation") which means that at that point, it becomes a positron traveling back through time...

As for the typical sci-fi idea of traveling into the past and changing stuff, I think it would be more like travelling through parallel universes, since changing something is exactly that - moving into another parallel universe... As Tahaneira put it:

4. It is possible and things can be changed, but there's no way we can know because, well, things have changed. If someone went back in time to assassinate someone to change some event, then that person was assassinated and that event didn't happen. It's not like we'd be able to remember what did happen and what didn't happen at the same time. Hell, for all we know, someone already went back in time to prevent WW2 and Hitler being charge was the results of their attempt to stop it. There's really no way to be sure.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

I think the butterfly effect gets stronger the further back you travel. Suppose I travel so far back that whatever I do in the past affects the present in such a way that future-me loses the motivation to travel back in time. Then I'd be trapped in some sort of ontological paradox. Like The Time Machine (the new one).

 

[4RM3D]

Yes. [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/18.201912-A-Discussion-about-Time-The-Blinovitch-Limitation-Effect] Let [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/18.203130-A-Discussion-about-Time-The-Illusion-of-Time-Time-Streams] us [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/18.204135-A-Discussion-about-Time-Travel-to-the-Past] talk [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/18.208546-A-Discussion-about-Time-Travel-to-the-Future] about [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/18.218644-A-Discussion-about-Time-Time-Tracks-Time-Friction] time [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/18.224218-A-Discussion-about-Time-Time-Loops] travel [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/18.231707-A-Discussion-about-Time-The-Laws-of-Time]

It always remains a fascinating subject. I suppose your name gave it away. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem much interest in this subject on this forum.

 

[krazykidd]

While i don't think Physically moving through time would be possible , i do not see why we couldnt potentially " see " the past . What i mean by that is create technology to be able to see any moment in any area in the past. While we couldn't travel there , we could see exactly what happened at a specific moment . Kind of like through a looking glass .

 

[Vegosiux]

Paradox shmaradox. I like to think of time travel as "overwriting" history. You know, just like you load an earlier save in your game if you die, then do something completely different? And the game progresses like you never got mauled by that wolf at all, because in the current timeline, well, you didn't, you replaced the old one.

Well, that's the kind of time travel I am willing to accept.

 

[Kyber]

I think we should have an international time travel day, in which we set up a location somewhere on earth, and we make an agreement that if we ever invent time travel, we journey into that location that very day for a brief moment just to give us hope that we will one day invent time travel.

 

[Flaery]

Isn't time just something we created to measure the length of a day?
I suppose in theory something resembling time travel would be possible, but it would be much easier to travel forward than backward.

To travel forward you would need to confine a person or thing in a chamber and put all their molecules, atoms, cells, etc. in a sort of stasis field that would wear off when the needed time has come.

Going backwards would require us to reverse the development of every thing in the universe, barring the person time-traveling. We would need to be capable of bringing the dead back to life and erasing our memories and reversing our age development.

 

[SonOfVoorhees]

If i went back in time and changed stuff, then it wont effect now cos we are already in now. So anything i changed has already happened in history. An if i changed stuff that was an issue then that splits the timeline separate to the one we have now.

Although, the thing to worry about is aging. So if you left now and travel to 1950 (for whatever reason) and lived there 10 years. Then when you come back to now you will be 10 years older. People will notice.

 

[fornever1]

In my opinion there's no way to change the past. unless I meet myself from the future on the 4/09/2013 I will never use time travel to meet myself on the 4/09/2013.

 

[search_rip]

And if so, how do you think it would work?

Well, it works and is rather easy, it's just a jump to the left and then a step to the right, put your hands on your hips and you bring your knees in tight haha

OT I think if it could be possible to time travel it would be impossible to change events so basically you would be there like watching the re run of a picture

 

[James Joseph Emerald]

In my opinion there's no way to change the past. unless I meet myself from the future on the 4/09/2013 I will never use time travel to meet myself on the 4/09/2013.

Honestly, if you got hold of a time machine a couple decades from now, would you be bothered to go back through your old Escapist posts and find the right date you set for yourself, just to prove yourself wrong?