The Philosophy Of Time Travel

Im sure theres lots of topics about this but i just want to get opinions. I was talking to a friend of mine the other day whos studying physics in college and i love getting complicated answers out of him even if i dont understand them. I asked him "Do you think we'll ever develop the means to travel back in time?" and he said back to me "We'll never have time travel at least at a controlled level if any at all" i was thinking we must be able to some how then he said "do you know why?, because no one has come back yet" made sense and i believe him. Just want to get other peoples beliefs on this subject.

Thanks
Mk

I really don't think physical time-travel is realy pratical, when you could do it through forms of consciousness.

true, a sort of look but not touch scenario?

Originally posted by MKULKTRA121
true, a sort of look but not touch scenario?

I think that's the only option that would keep our universial rule-set the way it is.

Originally posted by MKULKTRA121
"We'll never have time travel at least at a controlled level if any at all" i was thinking we must be able to some how then he said "do you know why?, because no one has come back yet" made sense and i believe him. Just want to get other peoples beliefs on this subject.

One thing that time travelers would be particularly adept at would be covering their tracks. All they have to do is read the newspapers. If they make a mistake and their cover is blown, all they have to do is go back and correct the mistake.

As for possible time travel examples, I always think that the 1937 Huey Long assassination might be worth looking into. The man was a strong contender for the presidency, and is still strangely popular (www.hueylong.com...). Unfortunately, he was also an extreme isolationist. If he had won, he might not have jumped into WWII nearly as fast as Roosevelt, giving the Axis more time to consolidate their gains and develop better weapons, leading to a possible Allied defeat, or at least stalemate.

The facts of the assassination are still in dispute. Dr. Carl Austin Weiss was the gunman, but there's question as to whether or not Weiss made the fatal shot or one of Long's own bodyguards. Either way, there's enough ambiguity there to suggest that a time traveler could have slipped into the confusion somewhere to do the job.

As noted above, there's also the notion that while physical time travel might not be possible, it might be possible to "psychically" time travel to inhabit and control a person's body in the past in a kind of possession. It wouldn't leave behind any telltale physical evidence, but it could still be effective in witnessing and changing events in the past.

Just a couple stray ideas I've had kicking around.

[edit on 4-12-2007 by Nohup]

thanks for the reply i like those ideas, my own ideas were always of a terminator based time travel scenario apperaing in the middle of no where in a big blue ball of electricity, but then come along all the paradoxes of time travel and the whole fact that no one (at least that we know of) has come back to either assassinate hitler at birth or stop 9/11 etc, but then again maybe they did and instead of changing our future they created a tangent universe...confusing stuff lol

MK

Originally posted by MKULKTRA121
but then come along all the paradoxes of time travel and the whole fact that no one (at least that we know of) has come back to either assassinate hitler at birth or stop 9/11 etc, but then again maybe they did and instead of changing our future they created a tangent universe...confusing stuff lol

Not knowing the future, maybe the worst possible thing to do would be to assassinate Hitler or stop 9/11. My Huey Long example could be a case of stopping an American Hitler before he had a chance to come to power. World leaders often come from the military. How difficult would it be to find and kill a future Hitler during the course of some battle in such a way that it would never be discovered? Not too hard.

And, as you say, maybe something worse did happen at some point, and the state of the world today is a kind of patch job resulting from numerous attempts to steer the past either toward or away from things we'll never know about. We're living in the alternate universe, the divergent timeline, created by time traveler intervention.

And maybe somebody will go back again someday and do something else and we'll never have existed. Although since I apparently exist, and apparently only in one universe, I don't think that's happened (or will happen).

If time travelling were available for us, our history and world would be a lot of mess,even causality would never work. History should by no means be changed by anybody and nobody can change it.

Please change thread title!

This thread is not about the philosophy of time travel but about the possibility of it.

I feel the thread title should be changed accordingly. I came here hoping for an interesting discussion and found the same old speculation you find in every other time travel thread.

Actually we already time travel. I have been on a 60 year trip now.

No, I'm not being humorous about this at all. We travel in the arrow of time, as we understand it, or maybe as we agree to understand it. And because we know that one direction is possible, as inquiring creatures, we speculate on the chances of changing that direction somehow.

Is the past secure? I doubt there is anything except logic to "prove" that it is. CT is a good example of changing the past. Consider that the death of JFK was agreed to by many as having been the work of Lee Harvey Oswald. Then, a greater number of people came to think there were multiple gunmen, and therefore a conspiracy. In a certain respect, the past is now altered.

The past is personal, for no one else can exactly share a memory of it in total detail simply because we are each unique individuals. My past, that is, the past as it is fixed in my mind, is the past that is true only to me. And if I change my perception of the past, then for all intents and purposes, I have altered it in as much reality as it has.

The past, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.

Well time travel is actually possible (forward) but not in most people's view of time travel. Using the concept of time dilation etc...

This is how i like to think of it.
The future is mere hopes and the past is only memories. So kind of impossible to 'time travel'.

Ok Tell me if I am wrong in ANYTHING. This is a theory of mine that I am currently preparing to test. On Time Travel. Not physically, cause that is not possible. But mental influence on events in the past to alter the outcome in the future.

It goes something like this:

According to quantum theory, there is the possibility of having infinite numbers of universes. Each one created by something that had multiple outcomes. Each universe playing out one of the possible outcomes for an event.

For instance, in this Universe, your wife leaves you today. In the second Universe she doesn't and ends up bearing the Son you always wanted. The son you will never have if she leaves you. Somewhere in the middle is the possibility that she DID in fact leave you but later reconsidered and you ended up with your son in the end anyways.

Altering our OWN universe would simply take too much energy. We would have to rewrite EVERYTHING that happened that was affected by that one situation. What if you simply crossed timelines and ended up on the Universe where she didn't leave you? Or even better and easier to accomplish, the more similar one. Where she STILL left you but reconsidered it later that day?

What would be required to do this? My answer to this is simple. You don't have to detect if the universe with this possibilty exists, because you KNOW it already exists because of the situations possibility. You simply need a method to get there. A sort of influencial remote viewing technique could be use, IMO, to see and switch to that other Existence. Chances are, if you on this plane are attempting this, then another you somewhere else is also attempting this. That being said, there would never be an unbalance where two of you exist in one dimension. At least two of you would be succesful. And the possibilty of you entering the plane where you and your wife are together and the other you hates her AND you successfully crossed time lines, is possible! The two "you's" swap. Both are now happy with their situation in life.

I suppose this goes along the lines of quantum computing as well. Two calculations are wrong. The one on your timeline is wrong but it is right somewhere else. And the somewhere else makes a wrong calculation that is right for here. So the two swap, making the calculation 100% correct on both timelines.

Possible? I think so. With our minds we can accomplish damned near anything. We all know that creative visualization can help to accomplish everyday things. So why not take it to a higher...more difficult level? Creative Visualization and a machine or mechanism to concentrate that energy on a specific point in order to FORCE convergence of the two realities.

This was my starting Post from another thread of mine in Paranormal Studies

[edit on 7-12-2007 by deadangel23]

athur c clarke recently had a excellent book about looking but not touching the past. What happens in that book is a very plausible scenario in case it does get discovered.

if something is changed while "back in time" (or even in this time for that matter), that shouldnt have been changed for this time (or the future), will the small change become exponential? i have read many books about time travel, and none of them were inforamtional. they were novels and the like. all theories were different in some way, but i am boggled.

if one were to find a way to travel back in time, it would be like a timeline of a person's life going straight for a while and then curve upward and loop back around to another spot on the timeline in the past. not only does this mean that there are infinite numbers of us, earth, and everything, but doesnt it also mean that said person would be stuck forever in his self created loop, doomed to repeat the process for eternity?

one more thing. Is there, in any of your theories, an end to the semmingly endless cycle of time? is some person, somewhere, in some time, doing something, like eating a bowl of cheerios, for the first time, so that there is no one ahead of him in time who ate the bowl before him, leaving him doomed to to the same? is there someone who is actually CHOOSING their fate instead of having their future selves choose it for them?

The Philosophy of Time Travel reminds me of the movie Donnie Darko. In the movie, Roberta Sparrow (aka grandma death) wrote a book called the philosophy of time travel.

Originally posted by SwAngo
if something is changed while "back in time" (or even in this time for that matter), that shouldnt have been changed for this time (or the future), will the small change become exponential? i have read many books about time travel, and none of them were inforamtional. they were novels and the like. all theories were different in some way, but i am boggled.

if one were to find a way to travel back in time, it would be like a timeline of a person's life going straight for a while and then curve upward and loop back around to another spot on the timeline in the past. not only does this mean that there are infinite numbers of us, earth, and everything, but doesnt it also mean that said person would be stuck forever in his self created loop, doomed to repeat the process for eternity?

one more thing. Is there, in any of your theories, an end to the semmingly endless cycle of time? is some person, somewhere, in some time, doing something, like eating a bowl of cheerios, for the first time, so that there is no one ahead of him in time who ate the bowl before him, leaving him doomed to to the same? is there someone who is actually CHOOSING their fate instead of having their future selves choose it for them?

the movie butterfly effect has a good theory on it. The butterfly effect means that one small change could potentially change EVERYTHING we know to exist. But how can you be choosing someone elses fate whent hat someone is YOU? you are still choosing your own fate since it is yourself you are affecting. Like I had said, time travel within our own reality is not possible exactly because of the reason you said. We would get caught doing the same thing over and over.

But, by going back in time, you create a separate reality where you went back. The one where you DIDN'T go back still exists. Once you complete your task in the past, ANOTHER reality is created where the wanted events play out as intended with no need to travel back in that reality. The simple act of going back in the first place creates 3 different realities on the simplest level. After that, nothing is created. Only played out in their own existence.

It is my understanding that in order to achieve this, we have to comprehend a deterministic existence. Where nothing is chosen, only played out based on the solutions and situations we are placed in. Every possible outcome plays out in its own existence. Finding the reality where the wanted outcome played out is the trick to achieving the task.

Which is why we don't see record of time travelers in our own existence. Because they exist in a separate reality where the intended results played out as if they were natural. Even though they created that reality by consciously altering the course of events in ORDER to play them out in a specific pattern. We see only that everything is random because we cannot exist on the same plane that we alter

Sorry for double post...

reply to post by MKULKTRA121


Maybe. Some group is doing that right now. But it's Math and Machine Plus a point in time. One Mistake and no one will be born to learn about the big bang, no going back to fix.

reply to post by deadangel23


Time lines are time lines change one for better, might make next one worse, to understand the idea of traving in time Google: timeline and check the graphs on recorded history, to see if you had means to undertake the trip would you do so ?

Originally posted by bone13
reply to post by deadangel23

 

Time lines are time lines change one for better, might make next one worse, to understand the idea of traving in time Google: timeline and check the graphs on recorded history, to see if you had means to undertake the trip would you do so ?

I would most definitely do it. Time travel has fascinated me since I can remember. If I had the chance to view things first hand that only history books can talk about, I would do it in a heart beat