SCI: Time Travel 101: A How To Guide

Time travel is a conceptually theory, One that has no foundation to back its presentation

if time travel was possible, All the governments of the world would be on it like a bunch of vicious dogs trapped in a huge cage and there is 1 piece of sirloin.

Unfortunately Time travel remains a mythical theory, I wish it was real though, I would go back and change so much

Originally posted by Kingdom of darkness
Time travel is a conceptually theory, One that has no foundation to back its presentation

With all due respect.... Did you read the article? Because while it is not technologically feasible at this point in time... There IS in fact a rather strong foundation to back its presentation....

This foundation is still a theory but it moves closer and closer to being scientific fact each day... in fact parts of the theory of relativity have been proven fact.....

So if what is within this theory does end up becoming "fact" then it is possible and the only thing keeping us from achieving what is proposed in the article is technology.....

So I see your point... But disagree completely with you when you say there is no foundation for it.... There is my friend... and that foundation came from the brain of a man you may have heard of.... Albert Einstein.

Thanks for your comments. I appreciate them!

i think of time travel all the time on how good it would be to vist the past or the future to see how your kids,kids grow up to be. I wonder if in are life time we will ever see the future unfold how most of us wish it to be . with spaceships time travel and life on other planets. we all know deep down that were not the only race to live and the sooner the goverment stop trying to hide the proof of it all the better we will all feel about everything. i understand y people wudnt want all this but what about the people that do ... i think we have bein visted by time travellers before but have not bein told . thanks. people intrested in time travel give me a shout with ur questions .

How did I not read this thread yet.
Although it's an old one, I've enjoyed it very much.
Someday, maybe just someday my great grandson or granddaughter will come back for me and i'll get to see the time machine, then i'll come back here and post it was true!
Imagine that.
lol
Niceone for that S&F

Originally posted by Dr Cosma
How did I not read this thread yet.

Well, it was just moved from the ATS news forum to here to make room for the ATS Live radio threads and all that. I am thankful for the move though, because it has the potential to be seen by people who have not seen it yet.

I am glad you liked it! I loved writing it. It is a thread I am very proud of. Hey, who knows. Here is to our grandchildren

While "just a matter of technology", they are some pretty vexing problems...even with just the forward time travel.

1) The energy source - something to power such a craft (going 99.9% the speed of light or more)
2) The ship - would need to stand up to the punishment of going so fast
3) The crew - how would you keep the crew from being made into jelly at the back of the ship
4) Obstacles - I'd imagine a small asteroid would be doom at light speed or near it.

On wormholes, yeah, I had the same idea when I first heard of them (what if you could plot a path through one reaching into the pass (as they are tubes through space AND time), theoretically. However, the whole "need to be energy" thing is a bit tricky, as is then re-becoming mass on the other end.

Kind of like the idea of transporters. Sorry, but I do NOT want to be atomized and then reassembled.

Originally posted by Gazrok


Kind of like the idea of transporters. Sorry, but I do NOT want to be atomized and then reassembled.

it does sound rather painful, no? Well, who knows. As technology evolves... I will be more than curious to see where science takes us.

Originally posted by gimme_some_truth
[pressimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/26c009918447.jpg[/pressimg] Through out my life I have heard many people say, “If I knew then what I know now” or  “If I could do it all over again”. I suppose many people have pondered at one point or another, what it would be like to travel in time. As a kid I wondered what it would be like. I never thought very much about the science behind it, or whether or not it was even possible, I just knew I wanted to build a time machine.

By Scott Lenig
2009-08-08

I recall several times digging around in my parent’s garage, looking for tools and knick-knacks that look like they might belong on a time machine. However, despite my scientific initiative, my parents always thwarted my efforts before I was able to get the engine off of our lawn mower. I was left to simply contemplate what time travel is all about.

I wondered, is time travel really possible? Is there a science behind it all? I guess if you think about it, we are all time traveling right now. Only it is just no fun moving through time at the simple pace of one second per second.  Let’s face it, when we fantasize about time travel we dream of going hundreds, maybe even thousands of years into the future or past.

Well, Time travel is possible. Scientists have even known the formula for over a century now. If one mention’s the word “Scientist,” Albert Einstein is often the first name that comes to mind, and for good reason too.

In 1905 when Einstein was just 25 years old he published his special theory of relativity. In his theory the central idea is that time is elastic. Essentially time can stretch and shrink. I can sense the readers out there thinking to them selves “How exactly can time stretch and shrink?” Well, the answer is relatively simple. All you have to do is move really fast.

You see according to the special theory of relativity, the exact amount of time it takes you to get from one spot to another depends on how the observer is moving. In other words, the faster you move the faster you get there.

But just how fast can one move? Science shows that we cannot move at the speed of light (186,000 miles per second). We cannot because the faster an object moves, the more massive it becomes and the more massive it becomes the more energy is required for it to build speed. Simply put, collecting enough energy to go the speed of light is just out of the question.

Light is an interesting subject to think about. The nearest star to our planet is about 4 light years away from us. Traveling at 186,000 miles per second it takes that light 4 years just to reach earth. This means that at night when you go outside and look at the stars you are actually looking into the past. The light that you are seeing from those stars actually first shone years and years ago.

Our own galaxy is somewhere around 100,000 light years across. So using conventional travel methods it would take a whopping 100,000 years to go from one side of the Milky Way to the other, That is of course, if we were able to go the speed of light.

At least that is how long it would seem to take if we were watching from here on earth. To the Astronaut it would seem to have taken a much shorter amount of time. Why? Because time is stretched by speed, the faster you move the more time slows down, or as I said before, the faster you go the faster you get there!

To quote the book How To Build Time machines by Paul Davies “ In a spaceship traveling at 99 percent the speed of light, a trip across the galaxy would take just 14,000 years. At 99.99 percent of the speed of light, the gain is even more spectacular: The trip lasts a mere 1,400 years. If you could reach 99.999999 percent of the speed of light, the trip could be completed in a human lifetime.”

To further explain in more understandable terms picture this; here we are in 2009 and you and your friend have acquired a space ship that can go 99 percent of the speed of light. Your friend gets in the ship and takes off at near the speed of light. They travel 10 light years then turn right around and comes right back at the same speed. When their trip is over, only three years have gone by for them. But here on earth it is now the year 2029. It took your friend ten earth years to get there and ten earth years to get back but because she was the one in motion only 3 years have gone by for her.

In a way your friend has just time traveled 20 years into the future and it only took 3 years. Now let’s just hope your friend does not change their mind and decide they want to go back in time so things can be the way the used to be. If that is the case it may seem that your friend is out of luck. For high speed motion is a one-way ticket to the future.

But is there a way to get back? The short answer is yes. But what is that way? In 1937 a man named W.J van Stockum published a paper in the Scottish scientific journal. Van Stockum used Einstein’s work to figure out what would happen if an object went into orbit around a rotating cylinder. What he learned was that if this cylinder spun fast enough the object could return to the time before it even left. What this means is that a closed loop in space is also a closed loop in time.

When I first heard about this I wondered why no one really knew much about it. It seems like such a revolutionary discovery. Then I realized the flaw in Van Stockums logic. In order for his idea to work, this cylinder would have to be infinitely long.

About 10 years later however, another person found a much more realistic way of traveling into the past. An Austrian logician named Kurt Godel. Godel learned that if the entire universe were rotating, it should be possible to find orbits in space that actually spiral back into the past.

All though his work in this area was meant more as a simple curiosity than a serious look into the matter, his work slowly led scientists to look into something that was coined “Einstein-Rosen Bridges”, better known today as wormholes.

Worm holes open up the possibility of traveling anywhere (or when) in the universe by shortening the distance between point A and point B rather than shortening the amount of time it takes to get there. This works because to open a wormhole is to fold the universe in on itself.

Think of it this way. Imagine the universe as a piece of paper. On one end of the paper is a dot. That dot is earth. On the other end is a planet that we are interested in exploring. Well this planet is millions of light years away so by conventional means going there is out of the question. Fold that piece of paper in half so that one planet is right above or below the other and you have just shortened the distance between the two by a great amount and therefore have made it possible to go there.

Opening a wormhole loops the universe on itself there by shortening the distance between two objects and just as Van Stockum wrote, a loop in space is also a loop in time. To loop time is to be able to go to any time you wish.

What this all means is that with the help of rapid movement and high speed your friend can travel into the future, and with the help of a wormhole your friend can also go into the past.

As you see, scientists have known how to travel through time for many years. The only thing that has kept us from doing so is a lack of technology. The question is will we ever gain this technology and if so how will it affect the universe and our daily lives? Only time will tell.


[edit on 8-8-2009 by gimme_some_truth]

Excellent post. I dont no if i should even bother to comprehend this but I'm lost. A light year is measured by how long it takes light to travel in a year. If a guy goes the speed of light for ten years then he s ten years older all the same. Maybe the watch your wearing is going to get messed up on the ride but who is to say time is stretched? And how could anyone know the measurement s of the time stretch? How can you know that time stretches? Im trying to absorb this and its not sinking in.

also, if I left this minute at 06:30:02 and traveled fast enough to arrive back in this same location at exactly 06:30:02 Would I see myself leaving? Even better what if i went faster than what it took to arrive at that time? Would I be there to send myself off with a hug? Im gonna need one after trying to figure this out. And one last thing. How the heck could it be possible to fold space? That one is way over my head. Get it? If we are going to fold space, would nt we have to be able to reach the other end for folding? Is a worm hole only an idea? They dont exist do they?

reply to post by gimme_some_truth

Here's the Truth:
All scientists, mathematicians, and theorists are missing the primary ingredients of Time Travel. They have leaped into the Sci-fi impossible without looking at some basic facts. I personally would love to be able to Time Travel. I would go ahead in time and gather Stock Market charts and then come back and be a billionaire.

Here are some practical things that must be reconciled to allow the smallest possibility of travelling in time.
1) Life is constantly in a state of decay. We are not physically eternal. In order to go back in time you have to assume that every form of matter must be captured in a time wave protal to the nth degree of timing. Every sound, light, physical matter, odor...all must be assumed to be eternally existent in order to go back and visit every minute detail.
2) In the future you would have to assume that the same events and matter already exist in all forms of matter simply awaiting to be set in motion. This is not even rational for some of the most educated minds of science and theory.
3) Time is simply an element of measure. It only exists on earth. It began at creation when God said, "the evening and the morning were the first day." Time and seasons are based on the rotation of the earth, the earth's revolution around the sun. Out in space away from our solar system time does not exist. so the person who travels light years for 3 light years vs. 20 years on earth...they were still gone and absent for 20 earth years. They will be 20 earth years older just like all of us.
4) Even the slightest deviation, a change in pace of a passer-by, someone stopping to give you directions like Basiago, any change would cause a change in the already delicate system of the eternal ripple of time and activity.
5) The g-force to reach the speed of light would not allow any creature to survive. They still would have to overcome the pressure differential to create a zero gravity within the sealed craft that would hold together at such speeds.
6) If you went to the future to visit yourself and give yourself some type of advice you would not be surprised to see yourself because you would already know you had met yourself from the past. If you go into the past to correct something with yourself you would not have needed to do this because you would have already been visited by your future self when that original time occurred.

That is the dilemma. If we are simply waiting for the future to come so we can achieve Time travel to go back in time and correct history. Then that is evidence that all matter is not eternal and we are on a single timeline headed in a single direction. When time is passed it is gone forever, never to be regained or reviewed.

7) There is a possible solution that scientists have overlooked. They have overlooked it because they would have to admit that God exists. The answer is found in the Bible. I have a theory as to how it might be achieved but all the issues I've mentioned make me believe it is impossible.

Ok, thanks man, that was an amazing read. It also provides a few points of research for me. I've been studying time traveler's for a while now. My only concern is that the energy it would take to do this must be extream.