I can't remember who originally said this, but why have we not seen time-travelers? If it was possible, we'd surely have met them throughout the history. It is indeed a very abstract concept, what does it actually even mean to travel in time? What is time to begin with?

I'd very much like to think it's possible to travel back in time, but the assassin's creed approach is as far as my scientific imagination and my logical mind can allow me to accept as a possible future. (animus basically let's you re-live the memory of another being with the use of DNA sequences, or something like that).

What do you think about time travel? And hypothetically, if it was possible, what would you travel to and why?

Well,

A. Anything's possible, we could have time travellers among us but can't say so lest they rupture the stream of time and create parallel and alternate time lines.

B. I'm sure the tech is in use today, no one has just unlocked the right combination and formula to build it.

SPACE TIME CONTINUUM!

I wanna go back to the days of the Dinosaurs and sneeze on one.
Possible to time travel, no since "time" itself doesn't exist and was only created by us for organisation purposes. I don't think I know how to properly say it doesn't exist but as soon as humans die out, time will also die out.

I wouldn't like to be able to time travel though, the implication of messing up my own timeline :blink: I'd like to see what happened to form my family as it is now, but at the same time it might not be the most joyful of tales...What if I am actually my own ancestor

EDIT: To go back in time the time/events must be stored on memory somewhere, where would that be stored? The universe just holds that info? How would we be able to tap this if so?
Think of watching a program on TV and trying to rewind, you can't as its previous clips have not been recorded and saved. But once to press the Record button you are able to rewind to the point you started recording. So there would not be any chance of going further back in time than to the time when the machine was invented.

Or you meet a hot girl, have six with her, and you become your own grandfather. Hello Fry. :biggrin:

As far as is currently understood, traveling back in time is completely impossible. Of course you might say that there might be something we don't know yet that could allow us to, but until you can produce the evidence, its impossible.

It is certainly possible to travel forwards in time (we're constantly moving forward in time) faster than other people, by taking advantage of differences in speed, for example there's an astronaut who currently holds the world record for time travel, Sergei Avdeyev, who during his 747 days in space aged about 0.2 seconds less than somebody on earth.

I see two possibilities:

1. Reversal Time-travel is impossible. There is no way to change what happened. The past is written.

2. Reversal Time-travel is possible, but only if you're willing to leave your universe. Let's imagine that there are parallel universes running side-by-side. If you were to somehow leave your universe, you could enter another parallel universe where time is not defined until you enter it. That way you could set a time that is sooner than the previous one. This would solve the Grandfather paradox. You could kill your grandfather, preventing your birth in that universe, but you would still exist because you were born in another universe. I really wish I could visually explain this.

By the way, future time-travel is possible to a degree. You just need to approach the speed of light.

*Looks at picture of Granny Fern when she was 19*
*Looks at picture of Granny Murdoch when she was 19*

Dude I would so ta-a-a, NO! No I wouldn't have

From what I understand Time travel to the past is theoretically only possible within the lifetime of the time machine so no trips to the wild west for the DeLorean

I believe in two things, and neither can be proven disproven or proven.

A. The Back to the Future time travel is possible, but the tech isnt found yet.

B. There is a very entangled series of 'two realities split, reality A where you shot the man who murdered your mom, and reality B where you showed mercy' creating equal and opposite reactionary universes.

I don't believe people who say time is absolutely set in stone, because simply put, no one has successfully gone back in time in an event to change their reality to see what their present would be like. So until either is proven, I won't believe anyones theory on time travel is proof and stone.

Edit: Or maybe it COULD work like Quantum Leap, which is pretty awesome if that was true.

Actually that's a pretty common misconception. There are a ton of things that are not possible and will never ever be possible.

One of those things is time travel, in theory you can only be perceived to be going back and only by reaching speeds faster than light (which is not possible for anything of as much mass as humans) and even then that is only perception but not actual reality.

So no time travel for us. And even IF it was possible due to some magic, then there would be those who could get their hands on it without being responsible enough to use it properly and the world would quite possibly be a lot more chaotic than it is.

*Cue Philosoraptor*

How do we know the world's chaos of now WASN'T caused by rogue time travellers? :blink:

Because one of them would have prevented Seinfeld from ever going off the air. Nuff said.

How do we know something didn't happen?

:P Because they'd have made sure to take out partypoopers like me in the process... unless... perhaps I'm a part of that chaos!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0TkKjei4q8&feature=related

:chaos:

Two possibilities, both ignoring the impossibility:

1) By the time we figure out a way, our culture will be such that we will be too polite to go 'round screwing things up like that.
2) Simply by moving something back in time (pretty much anything other than weird quantum stuff, I suppose) you change that point, and the universe continues from that point.


On a side note, one pet hate of mine is people ignoring/forgetting the microscopic/nanoscopic/etc. when talking about time travel and focusing on humans. Sure, if you travel in time and change stuff, things'll be different. But you should realise also that going back a few trillion years and dumping a golf ball in 'the middle of nowhere' will change things, too. If you managed to open a path to the very start, then sent an atom of mercury through, you'd still be making potentially massive changes.

I see everyone keeps mentioning the speed of light, but didn't they recently discover a particle that moved faster than light? They even double-tripple checked it. What does this new discovery bring to the possibilities?

I see I forgot to mention where I'd travel to. I'd travel back to the age of dinosaurs, when the earth oxygen level was bigger than it is now. That brings me to another aspect of time-travel and parallel universes: Let's assume time-travel is possible. Let's assume we can never go to the same universe as we originated from when traveling to another time, but instead of another universe, so the events there have no effect on our original universe. Let's also assume it's possible to travel back to your time from the time you visited and even bring something with you from there.. Such as raw-materials. Wouldn't this lead to infinite resources?

it is only theoretically possible to go forward in time if you can travel faster then light.

plus it would only be by a few seconds at best

If you went really fast around a black hole, it be considered time travel. Time is slower around a black hole due to its gravity and the faster you go also slows time. The particle collider has already increased the lifetime of such particles by a lot(dont remember)

Indeed. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5aRcwHULaI

I'd be checking out early twenty first century development, because of the earth shattering repercussions that had it's origin in that specific period and..

oh wait..


uhmm..




..never mind :hehe:




:whistling:

Well...Theoretically...

As a particle moves faster, its time slows down. When you reach the speed of light, time effectively stops. If a particle moves faster than the speed of light, time goes backwards. With this theory, I can assume one of two things can happen.

1.) A person moving faster than the speed of light can travel backwards in time and visit the past.
2.) A person moving faster than the speed of light will become younger but the rest of 'time' will continue on at the same speed. Fountain of youth, nothing more.

Either way, some pretty cool stoofz.

3.) A person doing this would die during the process and it would be too expensive to run again since we can't utilize a better fuel than fossil fuels

Oh, right, this is the most likely outcome... :sadvaultboy:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSf9aEETnvE&feature=related