If time travel was possible, could you travel before you were born?

Answer 1

I'm a big fan of the philisophical question:

"What if you went back in time to kill your grandfather, and instead he beat the crap out of you?"

Traveling backward in time has been a popular theme of science-fiction books, TV and movies as long as the genre has been around. Curiously, though, few who have portrayed backward time travel have actually stopped to consider the likely very real (and almost certainly very bad) implications of doing so.

There are usually two types of backward-time-travel movies: the "carnival ride", and the "circular consistency". Movies like "Back to the Future" and Star Trek IV are the "carnival ride" variety: simply use the ability to go back in the past as a means of fixing a problem in the present. Upon returning to the future, things are not usually grotesquely altered.

Then, there's the "circular consistency," where someone going backward in time was necessary to bring the timeline to its present situation in the first place. The Terminator is probably the best example of one of these. There were episodes of Star Treks TNG and DS9 that handled this pretty well too.

The flaw in the first type is that events are probably far more likely than not to be altered very radically between timelines, perhaps to the point of non-recognizability between them in as few as ten years. Movies like "The Butterfly Effect" capture this notion well. Even ST:TOS "The City on the Edge of Forever" handled it well: when McCoy went through the time portal the Enterprise ceased to exist because hd did something to jack history.

The flaw in the second type is that it must be assumed that the participants do exactly precisely the same thing as their timeline predecessors did when they were in backward time. If they fail, they will alter the forward path noticeably when they go back to their original timeline. But even worse, if they _succeed_, then the implication is an individual's actions and events are pre-ordained; that is, he has no free will!

A critical flaw in almost all time-travel sci-fi is that the writers fail to consider what happens to the existing timeline once someone decides to go back. If my brother goes back in time, I go forward as I always did, because the events that led me to where I am today already happened. But what if my brother goes back in time and then kills me in the past? My timeline is what it is, so I'm still alive. But my brother has now created a timeline in which I'm dead. The only way for these statements to be self-consistent is that there must now be _two_ timelines, one in which I'm alive and one in which I'm dead. That second timeline was created at the moment my brother went back in time.

The only way he could have done that was if, in the process of going back in time, he spontaneously created another universe. Creating a new universe out of thin air takes a lot of matter and energy, probably more than a million times more than a time machine could make :-)

It just doesn't seem likely.

Anyway, this is the physics group, so let's talk about what we know today. There are interesting implications about matter, energy, and time that come out of special relativity. Basically, you can put yourself in a rocket ship, leave earth and your twin brother behind, travel close to the speed of light for a few hours in your reference frame, come back to earth, and if you did it right you'll find yourself several years into the future. Your twin brother will have aged the same several years, but you will have aged only as long as you were in the rocket ship. So in essence, this is a sort of "time travel". This phenomenon is real, it's been tested (using two very precise clocks, one flying in an airplane and one sitting on the ground, so one clock ages maybe a few microseconds more than the other), and all that's missing is a rocket ship that can do the job right.

Interestingly, spacetime diagrams in special relativity do provision for the possibility of negative time travel as well, but they require you to travel faster than light to get there. But another consequence of special relativity says that, if you're made up of mass, you can't achieve light speed let alone exceed it, so we'll never see the negative timelines. So it appears as though the inability to achive backward time travel is already built into our known laws of physics.

Thank goodness. I don't want my brother to go back in time and kill me.

Good luck, work hard, and stay away from drugs.

Answer 2

If time travel were possible the present and the future would be one hell of a place to live because of everyone hoarding into the past and causing their own changes that would have the butterfly effect on Earth. Let's not forget though people of our time traveling back, some will die because of coming in contact with criminals who did kill during their reign, thereby preventing one person from dying who should have died in the natural course of things.
Plus, criminals of our time will travel to the past to take on a whole new world, some may be serial rapist / murders. Imagine the effect of taking an AK-7 to New York City 1925, for example, or releasing Nerve Gas in downtown LA during the Stock Market Crash of 1929.
This is probably the biggest reason why time travel will never be available to society, if it is developed it will be controlled by a body of government with a representative for each country on this body....The U.N.but each having voting power.

Nothing good can ever come of time travel, even if only one person travels and changes one thing in their life that will have a butterfly effect in an adverse way - the further into the future you go the greater the effect can be seen and the more people effected.

Answer 3

You could only travel as an ineffectual observer.

The reality is that if you could travel into the past and make any change whatsoever, then that event will cause a completely different future for the whole world. Everything is connected.

To make an obvious example: You go back in time and say something to your mother. That gets her thinking about something or other, which leads her to pursue a different life path then what she was on. She doesn't meet your father, and you aren't born. How can you travel in time if you aren't even born?

Answer 4

No. Before you were born you did not exist. Theoretically, you would be able to travel back in time as well as forward, but traveling back before you existed would not find your self even if the theory of a previous life were true due that would not be the same you that you are now.

Answer 5

Yes, Your date of birth would have no effect on the time you could travel to, but time travel is not possible, so you can't.

Answer 6

In theory, time travel is indeed possible, and happens on occassion, though not at a noticible pace. For instance, when you are aboard a train, or an airplane then time for you is moving slower than for people who are not aboard that craft. But you are moving forward in time. If you were to move aboard that plane, or train at the speed of light, or even faster then in theory you would be able to travel a great distance and time would move at a slower rate for you aboard your craft than it would for those that you left behind. It's really kinda intriguing, and complicated at the same time. But all and all, you would only be able to travel forward, never back. In theory that is.

Answer 7

nicely, enable's talk hypothetically that ingredient holiday is a threat. Therefor, you are able to observe of (hypothesis, back) that there are endless style of parallel universes, one and all of them made with each and every selection you're making. there has been plenty talk approximately this difficulty, you be attentive to. So, theoretically, the time which you left would not shop on till you come back to that ingredient or you have been destroyed (death, area-time anomaly, etc.) nicely, in case you eventually finally end up combating your mom's/father's beginning, then the ensuing anomaly might only make you disappear, theoretically. And, interior the time which you left, there may well be 2 opportunities: your mom/dad might nonetheless be there, yet with diverse lives/a protracted time or they might only end to exist. nicely, theoretically the area-time anomaly which you will create by using combating your father from being born might relatively only make you disappear or quite, end to exist in the two the time you left and the time you're presently in. of direction, right here come interior the parallel universes or dimensions, the place in one, you nonetheless exist because you have chosen to not do what you purely did, and in the different one, the form of activities might unfold like I wrote formerly. observe: I emphasize the interest 'theoretically' because of the fact it is how this finished difficulty is, additionally that's barely my view.

Answer 8

You mean go back in time before you were born?
Yes, I think so. If you watched Back to the Future III, Marty went back to like his great-great grandparents' time (I think...)

My opinion: Time travel will never ever be possible...though it is a nice idea, isn't it ;-)))

Answer 9

What would happen if you then turned around
and killed your parent before you were born?

"If time travel was possible" is akin to saying
"if a semantic paradox wasn't a semantic paradox"
or "if sheep weren't sheep".

I think you'll need to redefine exactly what you
mean by "time" before you're going to get any
useful answer to this question.

Answer 10

If time travel was possible, wouldn't we have already have been visited by people from the future?