Poll: Time Travel is Impossible, or at the Very Best, Highly Unlikely

[blobby218]

time travel has always been a ponderous subject throughout the years, I strongly believe that if time travel could be acheived it would only be foward in isolated pockets of thespace/time continum. this is why we have not seen any time travelers yet, but consider this : if this universe is indeed a closed one (one that ends and begins in a violent way) then you may just travel foward enough in time to get to the end of this one and the beginning of another universe and wait and watch as life repeats itself and evolves.

p.s if this is an open universe (a universe that expands for all eternity) then your kinda screwed.

 

[Talshere]

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Interesting you should say specifically that time travel would require the power of our sun, while you are wrong, all indications are it would take for more than that for "active" timetravel, optimistic estimates say we will have harnessed the power of stable fusion, EI the power of our sun, buy the end of the decade. More realistic estimates say 20-30 years, but general agreement is that by the end of this century the knowledge of stable fusion will be ours.

Now, I say "active" time travel because we already preform time-travel. Every time someone got on concord their watches would be a few nano seconds behind due to the time dilation effect that occur on moving objects. Granted this time loss in negligible, but with the use of ion engines (yes we have those) it is feasible that would could propel a ship to a significantly fast enough in relation to light, to cause noticeable time dilation to those on the ship. Currently it IS possible for us to propel a ship at a planet 12 light-years away and have it arrive before the crew die of old age. In fact would could do it in about 16 years est. Problem is that is 16 years for those on the ship. Everyone they knew by the time they arrived would be dead if they were not on the ship with them.

On theory which I dont remember well involves shooting antimatter particals (yes we have this too)backwards in a set configuration which have been associated with each other using a weird component of string theory. The interesting part about this theory is that you could only travel back to the occurrence of the first set of fired particals. Which would explain the lack of timetravelers as we have yet to develop this technology.

The theory for alternate dimensions (not alternate realities, thats something quite different) is fairly strong if very circumstantial. One such bit of evidence is light. I dont know how much physics you know, but light is very strange. In some instances it acts as a partical, in other it acts as a wave. This currently cannot be explain in any empirical data, however light makes sense in string theory if light is actually ripples in a higher dimension. In the same way a fish can see the ripples in a pond when you throw a stone in, but not the stone, this is how we may be seeing light.

Basically all the evidence we have for "proof" of other dimensions is theoretical based on really funky stuff we can do with string theory.

 

[ChocoFace]

it will be possible. Hey, if people are even speaking of reaching infinite speed (http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Tachyons), then because of human ingenuity time travel is too.

 

[C95J]

very complicated shit.

I watched this Stephen Hawkins programme yesterday and my mind was literally blown.

 

[Danpascooch]

Time travel is completely impossible, time is just a construct of man anyway, it is a measurement for the activity of the universe, to travel back in time, you would literally have to reverse every chemical and physical process to reverse the entire universe back to that previous state. The thought that we could build a device that could affect the entire universe on a subatomic level to rebuild a perfect representation of a past state is absolutely laughable.


I get that there are other views and that my view may not be correct, but this is my opinion on how time travel would work and why it's impossible (yes I said OPINION as in, cannot be disproven, unless of course you've traveled through time don't bother arrogantly throwing quantum relativity theories in my face or something, the truth is, we really don't have a clue how any of this shit would work)

 

[Danpascooch]

Here's another soul crusher- we'll never colonize other planets, because we lack the capability to travel faster than light, and there is no physical way to travel faster than light.

You won't get to be Han Solo. Ever. Even if you were born five hundred years from now.

What does not being able to travel faster then light have to do with not being able to colonize other planets..?

Either you're incredibly stupid or you're just being obnoxious. Either way, I see no reason to respond.

That was one of the rudest posts I've ever seen, particularly because he was right and you were wrong.

Just because someone couldn't take off from Earth and reach a habitable world in one lifetime doesn't mean we can never colonize other worlds. The idea is that if a large enough ship could be built to support a community, they could keep having children and lasting generations, meaning that humans could be in the ship as long as it takes to find a habitable planet. Just because planets won't be colonized by the people who originally took off from Earth doesn't mean they can't be colonized.

 

[Rathands]

I don't know about time travel, but I heard somewhere that scientists managed to teleport a beam of light; if teleporters could be made reality then who knows?

 

[Yopaz]

I have traveled in time for almost 20 years now. One second at a time I travel ahead in time. Seriously though I don't think it's possible with anything near the technology we have. If it is at all. The idea of time travel and the laws of physics are opposing each other. I am not a physicist and I wont pretend, but from what I've learned so far I would assume it's impossible. I'm not sad about that since it would make the person who found it very powerful with the ability to change history in unknown ways. Then there' the time complex that would state that if someone went back in time to change history he would return to a world where there was nothing to change making it impossible to actually change anything. Then I like the Dragonball way where the future and the past weren't connected like that, but were separate. What happened in the future's past didn't happen in the present. Confusing, but time travel is.

 

[Phoenixlight]

Travelling back in time doesn't actually make any sense. You just can't do it, just because you drive really fast around the earth a few times doesn't mean you would go back in time it's logically impossible.

 

[The Night Shade]

You can time travel you just need The Power Of Love

 

[PrimoThePro]

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I found your info compelling. I had no idea that we, as a human species is doing so much to propel ourselves outward in time. I also thought String Theory was just that... a Theory. I didn't know there were actual String Particles. I have a very limited understanding, if you have the time and patience, would you be willing to elaborate?

 

[LittleWings]

if time travel were possible we would see people from the future and it would create a time paradox people are stupid for thinking its possible

'If time travel were possible' That's different to 'If Humans could travel in time'. Perhaps the reason we don't see time travellers is because we do not gain the technology to travel in time in human existence.

That does not mean that time travel is impossible.

 

[jamradar]

Spoiler

Time travel is possible!

 

[Sir Thomas Sean Connery]

I think it is rather naive to think [i/]anything[/i] is impossible. Like how so many people right now believe that we can never go past the speed of light. You know, just like how you can never break the sound barrier and how your organs liquefy if you go faster than 60 mph. It's silly, because we no idea where our technology and/or scientific knowledge will be in even just 50 years, not to mention 100 or 1000.

Also, if we can figure out how to create wormholes and go really, really fast, then we can create time travel. You put one end of the wormhole on earth and then put the other end on a faster-than-light ship. Relativity puts the ship thousands of years ahead of the one on earth and voila.

 

[Sir Thomas Sean Connery]

there is no physical way to travel faster than light.

You mean like how there is no way to break the sound barrier? Or how if you go faster than 60 miles an hour, your organs liquefy?

 

[Paksenarrion]

EDIT2:So I had dinner, and I spoke with my dad on the phone about this, and he told me about electrons. Pure energy. If we made a ship out of electrons (Bare with me here) We could potentially move really close to the speed of light and therefore... travel through time.

For a second there, I thought I read "erections". Anyway, going back on topic, I believe it still possible to go back in time if we just followed the natural curve of space-time upstream, instead of anchoring ourselves spatially in one location, and *then* going back in time. I believe that is how natural time travel works.

Attempting to travel close to the speed of light, however, will result in an embarrassingly exponential increase in mass, and therefore drag us down in one spot, both spatially and temporally. We have to skim on top of the waves.