Aliens as Time Travelers AND Space Travelers? Who says they can't be both?

I suspect that Star Trek's version includes some rule about the traveler them self being unable to return to their own dimension after they have left it? Something like that?


But there is no need for a dimension here. In 4 dimensional space, we speak not of "objects", but rather "events". An "object" only one spatial location (X,Y,Z or "Up/Down", "Left/Right", "Forward/Backward" ) but may occupy a large expanse of time. An "event" occupies only one time. (X,Y,Z, t) ( X,Y,Z or "Up/Down", "Left/Right", "Forward/Backward", "Tomorrow/Yesterday")

Any "event" that makes up part of your history would be unavailable for interaction. Perhaps you are quantum entangled with them. Something like that. So maybe you time travel back to the time and location of the city where your grandfather lived when he was a child, but all you see there is an open field. You can't interact with that city, nor can it interact with you.

The problem with our thinking about time travel is that we're looking at too broad a picture. We're creating a "false dichotomy", that either it must be possible to travel to the entire plane of events (composed of all events that happened at a specific time), or none of them. But we ignore the possibility that maybe the answer lies in between those two extremes.

originally posted by: bloodymarvelous

originally posted by: Alien Abduct



I disagree. I think if time travel is ever invented it will be based on string theory, which is what I based my scenario on.

I'll address your scenario.

Let's say you find a planet 200 LY away. You go to your time machine based on Pluto, you go back in time when your grandpa was a child. You warp space-time and instantly arrive at that planet. You do some things to alter their history at that faraway planet right? You can because you haven't previously observed anything from that planet.

What happens if you then warp back to earth after spending only a few days at that faraway planet, and you go and find your grandpa and kill him?

You don't solve the paradox by just avoiding it.

Traveling to another dimension is exactly the same problem.

The underlying assumption to Star Trek time travel is that time travel is only possible to the past of other dimensions. You can't go back and kill your grand father because time travel to your own dimension is impossible.

But why couldn't you travel to another dimension, and then time travel from there to this dimension's past?

Good question. I thought of that already and addressed that issue at the end of my first post.

Anytime you start heading out into space at a fairly high speed, you'll be traveling both in space and time. A fairly common UFO theory is that the truly unexplained UFOs are evolved or modified humans coming either "back" in time, or "back" from a long journey into space to visit the old homestead.

originally posted by: makemap
Time travel is dangerous. You don't know what outcome will come out for your future self unless your trying to prevent it first place by erasing the person from doing it.

Maybe. There's another way of looking at it by seeing time as a very personal thing, and only applicable to whoever is experiencing it from their own point of view. So I could go back and kill my own grandfather and it wouldn't affect me, because my existence is tied into my point of view. Killing grandpa would be just another thing that happened as I perceived it. It wouldn't negate my being born and growing up to build a time machine.

Each individual has their own "timeline" that can only begin and end at birth and death respectively.

Faster than light travel is possible [due to past space alien visitations from starships here on Earth], time travel is impossible; because...time is time --- No way to get around it.

originally posted by: Alien Abduct

originally posted by: bloodymarvelous

originally posted by: Alien Abduct



I disagree. I think if time travel is ever invented it will be based on string theory, which is what I based my scenario on.

I'll address your scenario.

Let's say you find a planet 200 LY away. You go to your time machine based on Pluto, you go back in time when your grandpa was a child. You warp space-time and instantly arrive at that planet. You do some things to alter their history at that faraway planet right? You can because you haven't previously observed anything from that planet.

What happens if you then warp back to earth after spending only a few days at that faraway planet, and you go and find your grandpa and kill him?

You don't solve the paradox by just avoiding it.

Traveling to another dimension is exactly the same problem.

The underlying assumption to Star Trek time travel is that time travel is only possible to the past of other dimensions. You can't go back and kill your grand father because time travel to your own dimension is impossible.

But why couldn't you travel to another dimension, and then time travel from there to this dimension's past?

Good question. I thought of that already and addressed that issue at the end of my first post.

Ah . Yeah. I see I had missed it, or maybe I'd misread it.

originally posted by: Alien Abduct
a reply to: bloodymarvelous

You go back and watch your grandpa only to find that the you that arrives to kill him never comes. You conclude that you had actually traveled to a parallel world with astoundingly close resemblance to the one you killed your grandpa in...

So what the hell is going on?

You run all of the data obtained throughout the entire experiment through your super A.I. computer. And after a few long days of work you reach a conclusion.

All parallel world's are on the same river of time although in different states on this river.

So you don't think of time travel as really happening at all. More like the various dimensions that contain all possible versions of reality being out of sync with each other so that different ones will have reached different points in history.


Let's make this more interesting, then. Have you heard of a quantum physics experiment called the "Delayed Choice Quantum Eraser"?

en.wikipedia.org...

There is a phenomenon in QM (Quantum Mechanics) where if you send a single photon toward a wall that has two slits cut into it and then allow it to hit a wall behind the first wall, the photon will behave as though it has split into two photons and each had gone through a different slit. Sending multiple photons one at a time and adding up the results, you see that they never hit points on the second wall where the two photons could have destructively interfered.

( A photon oscillates between positive and negative polarity, so if the two photons would be at opposite polarities at a certain point, it is called "destructive interference" because the polarities would cancel out.)

However, if you place a detector at one or the other slit, the photon behaves as if it was just one photon passing through one slit. (No destructive interference points.)


In the "delayed choice quantum eraser" they used pairs of entangled photons. (Entanglement is where the two photons behave kind of like Corsican twins, where doing certain things to one of them causes it to happen to the other also, in a weird sort of way).

One entangled photon was randomly either sent to a double slit that had a detector on one slit, or one that had no detectors. The other was simply sent to a double slit that had no detectors.

If the first photon ended up encountering a double slit that had a detector, the other one behaved as if it had done so also (even though it hadn't.)



Now the time travel issue:

This continued to be true even if the placed the first photon's double slit apparatus further away than the second one's. Meaning the choice about where the first photon would go was being made AFTER the second photon had already exhibited the corresponding behavior.

Information was shown to be going back in time, essentially.


So the reason I believe a time machine will be based on Quantum Physics is because reverse time causality has already been demonstrated to be possible at the quantum level, using photons. Not very much of it, but enough to demonstrate the reality of it.

This is a pretty good video about the experiment if you watch it all the way to the end.

www.youtube.com...

He talks about using electrons in a double slit experiment, and then about using photons. But there's no need to get confused about that.

You can use either one. Using either electrons or photons with a double still you will get basically the same result.

originally posted by: bloodymarvelous
This is a pretty good video about the experiment if you watch it all the way to the end.

www.youtube.com...

He talks about using electrons in a double slit experiment, and then about using photons. But there's no need to get confused about that.

You can use either one. Using either electrons or photons with a double still you will get basically the same result.

I was aware of the double slit experiment but I wasn't aware of that new variation of it with the entangled photons. That was a great video thanks for sharing.

Yeah. Quantum Mechanics is weird. Although.... from the perspective of a quantum lifeform, the macro world would be the one that is weird.

If their society is neck deep in quantum technology, then Aliens may experience reality as being very weird compared to how we experience it. They would learn a whole different paradigm in their grade schools and high schools, and especially college.

The rules that apply to someone using that tech are probably much more complicated than we wish they were, where backwards time travel is fine, but merely being seen by an observer can make your ship blow up, or turn you invisible/intangible/out of phase ( which makes breathing tangible air pretty difficult, I imagine.)



The idea of a time traveling alien being in/from a "different dimension" may have a double meaning. They might exist in a state of "superposition" relative to our world just like how photons can pass through one another without interacting, and then slip into a different phase when they want to interact, where they experience constructive/destructive interference when they encounter our matter.

The New Age "woo" approach might be the closest we humans will get any time soon to really understanding it.