Didn't want to read through the whole thread, so I'm not sure is this has been posted; It's impossible to travel back before the time machine was created, you can only go forward, or to the original creation date.


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The bunny is the date the time machine was invented, you travel in time from that point onward.

And I'm not just pulling this out of my ass, it was on some show I watched. And it's the reason we don't see people from the future.

I see time travelers every day :shrug:

that's how I see it & seen it described similarly on the science channel

Or we could go back to the dinosaurs, kill them, plant them in the ground, collect fuel, go back and do it again. It's like an extremely dangerous gold farming.

Good point...Now I remember why I stopped thinking about this stuff. Back to the kitchen where I still know how things work I go!

first off how do we know there haven't been time travlers, i mean if i was hopping thru time i wouldn't want to advertise it, i mean everyone would probably ask questions and what not.

Also could you really change time? seems like if you went back in time you would...crap how to say that? It would be like you always went back into time, that you couldn't change things becuase if you did then you would cease to live in the reality you came from...and then you couldn't have traveled time...paradoxes make my head hurt

Check my post (#7) in this thread. If time travel were only possible by moving to another universe (like a copy), then that would take care of any paradoxes.

If they're right about neutrino's going faster than light, this whole theory is thrown out the window.

A time traveler would be immensely powerful. They'd have access to any point in time; one example of the repercussions is that they would able to use tanks in the Stone Age. No, I don't think we'll ever invent the time machine. Upon its creation, there would undoubtedly have been someone who would abuse the technology of the future such that we would see evidence of futuristic technology used to gain someone great power. Be it militarily or otherwise. Unless there are some benevolent time traveling police who can stop all of this, therefore, if it is created, it doesn't serve much of a purpose other than historical accuracy. I'm of the opinion that humans cannot create everything they can imagine. All of our technology has been based off of natural occurrences; so, should there be no natural occurrence which presents itself or exists regarding time travel, it would be beyond our grasp to fabricate one.

Not necessarily. Neutrino's are sub-atomic particles (the smallest single object we know of) with nearly zero mass. Therefore, sub-atomic particles moving through space and time would likely have little or no effect on the universe. Theories also don't get thrown out because one instance contradicts it. It may change our understanding of neutrinos, but for everything else, General Relativity remains valid.


To everyone asking where are all the time travelers? Here is a possible answer: The technology doesn't exist yet

One day man will understand the workings of the Universe in exact detail.

That day isn't now.

At one point flight wasn't possible,or a cure for Polio,or any number of things..so why not time travel?

Or they all wanted to save the Titanic, dooming the ship with all the extra weight

While it impossible to accelerate to or past the speed of light, traveling faster than the speed of light or accelerating from there is not an impossibility. Just really frolicking impossible.

Time wasn't created by man, timekeeping was.

Couldn't that also mean infinite resources, if taking something back from a copied universe was possible? :celebration:

Time dilation is a well understood and measurable phenomenon. However, to experience significant time dilation relative to the rest of the species would require either a very fast spaceship, or traveling to a region of space with a gravitational field much stronger than that on earth. (e.g. near a black hole)

Traveling backward in time is impossible according to current theory, as it would require infinite energy.

This is true for me too, I'm said to be more of a 3yr old now than I was when I was actually 3 :dance:

Let's assume someone actually created a time-machine, right now. He was drunk, so he doesn't actually know how it works, only that it does work.. Somehow. He does know it can take us back in time and forward in time, but that's about it. Would we evgen consider using it? We can't know if it creates a copy of the universe, or if we actually go back in our time or what. We might end up destroying something significant in the past, altering our present time in a way of no-one could even imagine. A time machine without 100% knowledge of what actually happens, is a dangerous machine and shouldn't be used even if it was invented.

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Why we haven't seen any time travelers makes perfect sense when countered with the theory that you can't travel back in time further than to the point at which it was created, as some of you have pointed out

One of the clearest ways to describe time: It's like the other (physical) dimensions, except completely different.


If you could control it well enough, you could create a communication device. Unfortunately you'd only be able to communicate with people who knew your standards/protocols and had the technology to monitor what you're sending... in other words, you'd be restricted to any point after the thing was invented.

Even that could have some challenging hurdles, since even if you sit dead still, you're still moving at hundreds of kilometres per second. In other words, if you changed your time-location by half a minute without adjusting you space-location, you'd find yourself a quite long way from home.

EDIT: "other (physical) dimensions", not "other (physical) dimension", ijit :rolleyes:.

You know, now that you mention it, Adding matter/energy to a universe could have unforeseen effects. I learned something interesting in my Physics class this term. Every particle in the universe has a gravitational effect on every other particle. Of course for most particles, that effect is so minuscule, but a strand of hair for example has a gravitational effect on Jupiter.

This is the gravitational formula: g = G(m1*m2)/r^2, where big G is a gravitational constant, m1 and m2 are separate non-zero mass particles and r is the distance between them.

Now here is the biggest mystery. Does gravity have a speed? If something were to pop into existence in this universe, say a time traveler, how long would it take for the gravitational effect to be measured on something else? Would it be instant? Would it completely mess up everything?

Also, think about this: If someone were to time travel to this day and age, they would likely bring other travelers as well, like disease. Going back in time could introduce pestilence to an ecosystem that could potentially destroy it. Perhaps it would be best to never use the technology even if it's possible.



You should read the book "The Light of Other Days" by Arther C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter. It's about using worm-holes to transmit information through time.

As for moving in space, it might depend on your frame of reference. Since we all have the same frame of reference here on earth (we are moving at a non-accelerating rate) it might be able to adjust by itself. Communication from other FoRs would definitely be trickier.

Maybe in the future the US or Japan or some other super advanced nation made a time machine, but they bred agents specifically for going back into time so they were never to be detected, and maybe each agent is assigned a year and that is their whole life, continously going through the same year over and over discovering new things everyday, that would be fun.