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I noticed there is a thread on Interstellar Time Travel, so I decided to post a thread on a similar topic: traveling backwards in time. Is it possible?
Despite all the scientific evidence saying that it is not possible, I say NO purely on ethical grounds. Imagine all the things you could screw up if you went back in time. Even if such travel was strictly regulated, someone, somewhere would eventually screw something up! :inquisitive:
As Stephen Hawking once said, the greatest evidence of time travel not being possible is the absence of tourists from the future.
That's exactly right. All of us are from your timeframe of reference. None of us are visiting from the future, and anyone who says we are is a Retrograde Authoritarian, and we know how the fourth lunar war worked out for them.
Never doubt that all of us are normal, 18th century humans just like you. Did I say 18th? I meant 21st. Sometimes I get confused, like any modern human being. I wouldn't know the first thing about wearing a powdered wig and lace cravat. And I certainly would have no clue about just how freakin' uncomfortable those high heels for men are when you're tromping around Versailles.
Ahem. Anyway. The point is that there are no tourists from the future.
Thats if the universe would even allow it self to change, as the conditions that allowed you to travel back in time vanish and your caught in a time loop. Which as modern interpretations state you'll ethier just not be able to do anything that would change the time line or else you'd have time split off into two different lines/universes.Quote:
Originally Posted by King Jan III Sobieski
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I sort of recall an experiment reported, in which a photon was sent back in time (a few milliseconds or such). :inquisitive:
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You can change the past easily, just make sure you win the war and have the most efficient propaganda machine.
You can travel into the future, by having good enough scientific prediction models.
I agree with Hawking and ColonelTissue, time ahead is pretty much infinite. If time travel were to exist at some point in the future, the possibility that someone, sometime has not only travelled back to the past (ie. our present) and been less than subtle, is pretty much a certainty.
That said - if there was a form of time travel that allowed you to view the past (and not interact) - that wouldn't cause any paradoxes &c. and would be highly useful to historians (though, it would probably put them out of business). We do, I suppose have that in a limited sense now - with all of our recording equipment and so forth.
And how often would this universe split up? Every nanosecond there is a chemical reaction in a chemical equilibrium that could go both ways...Quote:
Originally Posted by Lord Winter
You can do anything with photons these days. Next thing you know, scientists will have them dancing cabaret.Quote:
Originally Posted by Mouzafphaerre
Transferring something from the photon level to our level of reality is kinda far-fetched.
I remember hearing an interesting theory on reverse time-travel. If you could "beat" the speed of light, though it is known at the moment impossible, then traveling in a spherical orbit around the source of light would allow you to go backwards. The loop, which would allow it to be possible under current "standards" of time travel, would be to speed up in intervals while traveling around an object. This would create "cut-outs" in the orbit, making it an imperfect sphere, and allowing you to "jump" from section to section until you caught up with the beginning of the trail.
Good luck to whoever wants to do that :beam:
But that's not really time-travel is it? That's just going faster than light so you can see older light, you aren't actually traveling back to the time when that was created. It would still be REALLY cool but I don't know that you can call that time-travel.Quote:
Originally Posted by TruePraetorian
Well the theory is that there are an infinite number of paralell universe with new ones created at every instant based on the potential outcome of any choice/chance in the universe.Quote:
Originally Posted by Viking
As for why we haven't had any time travellers from the future, I forgot where I read about this, but there is a proposition that even if time travel is possible, you could only travel back in time to the exact point when the machine was made and not further back
There can't be an infinite number of universes, as there can only have been a finite number of choices.Quote:
Originally Posted by Xdeathfire
Right...?
Anyway, i believe reverse time travel is possible purely due to one thing - on an infinite timescale, _anything_ can happen.
So probably not within the span of human existence.