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May 8, 2007 at 5:04 pm #26933Leapy LeoMember
We’ve got to assume that time travel is impossible otherwise somebody would have appeared from the future by now to tell us of it.
But
If time travel were possible which era would you visit first, and why?
Would you visit the past or the future?
May 8, 2007 at 5:49 pm #160969DavidParticipant@Leapy Leo 218286 wrote:
We’ve got to assume that time travel is impossible otherwise somebody would have appeared from the future by now to tell us of it.
That assumption doesn’t really make sense. Who’s to say it couldn’t happen tomorrow, or that it won’t happen soon?
Many of the theories that support time travel are based on the idea that you cannot travel into the past farther than the time the machine was first switched on. However there are other theories that suggest that time is just another dimension, much like space–just that we don’t yet know how to change our position on that plane. This is the view that I support; time is merely another dimension.
Even if time travel is possible in the near future, there are not any guarantees that we would suddenly start seeing “time travelers.” This type of technology would be strongly restricted, due to the chaos and havoc one could cause by making intentional or unintentional modifications to the past. Paradoxes like “What if you kill your past-self?” and “What if you bring a technology back and it is implemented before it was destined to?” would be too prevalent for the general public to be allowed to move backward in time. The world as we know it could end instantly.
Personally, I wouldn’t go anywhere.
There is a lot of interesting information on The Wiki, but also a lot of technical information I’m sure some won’t find interesting.
May 8, 2007 at 10:10 pm #160980MrEggsaladParticipantI would probably go back to various times in my life, however not change it at all. And if you did screw up, but it wasn’t *that* bad, you can probably go to like a day before you used the time machine and just not cause it at all.
That technology would have to be kept out of the wrong hands though, otherwise the world would be pretty messed up.
May 8, 2007 at 10:29 pm #160970DavidParticipant@MrEggsalad 218319 wrote:
I would probably go back to various times in my life, however not change it at all. And if you did screw up, but it wasn’t *that* bad, you can probably go to like a day before you used the time machine and just not cause it at all.
That technology would have to be kept out of the wrong hands though, otherwise the world would be pretty messed up.
if you kill your past self, your future self dies too… But if your past self is dead, how was there ever a future self? And if you kill your past self, will you immediately cease to exist?
This is a paradox.
May 8, 2007 at 10:46 pm #160981MrEggsaladParticipantThat’s why I said if your screw up wasn’t *that* bad. I agree with your thing, probably you would just like go away..forever..heh then you are screwed!
May 9, 2007 at 6:29 am #160983PhilipModeratorI just like to live in the present, thank you very much. What is past is past, and the future wouldn’t be very exciting if we could somehow see it first, would it?
May 9, 2007 at 3:25 pm #160985Leapy LeoMemberThere are some very interesting points here, for instance I didn’t know about the theory that you can only move forwards from the moment you discover time travel [so, technically, they may have figured out how to skip across these dimensions in some secret government lab today, but we would have no way of knowing about it until at least tomorrow. A sobering thought].
The theory about killing your “self” has been taken further in some novelistic flights of fancy to include the idea that a time traveller could rewrite the course of history by killing a mosquito if the mosquito had been destined to give some Emporor a fatal bite and as a result of this the Emporor didn’t die at his appointed time and…Well, you get the idea: seemingly trivial alterations could have huge repurcussions.
You could rewrite human history just by swatting a mosquito.
May 9, 2007 at 5:17 pm #160979sarahtownyMemberIf I could travel back in time but merely as an observer, as I don’t want to kill a mosquito and ruin the whole planets future:( I would like to see certain things ..
I would love to go back to 1976 and see my grandparents again.
See me winning the diving competition when I was 14 for the county.
Watch my dad getting his medal for 25 years service in the army. Gosh I was proud 😀
There are lots more I could mention but then I would get all mushy!Just memories that are a bit faded now but would love to rekindle or to actually be there to see those moments again would be lovely… 😉
May 9, 2007 at 7:30 pm #160984Leapy LeoMemberAh, such a nice post, Sarah. It was worth starting the thread to read that alone.
I must admit there are events in my life when I was too young to avoid them that I would actively go back and help myself to avoid, and sod the consequences.
Nothing I would be happy to return to and watch passively though. There are beautiful things like crying when I watched my son being born but I remember that so vividly I don’t feel any need to see it again.
I’m quite envious of you actually.
May 9, 2007 at 8:43 pm #160982MrEggsaladParticipantLeapy Leo, but what if those changes made a larger difference than you thought they would? Even the littlest thing can make a large difference in someone’s life. And especially being younger, things that seem small now could have been quite big back then.
May 10, 2007 at 12:00 am #160972TigerbladeParticipantI’ve read a fair bit of material on time travel, various theories and such… one book by Dean Koontz titled ‘Lightning’ uses a premise that Nature itself won’t allow basic paradoxes, like if you go forward to 3:00PM tomorrow, then come back, your next trip can’t be to 2:55PM tomorrow in the same general area. You might encounter yourself and destroy the universe.
Another book by Koontz that I just finished, ‘By the Light of the Moon’ presents it a little differently. This one didn’t have travel to the future, but back to the past. The way it worked was that you couldn’t interact with anything, ONLY observe; you would be as a ghost — invisible to those around you, and unable to move anything. Standard physics would still apply more or less, like you can’t walk through walls, etc. I think that sort of theory works pretty well — Nature abhors a paradox and won’t allow you the chance of screwing it up. You can only observe.
May 10, 2007 at 12:43 am #160971DavidParticipant@Tigerblade 218395 wrote:
Another book by Koontz that I just finished, ‘By the Light of the Moon’ presents it a little differently. This one didn’t have travel to the future, but back to the past. The way it worked was that you couldn’t interact with anything, ONLY observe; you would be as a ghost — invisible to those around you, and unable to move anything. Standard physics would still apply more or less, like you can’t walk through walls, etc. I think that sort of theory works pretty well — Nature abhors a paradox and won’t allow you the chance of screwing it up. You can only observe.
How could the laws of physics apply, but not allow you to change anything?
Say I walk up onto a sea-saw toy in a playground… will it move upward? If so, then I am changing the universe. If not, what laws of physics do and don’t apply?
May 10, 2007 at 3:31 am #160973TigerbladeParticipantI meant more like the laws of physics that prevent you from walking through walls or sinking through the floor. As in, you’d basically be a ghost without the after-effects of being a ghost, like floating. You could move about your environment but not have any real effect on it. If you walk up the see-saw, it would theoretically remain in place.
The law of gravity wouldn’t apply, but friction would (since you’re able to walk) and you wouldn’t sink through the plank. I know it doesn’t make any sense in any sort of logical way, but c’mon. This is time travel we’re talking about. Not particularly logical to begin with.
May 10, 2007 at 5:00 am #160976RabidKittenParticipantSorry, just have to say how funny this is. Tom and I have been kind of ranting about this a little bit lately. At least one night. Too much at stake and too much insanity, too much theory involved.
I’d add on, but I’m pressed for time at the moment.
May 10, 2007 at 2:47 pm #160986Leapy LeoMemberMrEggsalad;218389 wrote:Leapy Leo, but what if those changes made a larger difference than you thought they would? Even the littlest thing can make a large difference in someone’s life. And especially being younger, things that seem small now could have been quite big back then.Mr Salad, they way I look at it it would be worth any other changes I accidentally caused.
Fact is, though, I cannot see how any one could cotton on to the changes.
For instance, suppose you swatted the mosquito that wasn’t going to kill a Pharoah at all but one that only had a local peasant farmer in mind, but because that farmer doesn’t die, [because you stood on the Mozzy that was due to kill him later that day] so it follows that Suzy from down the road marries this farmer instead of another one and the future genetics of humanity is slightly different than it would have been without that farmer’s imput [for Suzy turns out to have a very fecund womb].
Yes, his genetic survival will make humanity that bit different over hundreds of years as the original genes spreads far and wide, but the bottom line is: how would we know.
I don’t believe in that idea that you can “kill” your future self because you can’t kill something that is not now going to exist [like you cannot kill the genetic line that would have been produced from fecund Suzy’s second choice of marriage partner].
What has never existed can never know what it is missing.
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