A Thought About Time Travel?

Question

There are no laws that prove time travel possible, correct? If we assume that it is possible and at some point can be successfully carried out...

Does this mean that the human race has gone extinct at some point before reaching this stage and explains why we don't see anyone coming from the future?

What are your comments about this explanation? Does it allow both for the possibility of time travel at some point and the reason as to why we never see it?

Answer 1

Time travel as understood by physicists has not been demonstrated to be impossible. You are correct in that regard.

However, most theoretical models of time machines cannot travel to a time before the machine was constructed. This could be one reason why we have seen no time travellers - they cannot go this far back even with their machines.

There are other possible explanations as well. Perhaps there are travellers and we don't recognize them. They do their research and blend in perfectly. Or perhaps time isn't one-dimensional as many people assume. If there are an infinite number of time-streams (two or more time dimensions), then even an infinite number of travellers might fail to stumble into ours. And perhaps even if travellers can come, they are simply not interested. Our particular section of time may be of little interest in the future - there are plenty of records and all. Maybe all the travellers are millions of years in the past, eating popcorn and watching dinosaurs maul each other.

But all this is putting the cart before the horse, I think. Even if time travel is possible, it hardly means it IS. Unicorns are possible too, after all...

Answer 2

I assume time travel is possible, but the humanity at present does not know how to do it. You wonder why we do not see visitors from the future.

As you say, one explanation is that the humanity becomes extinct before discovering time travel.

That said, there are other possibilities. It is said you cannot travel to the past and kill your own grandfather. Such action would produce paradox, a contradiction. Reality would respond by not allowing the situation. If you were to make the trip, something would happen to you, you may be killed along the way, and the net effect is that your grandfather remained alive to produce a family.

In general, you cannot change your past. I hope our descendants are smart enough to understand it. Perhaps there is some time police to protect the past, but the greater protection is reality itself.

Also, you are assuming we have something worthwhile as a tourist attraction, and people from the future may not see it that way. At the present, we have the opportunity to visit people whose lives are the same as in other millenia. I sometimes see National Geographic documentaries, but I am not interested enough to visit in person. Such visit would cost money, and there are other places of more interest to me. The future may have te same attitude.

Answer 3

Today whilst driving to see my family for xmas(2 hours each way) my children and i were discussing how much easier it would be if we could time travel so we wouldn't have had to spend all xmas day travelling. But you know time is relative to the person or people involved. When you're young, time spent waiting seems to take forever but as you get older you say things like 'another xmas already!?' This just goes to prove how elastic time is which then goes on to prove that time travel could be possible - anyway, the rate the human race is going you're probably right about them going extinct before they develop any sort of time travel. Nice question!

Answer 4

1. If my next-door neighbor were a time traveler from the future, how would I know?
2. I think there is a suggestion that time travel is not impossible, but added to quantum mechanics it would amount to, for example, a person traveling into the past and thereby creating a new future for themselves and a new universe --- while this universe just continues without them. Both those realities (and innumerable others) would continue merrily on.

Answer 5

so ur saying i its possible, maybe if they do develop time travel, they'll knw not to use it since traveling back in time to "affect" the past would only create a time paradox, u knw traveling back in time to tell yourself the lottery number, but that would mean not needing to tell yourself(past) about the lottery meaning you(future) never travelled at all. And what if a time travellers came they bring knowledge from the future, that information will change the future drastically, maybe even changing the need for time travellers to travel into the past, so they never did or should I say will travel back in time from the future. So probably they can only be observers. http://www.tristan.icom43.net/quartets/norton.html heres a thought how do you know I am not a time traveller.
Although I do enjoy the idea of time travel, and it is a nice topic to read in science fiction novels, it is sadly i think impossible. O

Answer 6

time travel is a continuous occurrence. it all just happens to be in one direction to varying degrees. the faster something moves through space, the slower it moves through time. entropy dictates the direction of time through decay. in this particular universe, all things move from a higher ordered state towards chaos, or a lower order. as an example, one cannot unbreak an egg. however an egg can be observed in it's unbroken form after the fact simply by observing the event from a distance. If time travel is nothing more then the ability to directly observe the past then simply looking to the farthest galaxies we are traveling back in time almost 15 billion years. We travel through time to the future but we cannot observe it till it happens. we can travel through time to the past simply by looking from a distance at what has already occurred.

Answer 7

It depends about how you think about time, I suppose. I don't know about travelling into the future, but in terms of travelling back into the past, really, the only thing we'll ever come close to are books and museums.

Answer 8

That is an incredible and very original thought but I don't think so. Or if they could for some reason they are unable to change the outcome of events. All one would be is a casual observer. Much like prophets are in a way. That is just my take.

Answer 9

All i think time travel is this; We human created the time concept by giving measurements and if all people in the world agrees we can reset our watches back or front and travel into future or past. I think its the only way to travel.

Time travel is only an imagination and waste of time. Its only done by people who had missed something in their life or suffering in the present so that they could escape to future.

Dont waste your time friend by thinking too much of this concept.

Answer 10

i don't think time travel backwards is possible because whatever the traveler does in the past (even breathing) would change the precise time (even if only by .00000001 milliseconds) they left in the future making it so they were never really in the past at that (exact) time at all, this process would repeat itself indefinitely.

thats assuming that time isn't just a mental construct organizing simultaneously occurent events, or that time flows along a straight line.