Poll: Do you believe in time travel?

[Kair]

No, of course it isn't. If you were to time travel to 6:15 AM on the 5th of December, 1926 then at that moment, you would both be there and not be there, creating a paradox similar to dividing by zero.

Division by zero is a paradox only of human construct. Nature should not have paradoxes, only our mind tells us that it can.

 

[zehydra]

I believe it is possible, but it's not like you could move particular objects back in time, like yourself. It would just be a reversal of ALL time. Like pressing the rewind button on a VCR and letting it play again. You wouldn't even know you had traveled backwards in time.

 

[chriseb0529]

I don't think that time-travel will ever be possible, for someone to travel through time then the past, present and future all have to co-exist in some way, and since the whole point of time is that one state is replaced by the next, it implies that the past no longer exists, and the future only will once it arrives and becomes the present... I hope that isn't too confusing.

 

[Jaime_Wolf]

I think likely not. I find the idea of time as an actual existing dimension (the notion that time exists simultaneously allowing travel between times) highly suspect. It seems more plausible to propose that this sort of "time" is a useful abstraction with no real empirical existence. We can never observe the past or future and can only make statements about either by making assumptions about causality. The thing is, if you have a concept of causality, you don't really NEED any sort of "time" dimension with different times existing simultaneously to make sense of the world.

Personally I think that as time has been observed to warp or "dialate" in situations such as fast moving atomic clocks in orbit showing different times to those on earth, it may also be able to be affected in other ways, e.g. Bending it or folding it to send a body to a different time.

This is a somewhat mistaken view of time dilation. Time moves at different speeds in different inertial frames of reference, but it's not as though anything ever goes BACK in time or as though the two frames fail to exist simultaneously (it's very hard to define what I mean here by simultaneously, but, if I'm not mistaken, a frame of reference encompassing the other two should suffice). Dilation is to do with the "speed" of time, not the "position" in time.

Perhaps an example would help. If you were to board a spaceship that had launched in the past and had traveled at high speeds for an extended period of time, you would be in the "past" with respect to calendars. But once you got on the ship, you would be in the present because those moments with you aboard never happened before, despite time-keeping devices suggesting otherwise. It's not as though you got on the ship sometime in your past without realizing it, you just got on a ship that experienced slower time for a while.

Saying that dilation suggests time travel to be possible is like saying that brakes slow you down, so really good brakes might allow you to slow down so much that you go backwards.

 

[Anarchemitis]

Somehow I don't think a time machine will ever get off the ground, much in the same way that space travel will never be different from basically being super uber expensive submarines that take forever to get anywhere. That doesn't mean fiction can't bend reality as it pleases.

 

[wammnebu]

i dont know, are you ready to accept doc brown into your life?

 

[Xaio30]

I think traveling to the future is possible by shutting down your conciousness and prevent body-aging until you're at your desired time period, but I believe traveling backwards to be completely impossible.

 

[Ipsen]

Of course its P.O.S.S.I.B.L.E. Since we don't have the technology to make that idea realized, there's no way to know in the future if we will or wont be able to. Hence, possible.

 

[Patrick Dare]

Leaves a lot of paradox's
--If we had, despite any rules some dick would have come back and proved it to everyone in our time - or been sent to a loony bin.
--Or if they had, they'd have been stopped by an ever recuring time chase on one going back further than the other.
futurama episode where fry is his own uncle..

Ever seen 12 Monkeys?

Spoiler

Basically the first thing you said happens to Bruce Willis.

Also, you get points just for mention Futurama although I think you meant grandfather.

For fucks sake, can people please stop labeling threads as polls, when they aren't polls, but just discussions? You're annoying the heck out of me, and if the board had such a feature, i'd autoignore all threads that say poll without having one.

Obligatory discussion value:
I don't "believe" in time travel, simply because i have seen zero evidence for "time" to be more than a mental-VCR (Translation: Time as people imagine it, doesn't exist).

I agree. Are people doing this on purpose or do they have a memory problem where they write poll then by the time they're done typing the thread forget they put poll and don't fill anything in?

Anyways, time travel, yeah. Backwards in time no but as people have stated if you travel fast enough or stay in enough gravity long enough you can essentially travel forward in time since you will age say a week while the rest of the universe ages say 100 years. Of course this presents it's own problems such as getting to such speeds (which also causes problems with acceleration/slowing down), etc. I know some people will say "well things that we thought were impossible a century ago are possible now" but my position is that as we gain more knowledge our knowledge of what is possible and what may be possible also increases.

 

[Ekonk]

Of course, time is a dimension through which you can move - in fact, we're moving through it right now. Moving faster is easy. Moving backwards however, seems impossible.

 

[Kris015]

Yes, but only forward, which is already proven to be possible.

 

[Roamin11]

I think your poll traveled through time to somewhere else...

OT: Honestly, I have no clue. It seems to have a lot of flaws in it's theory but most theories have flaws. I really wish it were possible, that would be awesome.

Screw you NCR this is my New Vegas and I'm not sharing it!!!

OT: I really do hope its possible one day, but then agian I also want humanity to have a shared subconscious state, and to be able to evolve so we can live among the stars without terraforming (Unless the planet is like Mars then terraforming is okay with me)

 

[ayuri]

No, of course it isn't. If you were to time travel to 6:15 AM on the 5th of December, 1926 then at that moment, you would both be there and not be there, creating a paradox similar to dividing by zero.

this is something I have also considered, but there is the split universe theory where every second and choice/happening would create a new universe instead of being a time a place. Another one I considered was that time replays and the end of the universe (if it even is that drastic) it will reset the universe and repeat possibly meaning we are our own fossil fuels. A third thought is there is no thing as time so there is just distance for time travel.

and I tried dividing by zero on paper and a calculator and we are all still here. Haha I increased my integrity by disproving a previous belief.

EDIT: this pretty much applies to most of the non believers not just poison.

 

[Smooth Operator]

Well for now it remains the fabric of fiction, and I like fiction.
So yes, time-travel away.

But we are only barely grasping the basics of physics, there is still an endless amount of knowledge out there.

 

[ZakCanard]

Yes time travel is certainly possible and the lack of evidence is proof that the Time Police have got quite adept at removing said evidence. However they are human, so they will slip up. How else can you explain the spontaneous "invention" of mayonnaise [http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/beta/entry/A2043398] back in 1756?

 

[Secret world leader (shhh)]

As awesome as time travel would be I think time is just a manmade concept of convenience.

 

[Aiden_the-Joker1]

Time travel to the future is possible because time travels slower around incredibly large objects in the universe. So we send someone there for 10 years, they come back and say 20 years have passed here.

 

[Thundero13]

but we are all constantly traveling through time look i'm a second ahead of where I was a second ago.
Seriously though i'm pretty sure someone already invented time travel that can go backwards but only back to when it was turned on.

 

[tthor]

I think of it like this:
has the past ever changed? No? Then obviously time travel is either impossible or never discovered.

how in the world would you know if the past were changed? if the past were changed, you would be changed, and thus the past would not appear to have changed

 

[P.Tsunami]

If it was possible, we would have seen some by now

This is my take on it, too. Human beings always tend to slightly mess up everything they do. Even heavily policed, some time travel tourists would slip through the cracks. Since they don't seem to be, time travel is not possible, and will never be possible, ever.

I think of it like this:
has the past ever changed? No? Then obviously time travel is either impossible or never discovered.

But if the past changes, how would you know it had? If I go back in time, and change some crucial fact that completely rearranges your life, keep in mind your life would've always been that way.