Could we actually travel to the future?

Question

Many other people have asked this, but have you actually thought about this? People have talked about space-time continums being destroyed, wormholes being created and so on. They also say that you would need an infinite amount of power to travel faster then the speed of light since light is probably the fastest thing ever. So can we actually travel to the future WITHOUT damaging or changing anything?


PS. I dont want no B.S like 'I dont Know' or 'Go stuff yourself freak'

Answer 1

The answer to this question is in relativity, mostly.

Firstly, not only is time travel possible. It's actually quite common place. As explained by Gothic Angel, the faster you move, the faster the world's time around you seems to move and the slower your time seems to move according to someone observing you. Since everything in the universe is moving relative to something else, everything is always traveling through time, more or less, it just depends on where you're observing from.

The problem people have with relativity is they can't let go of the concept of standing still or the concept that there is somewhere one clock that is correct by which all others can be compared. This is the problem they had in Newton's time until Einestein came along and said, 'Hey.. what if EVERYTHING is moving and there *is* no right or wrong about it.'

So, let's analyze this a little. You're standing on the street and you start running. Someone is watching you and from their perspective your time has slowed down, you are traveling into the future. Now there's another guy watching both of you and he's standing on the moon. The side of the planet you're on is spinning away from him, but you're running closer to him. From his perspective, the other guy on the street is the one traveling into the future. We could do this all day until someone on the other side of the Universe is watching you, but I think you get the point.

Now, the better question to be asking is will we ever be able to go BACK in time.

First off, we think this already happens. Anti-particles are thought to be moving backwards in time. That is starting at the end of the Universe and bouncing around to the beginning.

Now, as someone else explained, by extention of Einstein's Relativity.. just as time slows down the closer to the speed of light you get, it stops when you reach that speed and starts to reverse once you surpass that.

I believe they also said they doubted mankind would ever be able to produce the kind of energy required to do this.

This is a very good assumption, because since something's mass increases the closer to the speed of light you get, you need infinite energy to get to the speed of light. Let alone to pass it.

Now, THAT will never be possible. It may be possible to travel from Point A to Point B faster than light could, but that would require something like a wormhole or a way of breaching space in such a way to access a part of it where at least that perticular law of physics does not apply. But, since you are still not actually traveling faster than light, just going around the limit, you won't be going back in time. However.. if you sent yourself a signal, you'd get there before the signal did, which raises some interesting questions about the Universe, but we won't get into that.

It is interesting to note, at this point, that while it is not possible to accelerate past the speed of light.. the problem is in acceleration. Again, since you get 'heavier', the faster you go, the more energy it takes to push you even faster, which makes you heavier again and thus an infinite loop. BUT if we found a way to do it without accelerating, then we could travel faster than light.

This is, of course, impossible according to everything we know today. But who knows what tomorrow brings?

Answer 2

I don't think humans have the power or technology to manipulate time and space to the point in making wormholes. I doubt that we could ever harness enough power to send a human moving as fast as the speed of light. In the last 50 + years we've only just managed to beat the speed of sound (the sonic boom), so I doubt that we could move as fast as light, ever. Just look at us biologically-- we're not suited for that sort of movement. It would be amazing if we could though-- we'd be able to travel around the Universe etc.

As for travelling into the future-- I can't see that happening. And even if we could, humans would take advantage of that power and we'd probably end up damaging lives and creating so many paradoxes.

Answer 3

People are so misinformed about Einstein. He never said we could ACTUALLY travel to the future...only that travelling near the speed of light would make it APPEAR that you were traveling to the future. By the very definition of the Theory of Relativity, one could NEVER travel to the future and actually remain on the Earth. You would, in fact, be zipping across the cosmos. The moment you tried to return to the Earth....WHAMMO, you are right back to your proper place in the time continuum. (Meaning exactly the amount of time that you actually experienced during the trip will have passed.) There's just no way to get around that pesky little problem.

The entire theory is a thought experiment about what one would OBSERVE while traveling at or near the speed of light...not what would actually be happening. There really is a difference when you're talking about those kinds of speeds.

Answer 4

I respectfully disagree that travel in time (forward and backward at will) is NOT possible.

Read Kip Thorne's conjecture about fishing 2 wormholes out of the quantum foam, enlarging them and holding them open with exotic matter (and negative energy), moving one relative to the other at close to the speed of light away from each other and then back again, jump in one, come out the other in the past! You can only travel as far back in time as to when the time machine was created to avoid the classical time-travel paradoxes.

To travel fast(er) into the future, just zoom your spaceship real close to the event horizon of a black hole.

Simply an engineering problem, what with exotic matter, negative energy, quantum foam fishing and zooming up to black holes!

Answer 5

The answer to this is simple. It is not possible to avoid traveling to the future. Everyone does it every day. Your question seems to hinge on whether we can travel to the future at different speeds, such that, for example, I might travel into your deep future in my near future. Other answers here have tended to focus on moving near the speed of light. This focus is irrelevant. Everyone moves into the future at a different and personal rate of speed. As the speed of light is constant in space-time, if I go for a jog while you sit and watch tv, then during that time you will have moved farther into your future than I will have moved into mine. I will have moved into your future. The fact that the degree of our differential is not great is part of the details, but is irrelevant to whether or not there is a differential.

Answer 6

Most likely by going faster then the speed of light, almost right when you press on the gas. Which isn't possible yet. But I think that people are working on it in great detail. So there might be an answer some time in the future.

Answer 7

According to Einstein's General Relativity, your velocity through space is related to your velocit through time. This relation is called space-time.

If you move very fast, from your perspective, time will seem to slow down. However to an outside observer, you would appear to be going faster through time. So if you want to go faster though time compared to everybody else, start walking. Seriously. You'll be going through time at a faster rate from others perspective. Though the difference will be grosely immeasurable.

For objects going light speed, the effect is far more noticable. A photon's view of time is so slowed down, that it has stopped.

Answer 8

Einstein stated you won't be able to bypass speedier or as quickly as gentle. until somebody proves him incorrect, shall we anticipate he's real. I mean--if time shuttle is plausible, then quicker or later somebody will/does paintings it out and builds a time gadget and succeeds in traveling the previous. If ONE individual can do it then others will study and sonner or later the present is crawling with refugees from the destiny. provided that we've not got dozens/hundreds/hundreds of thousands of destiny visitors residing among us we could anticipate that the physics is unworkable or thoroughly impractical.

Answer 9

just because we haven't found a way yet doesn't mean that the problem can't be found, don't forget the car was only invented 2 hundred years ago, look how fast we can travel now. As for traveling to the future I don't know about that as we wouldn't be able to tell if we changed anything

Answer 10

I doubt that we could individually travel to the future in that you would out pace the people in the present.
It would require some type of artifact that would also have to be able to take you into the past.
Such a device would rapidly saturate every era with these devices and they would be available to you now as they would be also available to prehistoric men.