Lets talk about time travel

If your topic has nothing to do with Spyderco, you can post it here.
User avatar
Evil D
Member
Posts: 27147
Joined: Sat Jun 26, 2010 9:48 pm
Location: Northern KY

Lets talk about time travel

#1

Post by Evil D »

Ok guys, bear with me. I was just watching an episode of Futurama, where the Professor invents a time machine but it only goes forward in time, and Fry accidentally sends them into the future. Then they decide to just keep going forward in time until someone has invented a time machine that also goes back in time. That got me thinking...and there are so many things here, I could probably write a book about this. I'll try to keep it in some kind of order...

1. Lets assume time travel is possible. That would mean that we are the past right now in this very instance, to some future reality. If you can travel back in time, then every moment in time has to exist on some level. Going back in time isn't as hard to wrap your mind around, because all of it has absolutely happened in exactly the same way it happened. Three weeks ago, you woke up and didn't die....there's no denying that. It happened...etc. However, it would also mean that you made a particular set of choices ultimately leading us to right here and now, and that if you had made other choices, there would be other alternate future realities..

2. The problem with traveling forward in time is much more complex, to say the least. Traveling forward in time is actually less about time travel per say, and more about moving forward to alternate realities. Traveling in time is actually just the byproduct of traveling through what would be a nearly infinite number of potential futures. It would be nearly infinite because of free will. Every choice every person in existence makes would change the future in some tiny way, fracturing out into different possible future realities. With the number of people in existence, and the possibility of so many choices being made, it's an astronomically large number of possible realities. This would also mean that moving back in time would mean that you're moving back from any one of these infinite number of future realities.

3. So, if you can actually travel forward in time, could you choose which of these realities you travel to? If so, you could potentially search through every possible choice you could make throughout your entire life and pick the future reality where you've made all the best choices. However, that future would also be dependent on every other choice every other person in existence has made. Whew. But, based on the right combination of choices, you could potentially be anything you can imagine, from the person who eventually cures cancer, to the dictator of a country, to the actual guy who invented time travel...

4. This would also effect everyone else, since the future reality where you're the king of the world would have to mean that someone else isn't, and so on and so on. Everyone would want to travel forward to their own perfect future reality. This would mean that somewhere in the future exists a world where each person in existence is "king of the world" or whatever, and there would also be an equally opposite reality where you're the absolute bottom of existence, and every single possible reality in between.

Now....if that's not enough to bake your brain, lets throw in a couple other ideas. What about the concept of fate? Are we destined to reach an ultimate outcome? If this is true, do we really have free will? Am I destined to type this out, or is typing this out changing my future reality somehow? What if I choose to delete all this and not post it? What then?

If fate is real, then why bother doing anything at all if I'm destined to reach a particular outcome? Is there some force pushing me to keep typing this? What if I stop in mid sente





LOL. Did fate just make me start typing again, or is this the alternate future reality where I did keep typing?
User avatar
tvenuto
Member
Posts: 3790
Joined: Sun Apr 29, 2012 8:16 am
Location: South Baltimore

Re: Lets talk about time travel

#2

Post by tvenuto »

D I really must go to bed now, have a lot to do before my flight tomorrow, but let me say I can't wait to get into this.

Edit: I just waved my hands in a silly manner, just to make one additional alternate future just in case anything goes wrong with my travel tomorrow. If anything goes wrong, I'll know to come back to the one where I didn't wave my hands.

Food for thought: A Cormac McCarthy quote (perhaps one of my favorites)..."You never know what worse luck your bad luck saved you from." Who's to say that my non-waving-hand alternate reality won't turn out even worse?
User avatar
SpyderEdgeForever
Member
Posts: 6325
Joined: Mon Jul 23, 2012 6:53 pm
Location: USA

Re: Lets talk about time travel

#3

Post by SpyderEdgeForever »

I have thought long and hard on this very topic, D.

First off, this may surprise you and others here, but, when it comes to humans travelling through time, to go visit the past or future, I tend to be very much on the skeptical side. Universal Replicators? Sure: They are within the known laws of physics, ie, biology replicates matter at the molecular level. But even so, I am always open to possibilities and I could be wrong on things.

The alternate reality thing is interesting on many levels, like you pointed out. As an example, there are the paradoxes, like the one I call the Inventor Paradox, though others have named it differently: Imagine someone from, say, 2115 AD has a time travel machine, and goes back to meet a young Sal Glesser, before he came up with the Spyderco knife design (I hope its okay that I am using you as an example, Sal), and gives him the specifications for Spyderco knives such as the Worker, Endura, and others, including actual physical models of them. This raises a paradox: Who invented the Spyderhole knife? The time traveller, or Sal? There are many variations of that one.

Personally, I think you touched on one of the aspects of time travel that hardly anyone touches on, EvilD, including many big time time travel scientists: The issue of whether or not there are actual people still living in what we call the past, and people living in the future. Think about it like this: You and I are alive now in 2015 AD. We could visit the gravesite of, say, Abraham Lincoln, or some other famous person. Lincoln is physically dead, to us. But if we took a time machine, and set it for, say, 1850, when he was alive, and we travelled to that point in space-time coordinates that we call 1850 AD, would he be there, or, is that point in space-time no longer existing? Its difficult to grasp these things, I think, fully, because we are born and raised to interact in three-dimensional space and we are used to visualizing things in 3d space, and some of this would require hyper-dimensional capacities.

The other thought is this: IF time travel is developed, whether it was a year from now, a thousand years from now, or a million years from now, and it was able to be done by human beings, or robots, or something else, that would mean that these time visitors could be in our current world, in 2015 AD, interacting with us somehow, watching and observing us, perhaps camoflaged and concealed.

Stephen Hawking once asked the question, "If time travel is real, where are the time tourists?" But if I were a "time tourist", I sure would not want it revealed that I was here. If you had a time machine, you could (some would call this unethical!) go and become a near instant billionaire by betting on known sports scores, investing in companies that you know would be huge, like Google or Facebook or Spyderco, and many other things. That then raises the issue: Are there time police who go after rogue time travellers and such things?

There is a man named David Anderson who CLAIMS (without much evidence as far as I can see), that he was part of a top-secret government-run time travel experiment in which he travelled backwards into time as did other people:

http://www.andersoninstitute.com/

Honestly, I just don't believe his claims are for real, about personally developing time machine stuff. Its fun science fiction, sure.

Now, there is something that fascinates me, and it is related to time control, as oppose to actual human time travel, but, I do not know if it is possible or not, but, bear with me, I want to share it with you:

There was a Russian physicist named Nicolas Kozyrev who back during the Cold War period claimed that his experimental discoveries showed time is not a mere made-up thing, but rather, time has substance and energy to it, like energy and mass. He further claimed that what we call time can be thicker or thinner in different areas, and, can be artificially engineered!
There are some reputable physicists who do not believe humans can physically travel through time (except as we normally do, moment by moment into the future), but, who DO believe it is possible, at least in theory, to SPEED UP AND SLOW DOWN time in a LOCALIZED AREA......through the application of the right technology.

If this was all we could do, it would revolutionize life as we know it, perhaps even more than nanotechnology. Think about it: You would be able to control the rate and flow of time in say, a room, or building, or, other local area. You could take plant seeds or seedlings, and speed up the time-flow-rate, and have entire fields of mature fruits and vegetables in what appears to be mere minutes or hours or days, to you and I.

You could control chemical reactions and speed them up and slow them down and you could probably use this technology to directly repair materials by REVERSING THE EFFECTS OF ENTROPY because that is a function of time.

Now let me make this clear: In order to do this we need to discover NEW PHYSICS. Unlike say, nano-replicators, which are based on known chemistry and biology, this time control stuff would require new discoveries in physics as we know it, and we do not know if that is even possible. But the idea is amazing, agreed?

Another use would be what has existed only in scifi sofar: The Stasis Field. Imagine a force field or something, and within that field or area, all chemical, nuclear, and entropic reactions were blocked, slowed down, or brought to a complete halt. Whatever you placed inside the stasis field would stay as it is, essentially forever, as long as the stasis field was functioning. You could use this to place yourself inside stasis, and stay physically at your present age, while the rest of the world aged and time passed around you...as long as your stasis field remained functional.

Imagine taking a piece of old rusted steel, like, say, a knife from the 1800s, and hitting it with time beams..and the knife miraculously is renewed before your eyes, all the rust and corrosion and other effects vanish as new steel appears. That would be one application of a time field of this sort.
User avatar
bearfacedkiller
Member
Posts: 11412
Joined: Sat Jan 04, 2014 1:22 pm
Location: hiding in the woods...

Re: Lets talk about time travel

#4

Post by bearfacedkiller »

1) I have always wondered why we haven't been visited and exploited by people from the future if time travel is eventually invented. The only reason why not would be because it is invented so far in the future and that we are so primative that we have nothing to offer. Or, maybe all the technological advances of the last century have come from the future. This gets heavy.

I watched a special with Brian Cox and he explained that some believe that space and time are one in the same (spacetime) and that all of time exists at once just like all of space exists all at once. We are the ones moving through it and it is our perspective that time is passing. I struggle with this level of predeterminism.

Controlling the rate at which we move through time may be another possibility and may be the key to space travel. Black holes are believed to distort time. Astronauts have also experienced phenomenon where times has been distorted so it very well may be possible.
-Darby
sal wrote:Knife afi's are pretty far out, steel junky's more so, but "edge junky's" are just nuts. :p
SpyderEdgeForever wrote: Also, do you think a kangaroo would eat a bowl of spagetti with sauce if someone offered it to them?
User avatar
bearfacedkiller
Member
Posts: 11412
Joined: Sat Jan 04, 2014 1:22 pm
Location: hiding in the woods...

Re: Lets talk about time travel

#5

Post by bearfacedkiller »

The biggest issue for me is that the answer to the question of time travel will also answer the question of fate vs free will which could also answer a lot of questions about religion and creation. This is about learning who we are, were we came from and where we are going in the future.

If humans invent a time machine in a million years and come back to visit us we are gonna actually be two different species.

Carl Sagan in Pale Blue Dot says that for people to survive the eons we must leave Earth, the only home we have ever known, the pale blue dot and go off in search of other homes. However, he then explains that as soon as we colonize this new world that we will begin to evolve to its environment. This coupled with the immensity of space would mean that by the time we sent people to another planet, colonized it and came back that so many light years would have passed that we would be returning to discover that we are now two totally different creatures due to light years of evolution. My point is that the future versions of us that come back to visit us may not be human anymore and may not be coming from Earth.
-Darby
sal wrote:Knife afi's are pretty far out, steel junky's more so, but "edge junky's" are just nuts. :p
SpyderEdgeForever wrote: Also, do you think a kangaroo would eat a bowl of spagetti with sauce if someone offered it to them?
User avatar
Evil D
Member
Posts: 27147
Joined: Sat Jun 26, 2010 9:48 pm
Location: Northern KY

Re: Lets talk about time travel

#6

Post by Evil D »

I'm gonna reply to all this, it's just way too much to text out on my phone..
User avatar
chuck_roxas45
Member
Posts: 8776
Joined: Wed Mar 03, 2010 5:43 pm
Location: Small City, Philippines

Re: Lets talk about time travel

#7

Post by chuck_roxas45 »

We are actually time traveling forward at a rate of one second/second. :)
User avatar
Doc Dan
Member
Posts: 14830
Joined: Thu Nov 08, 2012 4:25 am
Location: In a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity.

Re: Lets talk about time travel

#8

Post by Doc Dan »

When you look at a star, you are seeing the past right before your eyes.
I Pray Heaven to Bestow The Best of Blessing on THIS HOUSE, and on ALL that shall hereafter Inhabit it. May none but Honest and Wise Men ever rule under This Roof! (John Adams regarding the White House)

Follow the Christ, the King,
Live pure, speak true, right wrong, follow the King--
Else, wherefore born?" (Tennyson)



NRA Life Member
Spydernation 0050
User avatar
tvenuto
Member
Posts: 3790
Joined: Sun Apr 29, 2012 8:16 am
Location: South Baltimore

Re: Lets talk about time travel

#9

Post by tvenuto »

bearfacedkiller wrote:The biggest issue for me is that the answer to the question of time travel will also answer the question of fate vs free will which could also answer a lot of questions about religion and creation. This is about learning who we are, were we came from and where we are going in the future.

If humans invent a time machine in a million years and come back to visit us we are gonna actually be two different species.

Carl Sagan in Pale Blue Dot says that for people to survive the eons we must leave Earth, the only home we have ever known, the pale blue dot and go off in search of other homes. However, he then explains that as soon as we colonize this new world that we will begin to evolve to its environment. This coupled with the immensity of space would mean that by the time we sent people to another planet, colonized it and came back that so many light years would have passed that we would be returning to discover that we are now two totally different creatures due to light years of evolution. My point is that the future versions of us that come back to visit us may not be human anymore and may not be coming from Earth.
I have far more thoughts about evolution than I do about time travel, so I just wanted to point out a few things here. There is obviously a ton of stuff we could talk about with regard to this, and I don't mean to derail the conversation completely.

For evolution to happen, people need to reproduce (or not) in a controlled fashion. This could be survival based, i.e. every light-skinned person dies of cancer before reproducing due to ultra-high UV radiation. It could also be selection based, i.e. women strongly prefer dark-skinned men because the pale guys are always sun-burnt, itching, and smelling like SPF 8k. It could be more nefarious, i.e. light skinned babies are abandoned or killed, or gangs of dark skinned people surreptitiously murder the occasional light-skinned person. It could also be more controlled, i.e. "gataca-style" offspring gene-selection, or birth permits, or "human husbandry" (couples are selected on their potential for favorable offspring), or some sort of coming of age physical/mental/emotional trial where not everyone survives.

I'm sure the book mentioned all of this, and to a certain extent, most if not all of these things are occurring right now on Earth. However, since there is no one overarching trend, the general result is that we just oscillate around our mean gene pool. Also, if we "tame" our environment, we don't evolve within it. I don't care how many eons we spend in space, if we're always breathing our own prepared atmosphere, we will not evolve to survive in a vacuum.

It's an interesting topic, though, and I do wonder if we'll ever encounter an environment that will truly force a general evolutionary trend. The "human" solution has always been to work around it mentally. This is why we're on a knife forum, and not a "how to sharpen your claws" forum.

Sorry that got long, I have thoughts on time, but no time to put them down at the moment, which is supremely ironic.
User avatar
bearfacedkiller
Member
Posts: 11412
Joined: Sat Jan 04, 2014 1:22 pm
Location: hiding in the woods...

Re: Lets talk about time travel

#10

Post by bearfacedkiller »

If I was all over the place that is because I typed all that on my phone while lying in bed late at night. :/

...and thanks for passing the pipe this way. This is some totally far out 2am stoner talk going on here. ;)
-Darby
sal wrote:Knife afi's are pretty far out, steel junky's more so, but "edge junky's" are just nuts. :p
SpyderEdgeForever wrote: Also, do you think a kangaroo would eat a bowl of spagetti with sauce if someone offered it to them?
User avatar
Johnnie1801
Member
Posts: 2219
Joined: Sat Apr 26, 2014 10:29 am
Location: Europe

Re: Lets talk about time travel

#11

Post by Johnnie1801 »

For all you future Spyderco fans reading this in the future, could one of you please pm me the winning numbers for tomorrows Euromillions lottery draw :p
Currently enjoying Spyderco's in - S30V, VG10, Super Blue, Cruwear x4, CTS XHP, S110V x2, M4 x3, S35VN, CTS 204P x2, S90V, HAP 40, K390, RWL34, MAXAMET, ZDP 189, REX 45


Jon
User avatar
phillipsted
Member
Posts: 3674
Joined: Tue Oct 05, 2010 11:30 am
Location: North Virginia

Re: Lets talk about time travel

#12

Post by phillipsted »

I'm sure that sometime soon I'll think up a funny response to this thread...

For now... I'm an insomniac dyslexic agnostic. I lay awake at night, staring at the ceiling, wondering if there really is a Dog.

TedP
User avatar
Evil D
Member
Posts: 27147
Joined: Sat Jun 26, 2010 9:48 pm
Location: Northern KY

Re: Lets talk about time travel

#13

Post by Evil D »

SpyderEdgeForever wrote:Who invented the Spyderhole knife? The time traveller, or Sal? There are many variations of that one.

Well, Sal invented it...It isn't really a paradox per say, since Sal had to have invented it for him to have it in the future, or at least Sal would have had to invent it within the reality that this person is traveling back in time from. This would have to happen within one timeline of reality, or at least within one variation in which Sal did invent it, otherwise it wouldn't exist in the future for the guy to bring back at all.

Here's the real head scratcher....Even if Sal was given knives from the future before he even invented them....Sal would still have to go through the process of designing and inventing them, so that they would then exist in the future. This takes us back to the "vanishing Marty McFly" concept, where if something that happened in the past created something in the future, and you went back in time and stopped that event from happening, would it then be erased from the future? If Sal was handed a knife from the future, but then decided in his own reality NOT to invent them, would that knife disappear from existence?
Noah
Member
Posts: 101
Joined: Fri Mar 15, 2013 6:11 pm

Re: Lets talk about time travel

#14

Post by Noah »

Anytime someone traveled back in time, they would be altering the future. Is time one linear flow, where someone who traveled back in time would return to a future which was different than the one they had left, or would traveling back in time create an alternate future, and would the time traveler return to the same unaltered future he/she had left?

What about the phenomenon displayed in movies like "Interstellar" where the passage of time varies by location and gravity, and an astronaut who experiences say, 7 years of time, returns to Earth, where 120 something years have passed?
User avatar
Monocrom
Member
Posts: 1331
Joined: Thu Apr 06, 2006 1:01 am
Location: NYC

Re: Lets talk about time travel

#15

Post by Monocrom »

Traveling forward stinks.... Hyper inflation, you have no marketable skills, and no immunity to the diseases of the future.

But I'd definitely travel to the past. Roaring '20s.... All those sweet parties where no one gave a crap. Investing the stock market. Pulling out a week before the Crash. Or, perhaps just coming back to the Present with an armful of vintage Rolex watches. Maybe go back a bit further back when Rolex was a British brand and simply a caser instead of an actual watchmaker. ****, there's one guy who discovered a pristine example of a very early Rolex (back before any real quality was built into the watches) found in a forgotten dresser drawer. He wants a literally obscene amount of money. Has been given offers close to that amount, but yet refuses to sell. Keep in mind, it's a Rolex back before Rolex was Rolex (if you get what I mean).

Then again, as a watch enthusiast; I know how idiotic so-called High-end collectors can be. And why not, they buy brands higher than Rolex the same way the average person would buy an $11.oo No-Name quartz watch from Wal*Mart.

So yeah, not even much effort needed in becoming rich.

As for radically altering history, I wouldn't kill baby Hitler. But I would see to it that he was spirited away and raised outside of Germany, away from his horribly abusive father. I'd make similar changes too.
User avatar
SpyderEdgeForever
Member
Posts: 6325
Joined: Mon Jul 23, 2012 6:53 pm
Location: USA

Re: Lets talk about time travel

#16

Post by SpyderEdgeForever »

While this is not exactly true time travel, there is another possibility: SIMULATED time travel. Imagine a near or far future version of "virtual reality": You slip into a body-suit that covers your entire body from toes on up to head, including a full virtual reality head cover and tubes that go into your nose and mouth, and eye and ear coverings; it has molecular and micro electrical systems that plug into your nerve system, so that you can feel, see, taste, smell, etc; full simulated sense enviroment. You stand on a computer controlled treadmill that allows you to move in place, your body feels as if it is moving. This is connected to a VERY advanced computer system that gives super-detailed, real-time images, sounds, smells, etc. A complete simulated enviroment.

Then add to this some form of nanotechnological nutrient and body-waste recycling system, so that as long as your body is in a stable location (house, apartment, etc) that has the energy to keep this going (electricity), you could literally live inside a custom-made enviroment.
Now imagine programming this enviroment to be in the 1800s, 1000s, or any time you want. Ofcourse, anything future will be like a "living science fiction movie" and anything in the past will have to be based on what we know about the past. You're not actually travelling to the real past, but, you can live in a simulated version of it, and travel between them, as each program cycles back and forth.

This could lead to alot of societal problems for people: Imagine virtual reality addicts. Why have to live in and deal with the everyday real world when you could live your entire life out in a custom-made enviroment where you pick every situation and who you interact with? I also wonder if there would be any negative side-effects to the brain and human nervous system if one were experiencing this over an extended time?
User avatar
Monocrom
Member
Posts: 1331
Joined: Thu Apr 06, 2006 1:01 am
Location: NYC

Re: Lets talk about time travel

#17

Post by Monocrom »

Sorry, but that's not really time traveling at all since your actions in the simulated past change nothing here in reality. But yes, considering how utterly disgusting and pathetic the real world has become; I can see massive portions of the population jacking in and just staying in. Maybe not those who work for a living, but the Super rich as well as the chronically unemployed who live their entire lives on others' tax-payer dollars.
User avatar
shunsui
Member
Posts: 1647
Joined: Fri Apr 12, 2013 10:22 pm

Re: Lets talk about time travel

#18

Post by shunsui »

Simply traveling forward or backward in time would leave you floating in space as the solar system moves along at a clip of ~62,000 miles per hour. Targeting the Earth would mean a substantial feat of teleportation.

If you had a space ship you could travel to the correct coordinates and "travel time" at that location.
User avatar
The Mastiff
Member
Posts: 5951
Joined: Sun Jun 04, 2006 2:53 am
Location: raleigh nc

Re: Lets talk about time travel

#19

Post by The Mastiff »

There are a lot of UFO types who believe that many of the UFO's are humans from the future.

What gets me is the thought of beings from outside of our time continuum. Time is linear to us. For a being from the 5th dimension how are events perceived? Could this being watch the pyramids being built while watching current guards on night shift drinking coffee and reading magazines as well as everything else before and after?

Would you have to be outside the universe to do this?

Etc.
User avatar
tvenuto
Member
Posts: 3790
Joined: Sun Apr 29, 2012 8:16 am
Location: South Baltimore

Re: Lets talk about time travel

#20

Post by tvenuto »

shunsui wrote:Simply traveling forward or backward in time would leave you floating in space as the solar system moves along at a clip of ~62,000 miles per hour. Targeting the Earth would mean a substantial feat of teleportation.

If you had a space ship you could travel to the correct coordinates and "travel time" at that location.
Ah, but you see space and time are not separate, so what you think of a location in space AND a location in time, is really just one location in spacetime. In fact anytime you move anywhere, you borrow an infinitesimally small portion of your movement through time, and turn it into movement through space. If you move fast enough, the movement through time is slowed enough to measure, and this effect has been measured.

So, it requires more coordinates, but you should be able to travel to the desired location in spacetime, since traveling through time (in the non-standard fashion) is the hard part anyway, traveling through space should be easy enough. So, with the proper coordinates, Marty McFly can stay in the location of the parking lot of the mall, and go back in time (assuming you can do this).
Post Reply