Any thoughts on this?

R

Risata206

Chrono Cadet
What I love about time travel possiblities is the paradoxes and the "hows that possible." I just went to a thread where someone thought that their future self called them to warn them about something.

I think that if your future self called, warned you, you follow the advice, then your future self would have no need to call you because whatever happened to make them call, no longer happened.

So, is it then possible, that we do have time travel, people can go into the future, but, they stay "stuck" there, as in, they can't contact us from the future? They can only travel back to the present.

But let's say this. I travel 5 years into the future. I see that I am miserable at a job that I took. Or even simplier, I see that I had been in a car accident.

So, now I go back to the present. Armed with information about my future, I now set out to AVOID the bad stuff that I saw. So, I don't take that job, or, I avoid driving the day I was in the accident.

So then how is it possible, that my future self "saw" all this, if in fact, I went back and tried to change it?

So I believe that if you are able to get to the future-you are stuck there. We don't need a time machine to travel to the past, we have memories for that. And if we went back to the past to try and prevent something and it occured, then when we got back to the present it would be totally different than when we left it. Because of the event you prevented, you didn't experience some of the things that led you where you are today. So you could come back to the present and be living in a totally different state, or even be dead.

So my thoughts are simply if we are able to time travel-its a one way ticket. You are MIA in the present, and have to rebuild your life in the future. Kinda like that guy in the UK that "disappeared" for 5 years and then re-appeared out of nowhere and has no memories of the past 5 years.

Since things like that don't happen all the time-because if they did, they'd be noticed and reported on just like the above story-it leaves me to assume that if tt does exsist, nobody comes back to their original point of leaving.
 
another question, this one on physics. help!

I just posted that when we look at the stars, we are looking at the past. But when I really sit and think about it.....huh? So time is relative to the speed of light, which is why its theorize that if we can transcend that, then we can time travel.....

but how is it possible to see a star that no longer is there? How do we know that? If I was on a star, looking at earth, would I also see the earth's past? is the year on earth that I would see, relative to the year I am in on the star??

Oh god. Here we go, my head is going to explode....can someone dumb down basic physics to me? LOL
 
let me try to answer the second question first....you have to understand how your vision works. when light enters your eye you see this process of light (photons) entering can be simplified as the back of your eyeball feeling photons hit that sensitive membrane. the different wavelengths amplitudes and frequency feel different to your eye just as something sticky, soft or hard feels to your hand. now understanding this, when light escapes from a star and reaches the back of your eye it would have traveled a great distance. when you see it it took a great deal of time to get to your eye so when you see it the star could have gone through huge changes. to see the star change in the now go (real time) you would have to travel to the star and reduce the amount of distance so the reduce amount of time it takes the photon to travel into your eye. like if something happened to you far away by the time you found out it probably aready changed.

the first is a little complicated, its like trying to bounce a ball through the same path, its impossible. if you went to the future and came back it would be as if you saw where the ball went. even if you did try to do the same path you have already taken a different route. close but not the same.
 
Risata,

Satown has it correct.

Light travels at a finite velocity. It takes a finite interval of time for light to reach your eyes after it leaves the source. So, no matter how distant the source is you always see the past - never the present. If a star is 4 light years away from you as you look at it you see the star as it was four years ago. If the source is one kilometer from you you see it as it was ~1/300,000 seconds ago.

The first part of your question is probably the reason why we have time travel forums. We don't really know the answer to your question. First, we don't even know if time travel to the past or future is actually possible in this universe. We have theories and the theories have assumptions built into them that describe a universe that has certain physical characteristics that allow for time travel (in theory). But we really don't know if the assumptions describe our universe.

So, is it then possible, that we do have time travel, people can go into the future, but, they stay "stuck" there, as in, they can't contact us from the future? They can only travel back to the present.
Click to expand...

There's a bit of a logic issue in the problem here. If you travel to the future, get some previously unknown information, and then travel back to the "present" you have, in fact, traveled into the relative past with respect to the future that you traveled to to get the information. (I hope that that statement makes at least some sense.
)

On a metaphysical level there's a problem with trying to redefine events that are supposed to occur (but haven't yet occured with respect to the "present") based on information gathered by traveling into the future.

If the event that you're trying to redefine is simply the outcome of three or four balls bouncing around on a pool table then you could in theory have a good chance of forcing a specific outcome without unintentionally altering other seemingly unrelated events.

If the event involves the outcome of some event involving a human being several years into the future the degree of difficulty becomes hugely complex.

First, let's toss the Many Worlds Interpretation out of the problem.

The problem that the time traveler faces is that she has married the "wrong" person because during a time travel event 20 years into the future she discovers something about that person (details not necessary for our purpose).

So she goes back to a time before her marriage and avoids the event. She marries someone other than her original husband. This is somewhat satisfying for her, at least initially. But her change of partners has a cascading effect.

The person that she married the second go-round, Husband #2, was married to someone else in the initial scenario and eventually had children with that wife. The children no longer exist (nor do their extended progeny). Husband #2's initial wife is now married to someone else and they have children - who never existed in initial scenario. And this "Change of partners - Different progeny" event cascades throughout the world.

Twenty years later the world that she saw in her time travel event that caused her to initiate the change is no longer recognizable to her. And all she did was marry someone else.

I can even envision situations that ar much less invasive in appearance that lead to the same outcome as above.

I'm a time traveler. I witness Sally and Tommy meet one evening. It was quite accidental because Sally walked around a corner just as Tommy was turning the same corner and they bumped into each other. It was love at first bump. They got married and lived happily ever after.

On another time travel trip I recheck the event. It doesn't occur. I follow up and discover that Sally is a poster on TTI. A time traveler, the real deal as it turns out, is now posting on TTI and Sally is very intrested in the TT's story.

Instead of taking that walk at the appointed time that leads her to bump into Tommy she makes just one more post. When she later goes out she misses Tommy but 30 seconds. They never meet - they each end up marrying someone else.

Thereafter the result is the same as above. The time traveler on TTI was the indirect cause of the change even though s/he was taking steps to be as minimally invasive as possible.
 
Darby is correct. The smallest of events can ripple into changing major events.
One person can literally change the world.

On an even smaller note the time traveler can be close to Tommy and simply call his name out.
He is delayed for a couple of seconds turning his head and stopping for a second to see who that
might be as Sally barely noticing passes by Tommy. All the ripple events of children and no children was caused by one small calling of a name, whistling, or any other minor distraction.

The problem with the time traveler is he is not really all-knowing so this event can turn out in
several ways good or bad. Let's say your purpose was simply to stop a marriage and because you
distracted Tommy so much now he has his mind on the voice and not the corner and he walks out into
the street instead and gets hit by a car and dies. Another set of big ripples go out changing everything again.

Every person in this world is important. If you think you are not think of how many ripples you cause daily. The important thing is are you causing good or bad ripples? The choice is up to us.

If you are a good time traveler you can try your best and put the rest in God's hands. /ttiforum/images/graemlins/smile.gif
 
Pamela,

Every person in this world is important. If you think you are not think of how many ripples you cause daily. The important thing is are you causing good or bad ripples? The choice is up to us.
Click to expand...

But within the context that this story is shaped, one would have no knowledge of whether a ripple they are causing was "good" or "bad", hence your choice is immaterial. You cannot possibly know all the outcomes. So while you may think a ripple you cause is "for the good", it could very well create unending suffering for a great many people.

And therein lies YET ANOTHER "rub" with respect to Johnny Titor's Worldline Divergence metric. He made it up because he HAD to in order to make the story "work". But clearly within the context as you (and Darby) have laid out here, there is no possible way it could be a real metric.

RMT
 
But within the context that this story is shaped, one would have no knowledge of whether a ripple they are causing was "good" or "bad", hence your choice is immaterial. You cannot possibly know all the outcomes. So while you may think a ripple you cause is "for the good", it could very well create unending suffering for a great many people.
Click to expand...


Well, you have to make choices do you not?
You will still have "probabilities of an outcome" You make choices everyday and can kind of guess
of the probabilities your choices will make. Even though you cannot be 100 percent sure. You atleast have 2 or three guesses about which direction it could go in. You can never be sure but you have probabilities of outcomes. You are just not all-knowing... only God is.

That's why I added this:

"If you are a good time traveler you can try your best and put the rest in God's hands."
 
I agree if u calculated the number of people on earth see link below

http://opr.princeton.edu/popclock/popupclock.html

Multilpy that by the hours in the day and the choices that the entire population can make in that time frame, i think you get an idea how complex time travel is.

Is anyone good with maths would love to know? also is the mathimatical equation always changing and what is that called?

Merry Christmas to everyone at the TTI Family.
 
That's a lot of ripple and god talk, but not very meaningful. When you go fishing in a boat, do you worry about the effects of your bait or fish-removal up- or down-stream?
 
Ah, you can not make choices for someone else. Either you would be giving that person Orders, or that person would be a slave. In the end, you only can make choices for yourself. That though is still hard sometimes due to habits and like certain rules made over the years -- as in what time you go to work, although that may vary by a few minutes, what time you go home, and all of that kind of activity.

And yes, although a person is looking at the photons reaching the eye in the Present that left the star a long, long, very long time ago depending on the mileage, the time is still current at the star with other photons leaving. It is you who are in the Past concerning the viewpoint of someone else being right there up close to that star. But, to you, there is a future for that star that you have not seen yet, because the photons have not reached your eyes yet. So, the Past, Present, and Future in time is all there in the first place. That is because the star is obeying certain rules set out in this Universe, and unless things really go haywire, it just is not going to change all that quickly. Does it change though?

Well, according to an astronomer(s) who also is an astrophysicist, and perhaps the other person a cosmosologist, who wrote a new book, they think the Universe slowed down to form the Galaxies, but now it is speeding up again and expanding faster. (I guess according to data of certain satellites, the Hubble Telescope, and all of that data collected.)

So I guess then that although the speed of photons may be the same as in the speed of light being constant, then perhaps time is not really constant, but varying as distance gets larger since the Universe is still expanding.

Well, I guess I will have to think about that somewhat again someday perhaps.
 
Pamela,

Ray got it correct.

Yes, in both scenarios that I posed one relatively small event caused a significant set of changed events to cascade through history. That was a cautionary comment. Though one or two persons set the thing in motion they had no control over the cumulative outcome. I used the billiard ball example first because someday we might be able to completely control the outcome of a few billiard balls rolling around the table to some arbitrary degree of accuracy. But controlling the future interactions of billions of people isn't actually possible. They aren't moving around the world and interacting in the same way that billiard balls interact according to classical mechanics.

In other words, one person actually isn't important in this context. It's the chaos of the totality of the chain of events that is important.

In the scenarios that I posed the alternate world history included the elimination of people who were in the original history and the addition of people who didn't exist in the original history. If you allow the system to run for a sufficient period of time - which is probably less than 150 years - there will be no people left in the alternate history who existed in the original history. The alternate history would be completely different that the original history - for better or worse.

The real problem with these scenarios is that at the sub-atomic level of the quantum world the individual particles don't care about history. They don't have definite positions, velocities, masses or momenta. There's nothing in the laws of physics, at least as a first approximation, that prevents the alternate history from occuring. The sub-atomic particles aren't affected in ways that would be considered to be unphysical (physically impossible according to the laws of physics).
 
TimeNot,

Ah, you can not make choices for someone else.
Click to expand...

Exactly!

A time traveler might have good intentions but good or not making changes to historical events is not a good choice.

Killing Hitler before he rises to power thus preventing WWII sounds good but a whole generation of Baby Boomers might object to the change if they know that they probably won't be born.

And killing Hitler doesn't guarantee that a worse personality won't rise to power in Germany, that WWII is prevented or that Stalin wouldn't initiate the war in Europe instead of Germany. In 1939 Germany didn't initiate WWII in Europe by invading Poland alone. Nazi Germany and the USSR both invaded Poland as allies. They both had eyes on occupying all of Europe and they both had intentions of invading each other. Both Germany and the USSR had similar ideas for dealing with their "Jewish Problem". Stalin likely murdered more Jews that Hitler. The Soviets were just better at keeping their pogram for the Jews a secret from the outside world.

Killing Hitler probably wouldn't prevent the war. It would result in the scenarios that I posed in my first post.
 
Nice pardox Darby /ttiforum/images/graemlins/smile.gif German invents radar english master radar radar ends war war ends candy causes microwave to be invented. candy was invented by the Ancient Egyptians.

Who puts the candy in Percy Lebaron Spencer pocket?

Merry Christmas Darby /ttiforum/images/graemlins/smile.gif
 
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