Is travelling FASTER then the speed of light the key to time travel?

I was thinking about this for a while. If a star 100 million light years away had a telescope and looked down on earth, would they see our earth from 100 million years ago? Would they be able to look down and see dinosaurs roaming around?

Correct me if im wrong (i very well may be) but if we travelled to that star and it took us 50 million years, 50 there and 50 back (obviously that couldnt happen). Then came back to earth, would we be on earth 50 million years before we left?

[edit on 14-5-2007 by hikix]

if you traveled half the speed of light then there would be a noticible difference between your time and earth time.
Its all relative.
LOL
if you travel twice the speed of light I don't know what happens


[edit on 14-5-2007 by junglelord]

1st question yes if they looked at our earth the light takes 100m years to reach them so they would see dinosaurs.

2nd question- essentially NO! but when you say it takes 50m years to get there what clock are u looking at , 1 on earth or 1 on your ship?

[edit on 14-5-2007 by yeti101]

Originally posted by yeti101
1st question yes if they looked at our earth the light takes 100m years to reach them so they would see dinosaurs.

2nd question- essentially NO! but when you say it takes 50m years to get there what clock are u looking at , 1 on earth or 1 on your ship?

[edit on 14-5-2007 by yeti101]

I think that question is a little bit above my head. I just dont know how to answer that.

heh ok no problem.

the faster you go towards the speed of light time slows down for you on your ship. so if you travelled for about a year at near the speed of light when you got back to earth maybe 5 years would have passed.

but like junglelord said nobody knows wht happens when you travel faster than light. Our current laws of physics dont allow anything with mass to travel at the speed of light or faster. Theoretically 99% of the speed of light is possible.



[edit on 14-5-2007 by yeti101]

No, you would arrive in the future. If it was possible for the same people to live that long, you would have aged slower than the rest, making it seem that you were younger than them, but you still would have aged.

If you could travel faster than the speed of light, then you would become invisible, but not travel through time. Time only moves in one direction, forward. You can not travel back in time, only forward. (just a theory)

Originally posted by yeti101
heh ok no problem.

the faster you go towards the speed of light time slows down for you on your ship. so if you travelled for about a year at near the speed of light when you got back to earth maybe 5 years would have passed.

but like junglelord said nobody knows wht happens when you travel faster than light. Our current laws of physics dont allow anything with mass to travel at the speed of light or faster. Theoretically 99% of the speed of light is possible.



[edit on 14-5-2007 by yeti101]

So theoretically travelling at or faster then the speed of light and time travel do go hand and hand?

Well time and light cannot be seperated
they exist within our universe together and are related via relativity.

Maybe God is outside time and God is light, but does that mean travel faster then light is time travel. I would say no as well.

So theoretically travelling at or faster then the speed of light and time travel do go hand and hand?

when you get to speeds approching the speed of light time dialation gets bigger. You effectively travel into the future. But currently nobody thinks its possible to travel back in time.

If you were to continue the graph on this page www.thebigview.com... past the speed of light time dialation comes down. But we dont know the nature of time at those speeds.

nobody knows what would happen if you travelled faster than the speed of light. And currently its not even an option to travel at or faster than light ever!

[edit on 14-5-2007 by yeti101]

maybe there is a race somewhere in this universe that can travel faster then the speed of light. I read the lacerta interview (i dunno if its real or not) but apparently there is a race of aliens from another dimension so powerful they can destroy the universe with their brains?!?! thats another topic in itself but just because humans cannot travel the speed of light (which means that they cant time travel) maybe a race of aliens can.. hence, making time travel possible, although maybe not through human technology.

If we were looking at a habitable planet ten light years away, and could see to the surface, we would see things that happened when that light left the planet at that distance. It took that light ten years to get to us, so what we would be seeing in the present would have actually happened 10 years earlier.

I have no idea what would happen if you travelled there at twice the speed of light, getting there in five light years instead of ten. I don't think you would travel into the past, because everything in the universe is happening in real time and therefore, it's just the light you are beating, not time itself.

The real trick to interstellar travel isn't in speed, but in method. I understand experiments have been conducted that actually caused electrons to change and even switch places. If it is possible on a quantum scale, perhaps it can be possible on our scale to actually teleport a human being, or supplies, etc. Imagine the solutions we could find with that technology, and then think about the dangers.

Nothing in current physics suggests that anything could ever travel faster than the speed of light in a vacuum.

Originally posted by uberarcanist
Nothing in current physics suggests that anything could ever travel faster than the speed of light in a vacuum.

I'm not sure I agree with that entirely. Granted, I'm far from an expert in the field, but doesn't quantum entanglement imply that *something* occurs faster than light (even though know one is really sure what that something actually is)? Basically, a change in the spin state of one particle (usually proposed as an electron) will instantaneously affect a change in the spin state of a paired particle regardless of distance.

[edit on 15-5-2007 by vor78]

I was thinking that an easy way to "travel" into the future would be to fly a spaceship around the Sun at close to the speed of light for about 10 years. After 10 years, come out of orbit and fly back to Earth, in the 10 years you were flying around the Sun, the Earth might have aged 100 years. So effectively, you've travelled 90 years into the future.

If travelling closer to the speed of light causes your personal time to slow down, then maybe travelling higher than the speed of light will cause your personal time to go backwards (you get younger). Don't quote me on that btw.

Another interesting idea would be if you stopped moving all together, ie took a spaceship out of the solar system and slowed down to zero (not the speed of our solar system or galaxy). This would theoretically cause your personal time to move faster and the universe would almost come to a stand still, to an outside observer you would die instantly of old age.

This late at night I could fall into the trap of not being able to sleep due to my mind running ideas and calculations and some of this stuff is enough over my head to warrent more research. Again falling into the trap. But a good begining point for masses going faster than light is tachyons, enjoy.

en.wikipedia.org...

As for Einsteins Theory of Relativity on time dilations for aproaching light speed, what he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Not sure if it can be fully accepted as fact for this arguement as it remains an unprovable theory today. Then there is the part about as an object approaches light speed it increases in mass and requires more energy to maintain the speed. But the old E=MC^2 (seperate theory) never seemed right to me if the Theory of Relativity was correct. Especially when I considered a bolt of lightning. My theory is that too many people blindly took stock in Einstein and he was blatently wrong on a few accounts. But none the less, quite advanced in his thinking for the time and right about a number of things.

There was just a thread on here about the fact that scientists were convinced that people could sense future events. What this implies is that information can travel back in time, or that electrons can exist in two places simultaneously. If that is true then all that has happened, is happening, and will happen already exists somewhere and all we have to do is figure out how to access it. Once technology can figure that out, then I think we will be able to travel in time without having to go light speed.

To answer the OP's question, I would say no. Light speed is not the key to time travel.

[edit on 15-5-2007 by TheComte]

Originally posted by The Cyfre
If we were looking at a habitable planet ten light years away, and could see to the surface, we would see things that happened when that light left the planet at that distance. It took that light ten years to get to us, so what we would be seeing in the present would have actually happened 10 years earlier.

I have no idea what would happen if you travelled there at twice the speed of light, getting there in five light years instead of ten. I don't think you would travel into the past, because everything in the universe is happening in real time and therefore, it's just the light you are beating, not time itself.

Yes, well said, I think exactly the same. Even though aliens 100m light years away can see dinosaurs on Earth, there aren't any dinosaurs in real time so it's impossible for them to come and see them.

If they were to speed to Earth quicker than the speed of light then surely they would just see the earth's history in high-speed as they neared the Earth? But when they arrived they would find us as we are now.

As for Einsteins Theory of Relativity on time dilations for aproaching light speed. Not sure if it can be fully accepted as fact for this arguement as it remains an unprovable theory today.

The below video describes some experiments to try to verify Time Dilation. It conformed to Einsteins equations almost exactly according to the video. They have gone on to do many other experiments in this effect and with more ease on Spaceflight missions and the ISS.



On a side note, just a slight correction, sorry to be nitpicking.

what he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize

More specifically he won his Prize "for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect."

How do you know what is happening infront of you, when traveling at such high speed? I really think that there is a much better solution to travel those distances other then flying an object at the speed of light or above. So, how do you avoid collision with anything at such speed?

There are a couple of erroneous assumptions here, I think, given what we know now.

You could not 'see' the surface of a planet from the distance of several light years. You'd have reached the limit of resolution given the wave length of light. A UV telescope with shorter wavelength might give some additional resolution but nothing to allow you to see animals on the surface of a distant planet. However a distant civilization might be able to pick up the earliest radio transmission if they have not degraded too much into background noise during the trip. So you might be able to see an early episode of I Love Lucy in B&W TV transmissions, but you couldn't see the actors, just the broadcast.

The problem with quantum entanglement and tachyon particles is that they are not solid matter containing information and organization, as is an Astronaut. You might send information into the future or faster than light, but you couldn't retrieve it, so the information would be 'lost'.

So I guess if we could change our bodies into energy and accelerate that energy or convert it into a tachyon pulse, then re-assemble it at the destination maybe that would result in something like time travel.

If you could somehow travel 'inter-dimensionally' and visit a parallel world but somehow cross into the dimension in a weird way, you might be able to go back and forth in time, but it wouldn't be 'your' time, it would be 'alternate time'. Since your time would essentially 'cease to exist' for you, then what good is it?

IOW the idea of traveling freely back and forth in time and then returning to your specific present like H.G. Wells' The Time Machine is impossible given our current knowledge and technology.

However, say we could create a holographic simulation that is 99.999% identical to 'real life', then you could conceivably go back and forth 'in time', but it would be 'recreated time'.

Maybe you could not distinguish between 'recreated time' and 'real time' to some degree, but unless we knew everything, including the position of every atom and molecule, your recreation would be more or less robust. Making your recreation more real might require more energy than one could obtain.

It's generally thought that if you create a time machine in the future you can go back to the time that this machine was created but no further back.

But, since the idea of going back in time is really as appealing actually going back in many ways, if you could fool the brain, or make the holographic simulation very real, then for the person, it would be very close to a journey back in time. The holograph might be able to let you see the signing of the Constitution and other events for which we had good information and documentation, but that's what we are essentially doing by watching movies, revisiting the past, 'Walking with Dinosaurs' and so forth.

So I'd say it depends on your purpose. You couldn't go back in real time and prevent the assassination of JFK, for instance, because the JFK you saved wouldn't be your original JFK; in your Universe JFK still gets killed.

It's also not impossible to imagine that we might somehow 'change' in the future if we go through some kind of transformation and find that there exists some kind of plane outside of time and space-time. If we were able to do that, then it would be like a two-dimensional being suddenly able to walk through walls. He'd be violating the apparent physics of his former 'world', but he would not be violation the physics of his new time. He would be indistinguishable from a magician or a god to the 2 dimensional 'flatlanders'.

So in summary, though we might eventualy be able to send information or something through space time, generally we could not retrieve it nor could we 'travel' with physical bodies I think, at least until some kind of major evolution or other development occurred.