Laws against time travel

Time travel will happen and when it does what laws should there be in place to protect people, time and other aspects of time travel.

Should time travel be outlawed?

How about a law that you can only travel into the future? Therefore, not changing the present?

One way ticket, you can never come back?

Would you still use time travel if those restrictions were imposed?

I think traveling back into the past is really hard, because your atoms would reverse to the positions they originally held in the universe and your body and clothes would just cease to exist.

So possibly only forward and back to where you came from is possible with time traveling.

and there should be a law against it indeed since anything good that can be used bad, will be used in a bad way some day...

but since there are some persons who seem to be above the law I think it doesn't matter that much.

No time traveling for me, I would just prefer a more peaceful dimension with some higher moral standards.

The only way to do it properly without affecting anything would be to travel as a detached observer... which is probably the only way it can be done. Otherwise you'd change the course of history the moment you went back and it wouldn't really be time travel. Because then you'd be creating a new timeline.

reply to post by Grey Magic


Grey I never heard that line of reasoning about the particles, but I see the logic. Reversing time would be insane. You would have to jump back.

A more important question is sending messages back in time. Which by the way can already be done. Has been done.

It is well documented and accepted physics. It was done by transmitting microwave waveforms through an iron girder. The original documentation dealt with the transmission of a Mozart tune back a few milliseconds before it was sent.

www.photonics.com...

I remember reading a story where people found a new supply of energy, seemingly free, they used some machine to absorb energy from the past. Of course they quickly realised that if they were doing this and kept doing this their future selves or ancestors could be doing the same to them from the future and quickly banned the practice. It was a Douglas Adams story I believe.

I don't think we know enough about cause and effect to know if it would or would not cause damage, maybe time would sort itself out or maybe something bad would happen.

Another point is that even if you only travelled to the future it would be no better, you are assuming we are in the true present, to those in the future it would be the true present in their time too and what might seem the future for us would be the past for people even further forward in time. Hope that makes sense.

So I think there should be rules but I wouldn't know what really, or how to enforce them..

reply to post by CuriosityStrikes


It makes perfect sense, but it hurts my brain!

There is no reason to believe that messing with forward time does not damage the future.

Lets play a game, throw some scenarios out and see how they play out!

I travel forward in the future, and visit my great grand children. Seems harmless enough.

One day little Timmy is playing with his friends, this strangely dressed but kindly man approaches him. The perimiter defense systems for the playground which everyone knows better than to mess with trigger, sending the kindly fellow into convulsions. During the convulsions the man accidentally kicks Timmy, causing him to fear strangers. Timmy never gets married, and never has the 4 children he would have, one of whome saves the first interstellar bowling league from total destruction.

Originally posted by Kruel
The only way to do it properly without affecting anything would be to travel as a detached observer... which is probably the only way it can be done. Otherwise you'd change the course of history the moment you went back and it wouldn't really be time travel. Because then you'd be creating a new timeline.

Kruel If Quantum Mechanics tell us anything, it is that everything changes when it is observed.

Here is the problem: You don't KNOW! I mean really know whether your passive observer will blow out the future time line on the first trip. You could know by jumping to the same time repeatedly and monitoring carefully for changes, but then it is too late. The damage is done.

As far as the Copenhagen interpretation of QED which is the most popular interpretation and supports the multiple universe theory you mention. I do not believe it and find it laughable that physicists do.

There is one rule which no physicist will dare to challenge, and which goes right out the window with that interpretation. The second law of thermodynamics. No free energy!

When you make a choice and the potentials for two universes instantiate into a new universe to accomodate the choice, where does all the energy come from?

This is the ultimate free energy theory being peddeled by physicists.

Why don't we just spin up a new universe and suck all the energy out to power this world? What the hell it didn't exist before did it? No loss! There are infinite more out there!

Originally posted by Marsrising
...How about a law that you can only travel into the future? Therefore, not changing the present?
...

You most certainly could change the present, if you traveled into the future. Assuming you came back, that is.

I would be a rich, rich man if someone could give me a sports almanac from 2009.

that without the technology any physical means metaphysically of violating coporate or temporal law as well as common and by laws be presecuted by means of the looking glass methods.

According to Dan Bursh from MJ12. If u go back into time you will create a different timeline with a different future. But the timeline that u originally came from will remain the same.

We are living in multiple realities. Meaning the future has already happen. And when psychics predict the future, they are actually taping into one of the timelines from the future, therefore, it is not 100% accurate because there are multiple ones and it would sometimes be similar, but not always the same.

Time travel is real. Just look at the stars at night. U are actually looking at the stars billions of years ago, therefore, u are living in the past from the star standpoint. However, if u live on a planet near the star u are living in the present.. In space there is no such thing is time, therefore, it can be manipulated.

Bet you can’t answer this????

Read carefully.

“Jane” is left at an orphanage as a foundling. When “Jane” is a teenager, she falls in love with a drifter, who abandons her but leaves her pregnant. Then disaster strikes. She almost dies giving birth to a baby girl, who is then mysteriously kidnapped. The doctors find that Jane is bleeding badly, but, oddly enough, has both sex organs. So, to save her life, the doctors convert “Jane” to “Jim.”

“Jim” subsequently becomes a roaring drunk, until he meets a friendly bartender (actually a time traveler in disguise) who wisks “Jim” back way into the past. “Jim” meets a beautiful teenage girl, accidentally gets her pregnant with a baby girl. Out of guilt, he kidnaps the baby girl and drops her off at the orphanage. Later, “Jim” joins the time travelers corps, leads a distinguished life, and has one last dream: to disguise himself as a bartender to meet a certain drunk named “Jim” in the past.


Question: who is “Jane's” mother, father, brother, sister, grand- father, grandmother, and grandchild?

Originally posted by Cyberbian

Kruel If Quantum Mechanics tell us anything, it is that everything changes when it is observed.

Right. Which is why I said detached observer. In other words, someone who merely observes but doesn't project. Instead of going in the past you'd have to look into the past. It doesn't seem too impossible if you consider that waves emitted/reflected from the earth long ago are still out there bouncing around in space. It would be like reading a book, just the words are made up of waveforms instead of words and you would be putting yourself in the book, like the holodeck on star trek... but without a body or any way of interacting (including your thoughts being kept from interfering, which would be the case if you had no brain - the brain emits thoughts in the form of waves). So you'd be like a disembodied spirit.

Why don't we just spin up a new universe and suck all the energy out to power this world? What the hell it didn't exist before did it? No loss! There are infinite more out there!

That's an idea I've pondered as well. Actually if a point in space is spinning so fast that it's perception of time is infinitely faster than ours, we should be able to suck an infinite amount of energy from it. So the law of thermodynamics wouldn't be broken but the same result (infinite energy) would apply.

The way "time travel" is likely to happen is as 'virtual time travel'.

Through research, deduction and use of supercomputers it may eventually be possible to have enough data that an almost completely realistic and accurate virtual 'slice' of the past can be created.

Let's take the JFK thing as an example.

We take all the factoids known about Dallas in 1963 (and anything relevant in the past in Texas or Dallas or any other city involved, including Chicago and Florida where other assassination attempts were made) and input them into a supercomputer. I'm talking -everything- from names of everyone who ever lived in Dallas to every single bit of testimony, to everyone who ever knew or came near all of the principles, to super-accurate plots of every square millimeter of Dealy Plaza and surroundings. We input the entire history of the United States from the time of Washington, to the era when Joseph Kennedy was rising to power, to the machinations going on in Europe, the Mossad, Russia, Corsica; you name it, it's in there.

Then we have the computer give weights to all that information, such that it can give us the top two or three logical scenarios. We can even have the computer be heuristic and have it 'learn' and be able to update itself if any information is learned during a walk-through.

Then we construct the event in a 3-D virtual world so people can do a walk-through.

It will be nearly the same as being there, plus you will be in a type of 'God-mode' where you can infinitely zoom in or out, or go up in the air or under the ground.

Of course you won't be able to influence anything in your real current future (see below), but you can get a very robust experience.

You are able to experience 'the past', you can test hypotheses, you can even interact with the virtual inhabitants and ask them questions.

Now imagine the same scenario with any other past historical event you can imagine. It's really all about the density and accuracy of information and having it all in one place at one time. The experience will be as satisfying, if not more than any instance of 'actual science-fiction' type time travel and a lot safer.

The same thing is true about exploration of the Galaxy and eventually the Universe. We will not need to 'go there'.

The experience will be like having a completely up-to-date real time, accurate to the millimeter Google Earth on steroids.

It's all about the data and computing power. It will make any potential experience of 'real time travel' pale in comparison. Remember, it's likely that any real 'sci-fi' time travel will involve an alternate dimension, and an alternate time line. Like that situation, in the virtual model, the only limitation will be the lack of ability to influence the 'real' future.

In fact you could even go ahead and influence the events you were studying and have the virtual world fast forward and show you what your 'interference' would accomplish. You'll be able to prevent Oswald (or whomever you choose that you think the killers were) from being born, or prevent him from going to work that day and see what the outcome might be.

Make sense?







[edit on 20-6-2008 by Badge01]

We don't even know what time really is, so it's a little odd to think it can have all these rules and limits associated with it.

Originally posted by Nohup
We don't even know what time really is, so it's a little odd to think it can have all these rules and limits associated with it.

As a form of measurement it can be assessed and have laws associated with it. You are referring to time in a philosophical way, But, I am referring to it in a scientific way.