The Hazards of Time Travel

Hello to all. I was thinking this over the other day and a few things kept bugging me. I'm sure there's a workaround for the more likely problems, but if time travel ever becomes a reality for the everyday man, it seems it would be a lot more trouble than it's worth. Some examples:

Language Barriers

Forget foreign languages. It's difficult enough to understand each other when we speak the same language in the same century. Years ago I read "Trainspotting", a 244-page novel written almost entirely in Scottish dialect, and I honestly had an easier time learning Swedish than getting through it. A hundred years ago a high percentage of the words we use today in English didn't even exist, much like many of the words from that period have fallen out of use. Go back 400 years and you'd be hard pressed to identify a single phrase in a written document. Remember The Faerie Queene? Apparently people spoke like that in their everyday life. Imagine trying to imitate it when you step out of your time travel booth and some curious onlooker wants to know exactly what you think you're doing falling out of empty air like that. Try explaining it to the authorities.

And what about words and phrases that change meaning over time?

Some examples:

Artificial - This originally meant ‘full of artistic or technical skill’. Now its meaning has a very different slant.

Nice - This comes from the Latin ‘not to know’. Originally a ‘nice person’ was someone who was ignorant or unaware.

Awful - This meant ‘full of awe’ i.e. something wonderful, delightful, amazing. However, over time it has evolved to mean exactly the opposite.

Brave - This once was used to signify cowardice. Indeed, its old meaning lives on in the word ‘bravado’.

Counterfeit - This once meant a perfect copy. Now it means anything but.

Source

The problem gets even worse if we venture into the future. We have no way of knowing that "Hello there!" 50 years from now won't be a recognized declaration of war.


Curious Cuisine

Ever travel to a foreign country and find yourself scanning the local menu for something you can identify? Something that won't offend your delicate palate? In the Seychelles it's perfectly normal to eat bat, if you're used to it, as one travel writer learned the hard way:

I had never eaten bat, but I figured that since bats eat fruit, it couldn’t be that bad. I ordered mine grilled. I can honestly say it was the single worst thing I have ever eaten in my entire life. The wings have more bones than any piece of fish on the planet. I’m lucky I didn’t choke. But choking may have been preferable to spitting out bat stubble, which I had to do since the bat wasn’t cleaned all that well before cooking. The meat, all one-half ounce of it, was nasty. The only way I knew I could get the taste out of my mouth was by drinking some tequila. There wasn’t any. In fact, there was no liquor at all.

Several other restaurant patrons and I took a ferry to get to another island. I got sick, so did most everyone else who ate bat. It was like a horror movie. I’m still trying to get the image out of my head of bat flying out of my mouth. On the other hand, the ant larvae taco I had in Mexico was great. If you put on enough hot sauce, most anything is good.

Source

So obviously making the right culinary choice is crucial. But in time travel it would be less a matter of comfort and more a matter of actually surviving a meal. Think about it for a second. In modern times, sanitation and food purification are pretty well advanced in developed countries. What our ancestors ate without a flinch would likely cause our wimpy modern-day stomachs to contort and possibly implode. Their bodies were used to it and knew nothing else. The same goes for drinking water. The only solution I can see for the dedicated time traveler is to either fast for the duration of the trip and hope not to get stuck, or hope that science perfects a wonder pill capable of killing all imaginable microbes and bacteria, past and present. Even then it's still a dice toss.


The Ever Shifting Landscape

One of the things that always worried be about randomly jumping through time was the fear that I'd find myself embedded in a building. Or a tree.

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How can we know for sure that (a) we'll wind up exactly where we plot our coordinates, and (b) that if we're randomly traveling we won't become a semi-permanent part of the landscape? The future is the bigger gamble, naturally. That nice open field of today could well be the mega-mall of tomorrow, and if you take plate tectonics and continental drift into account, on a long enough timeline you might as well just throw out all existing maps and put your faith in a good luck charm.


Appearance

Traveling into the future could be terrifying for the first man, at least. Who's to say that one particular race wouldn't be especially persecuted at some point along the timeline? And if we traveled far enough back beyond where there is a verifiable record of mankind's interactions, it's another blind leap. Blue eyes could be a sign to the locals that you're possessed by demons. Dark skin could mean you *are* a demon. With so many drop-off points along the curve, there's no real way of knowing until you get there.

These are just a few points that have always nagged at me. Any ideas on feasible solutions or other potential problems that aren't often addressed?

Keep in mind that the sun (and every planet with it) is constantly moving through the universe. If you were to go back or ahead in time, you might actually end up in space! :x

I believe that time travel although theoretically possible is literally impossible. It simply cannot be successfully done. I do like the original post however. S&F.

This is the problem with time travel... (as the other posters have also mentioned)

The universe is made up of some insane amount of energy, atoms, molecules, etc, that are all placed at an exact position in space. We splice together the movements of these things and refer to it as time.

If you technically wanted to go back in time, you would have to re-arrange every part of energy, atom and molecule as it existed in the EXACT same place in order for your frame of reference to be correct. This is why I don't believe that time travel is possible.

I do however believe you can look back in time if you were able to move faster than light, but as you slow down, you would return back to the speed of light and below and everything would return back to your frame of reference in the "current" time.

Now, if you honestly think string theory is real, and that every choice we make fractures the universe into another dimension or universe of it's own, then time travel could be quite real. But by going through time, you would actually be leaving the dimension you exist in and would probably never find your way back.

Fun to think about, S&F for a thought provoking post.

~Namaste

Very insightful, welcome to the club!

S&F

Originally posted by MrFake
Keep in mind that the sun (and every planet with it) is constantly moving through the universe. If you were to go back or ahead in time, you might actually end up in space! :x

Good point! I get a headache whenever I add space to the mix.

Originally posted by csimon
I believe that time travel although theoretically possible is literally impossible. It simply cannot be successfully done. I do like the original post however. S&F.

Thanks! I don't think it's possible outside of theory either. It would mess things up too much on a cosmic level and the universe would probably cease to exist.

yep my worst fear would be ending up in another time, in another dimension. What if in that dimension, the people i love, dont love me anymore? I hear there are just an infinite amount of possible "other simultaneous lives" I would hate to get stuck!
Time travel will never be my thing.

Reminds me of McFly in Back to the Future

Language barrier:

Lou: You gonna order something, kid?
Marty McFly: Ah, yeah... Give me - Give me a Tab.
Lou: Tab? I can't give you a tab unless you order something.
Marty McFly: All right, give me a Pepsi Free.
Lou: You want a Pepsi, PAL, you're gonna pay for it

Marty McFly: Whoa, this is heavy.
Dr. Emmett Brown: There's that word again; "heavy". Why are things so heavy in the future? Is there a problem with the earth's gravitational pull?


Shifting landscape:

When he comes back, he arrives on a train track.

reply to post by SonOfTheLawOfOne

Very well said. Star for you. String theory is interesting to think about but I can't see it as a real possibility unless the splits are artificially induced (via particle accelerators perhaps? I'm ignorant on the dynamics), and then I imagine we'd be in for serious problems (if it hasn't happened already). Sometimes I fear that the un-tampered with universe is mind-numbingly ordinary and our only real escape is through fantasy...

reply to post by AnteBellum

Thank you! It was fun to put together.

Maybe you could solve the displacement problem with a transmitter - receiver setup. It would mean you couldn't go back before the receiver was invented, though. But, it would have the advantage that you would only have to build the receiver. Then, just sit back and wait for someone from the future to send you a transmitter.