Poll: Time Travel is Impossible, or at the Very Best, Highly Unlikely
- Thread starter PrimoThePro
- Start date
Recommended Videos
Time travel into the past: Impossible.
Time travel into the future: Possible.
The faster you move, the slower time moves for you. At 99% of the speed of light, time is warped so much, that if you age one day at this speed, the rest of earth will have aged say 40 years. You have therefore travelled into the future.
Check out 'Into The Universe With Stephen Hawking,' there are some good theories there.
Time travel into the future: Possible.
The faster you move, the slower time moves for you. At 99% of the speed of light, time is warped so much, that if you age one day at this speed, the rest of earth will have aged say 40 years. You have therefore travelled into the future.
Check out 'Into The Universe With Stephen Hawking,' there are some good theories there.
Why do you think there is no public knowledge of time-travel?
Because everyone who did/will do/does so either ended/will end/ends up up somewhere in space because Earth was/will be/is somewhere else at the time of arrival than at the time of departure or for those few who did/will/do end up on Earth either died because they arrived before Earth supported life, got eaten by dinosaurs, died by the meteor that killed the dinosaurs, got crucified/impaled/died in an arena/got enslaved and died/got burned for witchcraft/arrived too close to an erupting volcano or got killed because they said the Earth was round or turns around the sun or they are/were/will be imprisoned in secret government facilities/end up in a zoo for the entertainment of the aliens/robots/ants/other future rulers of Earth or they don't/didn't/won't tell anyone out of fear someone might mess up the timeline or they took over the world and are now ruling it in secret or don't realize they are constantly traveling forward through time at 1 second per second.
People who witness holes in time usually just pass it off as a deja-vu.
Because everyone who did/will do/does so either ended/will end/ends up up somewhere in space because Earth was/will be/is somewhere else at the time of arrival than at the time of departure or for those few who did/will/do end up on Earth either died because they arrived before Earth supported life, got eaten by dinosaurs, died by the meteor that killed the dinosaurs, got crucified/impaled/died in an arena/got enslaved and died/got burned for witchcraft/arrived too close to an erupting volcano or got killed because they said the Earth was round or turns around the sun or they are/were/will be imprisoned in secret government facilities/end up in a zoo for the entertainment of the aliens/robots/ants/other future rulers of Earth or they don't/didn't/won't tell anyone out of fear someone might mess up the timeline or they took over the world and are now ruling it in secret or don't realize they are constantly traveling forward through time at 1 second per second.
People who witness holes in time usually just pass it off as a deja-vu.
If we build a time machine and travel back in time then we can only go back as far as the time machine exists, I watched "The Universe" and the people on that show have about 30 PHDs for every eyeball they have so I'm goin with them on this one.
We're travelling forward in time as we speak. Or we could travel back in time by looking at ourselves.
And given we invented the measurement of time - which is an abstract concept used to measure an abstract concept - anything is possible.
And given we invented the measurement of time - which is an abstract concept used to measure an abstract concept - anything is possible.
Of course time travel is possible. I know, I do it all the time. When I woke up this morning, I got out of bed and slowed time. Any motion, however minute, changes the flow of time from the moving object's perspective. So, by getting out of bed this morning I slowed the rate at which I move through time by a little bit and went to the future. Of course, to travel in time by any perceptible amount one has to move at a speed close to that of light. Time travel to the future is very easy, however time travel to the past may or may not be impossible because of the super-luminal speeds necessary to do so.
So you walk into a machine and die, then a copy of you is made somewhere else. Awesome.gmaverick019 said:
The argument of "within our infinite future we'll do it!" is rather flawed. For example, by the concepts of infinity everything exists in this universe.
Is there another earth? If the universe is truly infinite there is not only another earth but an infinite number of other Earths, among them is an infinite number of Earths that are exactly like ours, right down to the two people having this conversation on the internet.
Sounds great, but what good does it do for us?
Fucking none, it's just playing around with definitions.
Of course you are in your full right to assume that we will see teleportation one day (noone can proove you wrong in the present, after all), but there is no scientific basis for this. Not even the slightest bit of a valid theory.
Note: teleportation used as in "teleportation of matter".
Like he said.
I think people need to redefine the term "time travel".
Einstein proved that time can bend. Time is different at certain conditions. Thus time "travel".
I think people need to redefine the term "time travel".
Einstein proved that time can bend. Time is different at certain conditions. Thus time "travel".
That's going to be tough, seeing as they would be impossible to detect (causality and all...)HT_Black said:
nope, teleportation is possible, and you'd be surprised just how fun really advanced physics is.Staskala said:
pretty good analogy, and also pretty close to the truth.bfgmetalhead said:
D: I wanted to say that...Mad Fast said:
Actually, scratch the paradoxes. Those are really just things you tell people who don't know much about science. For example, do you know the twin paradox? One of two identical twins, twin A, gets on a spaceship and travels at 0.9c for 1 year (twin B being the observer), and returns. Twin A will have aged less than twin B due to relativistic effects, so they are no longer idetical. 'course, that not a paradox, more of a matter of stupid semantics.
So yeah, time travel to the future is possible, as you do it every time you get into a car. The past is a bit more difficult, and thinking about it is way above my pay grade
E=Mc2
This law is one of the laws which somehow must be broken to come up with time travel.
Because we would need a silly amount of energy to actually go back in time.
For instance, if we would be traveling faster then the speed of light (scientists can manage 99.99% of that speed, in the hydron collider) then the object would always become heavier and heavier, making you! Heavier and heavier.
But there is also one thing that makes me confused.
If we would travel from now, to roman times, wouldn't it then mean that we would fade away?
None of the bio material existed on that time which created you.
So how can you exist?
I think we should concetrate on a much interesting and an option which is more likely.
Space travel.
This law is one of the laws which somehow must be broken to come up with time travel.
Because we would need a silly amount of energy to actually go back in time.
For instance, if we would be traveling faster then the speed of light (scientists can manage 99.99% of that speed, in the hydron collider) then the object would always become heavier and heavier, making you! Heavier and heavier.
But there is also one thing that makes me confused.
If we would travel from now, to roman times, wouldn't it then mean that we would fade away?
None of the bio material existed on that time which created you.
So how can you exist?
I think we should concetrate on a much interesting and an option which is more likely.
Space travel.
Patience; use the Force. But mostly, have patience. If it's possible it will take time. If you told people a hundred, hell, even twenty years ago about the internet, people would think you're crazy.
I say time travel is possible. I don't believe there's a particularly large chance of humanity ever mastering it, but that it's conceptually possible:
Imagine, if you will, a wormhole. One end of the wormhole (End A) is in motion for one minute; the other (End B) is stationary. End A will experience time dilation*, basically causing time within it to move more slowly than time in End B; we'll say that locally, only forty-five seconds pass. The result? End A still links to End B, but because only forty-five seconds have passed for A, it doesn't link to the current End B. Instead, it links to End B of fifteen seconds ago. Time travel occurs.
At least, that's what I think. I'm not an expert, heh.
*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Dilation#Relative_velocity_time_dilation
Imagine, if you will, a wormhole. One end of the wormhole (End A) is in motion for one minute; the other (End B) is stationary. End A will experience time dilation*, basically causing time within it to move more slowly than time in End B; we'll say that locally, only forty-five seconds pass. The result? End A still links to End B, but because only forty-five seconds have passed for A, it doesn't link to the current End B. Instead, it links to End B of fifteen seconds ago. Time travel occurs.
At least, that's what I think. I'm not an expert, heh.
*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Dilation#Relative_velocity_time_dilation
If time travel was possible, then nothing would be consistent. You and I wouldn't even be here. People could time travel to rapidly evolve methods of time travel in the past. By providing the technology to time travel, the amount of people doing it would increase. So, why is our history constant? If time travel were possible, don't you think hundreds of time travellers would be changing our history? Why aren't there any time travellers telling us that they've time travelled or showing us how they did it? There would be people trying to tell the whole world they've time travelled. The more you think about it, the more it hurts your brain. Maybe it's possible to time travel in very small amounts. I don't know, Donnie Darko seemed to have a good explanation.
That point about a universal memory is interesting.Soylent Bacon said:
But to the point, time travel is impossible, has anyone ever heard of a graph that tends to zero? It basically means that the line on the graph will continually get closer to zero, but never quite make it all the way. It would stretch to infinity on the X axis, and never quite make 0 on the Y axis.
I've not explained that well, but maybe someone can get a picture of a tan wave to show that off.
Anyway, there's a point to that, to warp time, we have to travel extremely fast. It has been experimentally proven that the faster we travel, the slower time travels around us. If you do the maths, you could work out that the rate at which time is affected by velocity proves that to stop time we would have to be travelling at the speed of light, which is approximately 3x10^8m/s. Or 3,00,000,000 metres per second. I don't need to elaborate on how massive a speed this actually is. And to actually travel backwards in time, we would need to be moving even faster than light. Now, as objects speed up, their mass increases, and using the formulae F=MA, we are told that as the mass increases, so does the force, and therefore energy required to accelerate it. This means that the faster something is going, the more energy there is needed to keep it getting faster. This is an exponential growth. So as we start reaching the speed of light, the energy required to move even a single atom at those speeds is immense.
Now back to the point about tending to zero graphs. There is no amount of energy that would ever be enough to move something at the speed of light. Because no matter how much energy we keep adding in, although the speed would always be closer to the speed of light, it would never actually get there. It would tend towards the speed of light, but it would never quite make it.
Have i made that last bit clear enough? It's hard to explain but it shows why time travel is indeed impossible.
If you didn't want to read all of that;
1. Travelling backwards in time requires travelling above the speed of light.
2. This requires an infinite amount of energy, which is impossible to obtain.
Well the faster you go the slower YOUR perception of time is, so time would seemingly stand still at the speed of light. Past that, it could be plausible that you would go backwards. But it's only your perception of time, you aren't actually going back in time. Plus, it would be practically impossible to go past the speed of light.
