What do you think of Time Travel

I'm putting this subject in this forum because some hypothesize that "aliens" are really humanity from the distant future who have traveled back in time for some unbeknownst reason. Also this sub-forum gets alot more attention than the other ones do.

I'd like to know what you think about the subject of time travel. I personally don't believe time travel into the past is possible, at least not possible in the way we think of it. Because of the unlimited number of paradoxes it would create, by the laws of conventional science I don't think that we can interact with our own past.
But then there is quantum physics which seems to allow the creation of parallel worlds through the changing of past. Just thinking of parallel earths and parallel [insert your own identity here] just makes my brain hurt.

Einstein's theory of special relativity seems to allow for some sort of forward time travel through traveling closer to the speed of light. Could someone explain to me how this is supposed to work. How does traveling at great speeds warp time? I read somewhere that 5 years spent at 99% the speed of light would equate to 50 years of earth time. How can this be? Would our own conscience sense of time be warped? Why would time seem to slow at great speeds?

Also, would the talked about extraterrestrial "anti-gravity" drive which allows for faster than light travel create this distortion as well?

Your thoughts.

[edit on 29-6-2006 by CaptainKirk]

[edit on 29-6-2006 by CaptainKirk]

Travelling forward in time is theoretically possible.

If two twins were born, one stays on Earth and one is sent to Pluto and back, the one who went to Pluto would be younger than the one on Earth.

I'm no expert, but I think that's what would happen, I might have mixed it up a bit.

Travelling back in time though, I don't think that can or will happen. Wouldn't the device being used just cease to exist?

what about if we are in a time loop. can you not go back in time then?

Time loop? Can you elaborate on that? Because I'm pretty sure that doesn't exist.

youre saying time flows in a linear way(straight line), what if time keeps going round in circles(time loop). the universe is weirder than anyone can imagine.

time is more well known thing than general public know.

Okay then, that would make sense, truthfully, we don't and probably won't know what time is exactly.

But if time did go in a loop, maybe a coil, that could explain ghosts as well. If the 'time coil' looped really tightly, maybe it could overlap slightly, allowing time travel and other paranormal activity.

Good theory, got me thinkin' that one.

ok, i understand you. but just think for a sec, if man could travel outside our 3d reality, they could travel faster than light, this is accepted. time as we know it only exists in our 3d reality.
if we got to a point were we could travel outside the 3d reality, than possibly we should be able to travel in time also. i know it is more complicated than that, but i think you may get my point.

like all the different levels, i.e how does gravity, time co exist and what other levels are there.

[edit on 29-6-2006 by andy1033]

Can i share with you an interesting snippet from a firend of mine who is a Lecturer at Cambridge University? She had a student, very bright and able who said to her that it would be a female who would be the first time traveller as it would be the person who found the way to make this possible to experiment herself. My friend laughed and then asked why the student felt this way. her reply astounded her.

The student was driving along a road at night, when she saw a smart 4x4 behind her, not close enough to see the driver but close enough to see the make ect. She thought to herself the following.
" If I ever rich in the future, i'm going to buy one of those really smart 4x4's. If this was me and I could time travel I would show this to myself, and I would flash my head lights three times". The 4x4 flashed its lights 3 times.

The student is adamant that she will discover time travel within the next 10 years, and as a theoretical physicist she is well placed to do so. being a very smart switched on girl, this student has qualified, works for a british firm of electronic developers, and next year will go back home (China) to work for the Chinese state research authority.

Make what you will of the story, but I actually think time travel is very possible, but we just have not found the energy of time to do it in.

that story is nice and all, but i do think america has spent so much money on this subject and they probably have the best people working on it.

time travel obviously would be a dangerous thing for the world, if we could go back in time(time looping should allow this). so i cannot see the americans wanting anyone else having that sort of technology.

just think for a minute about the possibilies of time travel, it would be such a dangerous thing for any country to have.

i personally believe it is one of the reasons why the public cannot be told of the alien thing, because if we were told of the aliens were here etc.. then they would have to explain to the public how the aliens have got here, and time travel is a possibility on how they got here.

Thinking of time in nonlinear terms is on the right track, IMO. However, I'd say visualizing it as a "loop" is just as innacurate. Time happens all at once. Alpha/Omega simultaneously and we experience it in a straight line because that's our perspective.

I do think Time Travel will happen one day, but I don't think we'll be able to go backwards in time to a point before the time machine exists. I think Time Travel will be based on having an artificial connection to the "past".

Think of a wormhole that you can "anchor" in some way. You anchor 1 end in the NOW and then take the other one with you as time passes, allowing yourself to go back to that anchored "NOW" whenever you want. A "time machine" would therefore be a device that you anchored the wormhole in and kept "reanchoring" every nanosecond so you have a "connection" to every moment in the life of the device. So, no time travel back to dinosaur days, but once the device is active then you can always hit the cosmic "undo" button and go back to the day you invented it.

Time Travel to the distant past might be possible with this method if there's some way to take an existing wormhole and find "connections" throughout it's lifespan. (Like bubbles in the Quantum Foam that we can pop out of. ) In that case we could go back to the beginning of the Universe!

When Time Travel is finally perfected, the mission of the first expedition really MUST be to recover the 108 lost episodes of Doctor Who.

i do not get how because you said all time happens at the same time, you reckon we cannot be in a loop. just because everything in time happens at the same time, does not make time looping theory redundent. i do believe that like so many others that all events happen at the same, it is how this interacts with us, that most have differences over.
it is like you said important to visualise things(einstein said imagination is king). we all must understand that if we cannot imagine something, does not mean it is not true, just that our intellects will not understand it and maybe will not let it work in the framework of our minds.

SKMDC1 - do you believe them when they say, if man can travel outside our 3d reality, that man could travel faster than light. this is something they have seemed to have admitted. therefore if you break outside the 3d world, because our time only exists in our 3d reality, then there must be a way to travel in time.
then we just need to understand how time interacts with all the other levels of things like gravity. surely by this route alone they will find time travel, there may be other routes like messing around with gravity.

Where does our own perception of time fit in to all of this?

How can 5 years experienced in space at a certain velocity correlate to 50 years of percieved time on earth? How does this work? what causes time perception to speed up or slow down? If a place is 5 light years away and you traveled there in a vehicle that travels and at the exact speed of light, why would seem to take decades for the crew to reach their destination on earth but a mere 5 years for the crew themselves? Or have I just got myself confused?

If someone were to be living on pluto right now would time pass at the same speed there as it would here? Or would they/we age at different rates? This whole space-time continuom thing is beyond me.

Captain,
its called time dilation and can be found in all major religious books and tracts. Even the bible has evidence of it happening.

Man A stays on earth. year 2050.

Man B enters craft and races away from earth at the speed of light / 99.9 % for one year.

For man B only one year has past.

For man A
100 years have past and he is dead.

Time is reletaive to your speed and motion. The faster you travel the slower time goes in relation to a static point. Thats why star trek and other sci fi films are so silly. there is no time dilation and that is impossible.

how we understand and percieve time, seems to have something to do with the center of our galaxy, there seems to be a core in the galaxy where our time is regulated from.

there should be alot of pages on the internet that would explain space time relativety. just put space time relativety in google. the best way to explain to the lay person would be by analogys.

but i would not ridicule star trek to much, because they have to make the program quick to understand for the audience. of course things will not be exactly like how they show.

[edit on 29-6-2006 by andy1033]

I think its possible. If you look at the technology of today, and tried to explain it to someone 100 years ago, they wouldn't believe you. Now imagine 100 years from now, now try 5,000 years. We can't even dream of the technologies of tomorrow. (Now open the mind a bit) The people of the future would surely understand the problems it would create by sending themselves back in time, so lets say they create small research bio-robots into the past to gather dna from plants animals and humans for the dying breeds of the future. They would send these "alien" looking creatures into the past, with ultra top secret documentation in case of any miss-haps: WE ARE BIO-ROBOTS OF THE FUTURE, SENT BY MANKIND, UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES MAY OUR IDENTITY BE REVEALED TO THE POPULATION. The government would confirm this after the discovery of a downed craft. Then the order would go out, "The population must be shielded from the bleak future of earth by all means" while they work with the "aliens" by providing them with the materials they need for our future.

thunderhead - if thats in response to my thread where i talked about a possible reason for not giving out info on aliens. can i just say, there may be many ways that aliens could travel to earth, what i said meant that if they came through a method like time travel or technology that can be used for time travel than the government would not be able to tell the human race, becasue it would be to dangerous.
if you did not write your post to response to my post above, then thats fine, i just wanted to make claer that there may be many reasons why alien life, ahs not been confirmed by our leaders.

I agree with you 100% percent. I was merely pointing out that no option should ever be ruled out. It would be foolish for anyone to claim they know what will or won't be possible in the future.