Immortality and Time Travel - How its Done...

[nyim]

First of all I'd like to say hi to everybody and thanks for having me. Secondly i would like to put forward a theory of mine for you to consider.

I figure that immortality and time travel are completely possible given that certain things are put in place to allow it.
With modern technology we have the ability to create tiny machines (nanotechnology) to perform a variety of tasks. The human genome has been mapped. By creating a nanobot, designed and programmed to create an even smaller nanobot (and if need be so on and so on) we can achieve something small enough to alter dna. Bit by bit, rebuilding it and turning old, dead and dying matter back into young fresh healthy matter. In doing so you potentially have created a means to immortality.

With immortality we can now move on to achieving actual time travel itself...

It is said that the laws of probability state that if an infinite number of monkeys are sat in front of typewriters for an infinite amount of time then eventually, one of them will have typed the complete works of Shakespeare.

Now, if the previous statement is true and i believe it is (you sit with a bag of numbers 0 to 10 and blindly pull em out one by one, eventually they will come out in order, same for a pack of cards etc) then it follows that with immortality and eternity going hand in hand then at some point a way to travel in time will be discovered and from there you can go anywhere.

So this doesn't help you, joe public right now but it does show that it can be done, it just means we have to work at it, be patient and hope that someone travels back to explain to us now, how to do it.

Discuss...

 

[timetravelroomie]

Well,

The nanotech/nanobots...
Good, but if you have ever read sci fi the concept of it "regenerating" living matter has been in place since the november '77 issue of OMNI magazine.


The philisophical views behind time travel are fun, but obtain no real working.

With respect, what's the point of having a philisophical discussion pertaining to time travel, of there is no solid science backing it. I can talk about the multiple posabilities till we are blue in the face, but if we haven't worked out the set way of making time travel work, the discussion is fruitless. In other words, what's the point of making the gravy if you haven't made any biscuts.....


I say make the biscuts, or atleast the dough, then talk time philosophy.

Roomie

 

[Darby]

nyim,

Now, if the previous statement is true and i believe it is (you sit with a bag of numbers 0 to 10 and blindly pull em out one by one, eventually they will come out in order, same for a pack of cards etc) then it follows that with immortality and eternity going hand in hand then at some point a way to travel in time will be discovered and from there you can go anywhere.

The first part of the statement is true. Given 10 cards numbered 1...10, if you spend enough time pulling them out one at a time you'll eventually pull them out in order. The chances of doing that are 1:10^10 (1: 10,000,000,000). If you could pull one set of ten every 10 seconds it would only take you ~3171 years to do it. A pack of 52 cards would only take you several times the expected life of the universe to accomplish. But in either case it's theoretically possible.

The second part of the paragraph is logically flawed. It assumes that time travel is possible and then further assumes that whatever the "formula" for accomplishing it is simple enough to allow a random draw of the factors to be completed in a finite amount of time by an immortal who is genetically altered by nanobots. As you see above, if there are only 52 factors involved in the formula it would take several times the lifetime of the universe to accomplish if the immortal spent ten seconds, 24/7 "forever" randomly guessing at the 52 factors. For the immortals the universe would very likely come to the end of its lifetime before they solved the problem.

Fortunately that's not how research science works. We mortals should have taken "forever" to solve the sequence of peptides in the insulin molecule to be able to deal with diabetes. But we solved the problem in the early 1950's. Nature only appears to involve random sequences. The sequences are complex but there are ways to isolate partial sequences such that we can put five or six partial chains together in the correct order and solve the mystery (even though we might not really understand much about how the partial sequences came to be). But this still leaves unresolved the question of whether or not time travel is actually possible in this universe. All the time in several lifetimes f the universe won't change the physical situation if time travel isn't actually possible (and by time travel we mean time travel into the past. Time travel to the future is already a well documented fact.)

* - You might be wondering how I came up with the numbers. Here's how it goes. You have 10 cards. You also have a linear grid of 10 boxes, one box for each card pulled in a sequence. Each card, therefore, has 1:10 chance of landing in a particular box in each drawing. So the formula is...

P = N^n, where

P = probability of a particular sequence

N = the number of cards

n = the number of positions that the cards can occupy in a particular draw

The "configuration space" formula is used all the time in thermodynamic stuations.