Should it be banned?

D

Demon_skeith

Temporal Novice
Do you believe time travel should be banned? I believe two theories would make it a solid ban as they say if something is meant to happen (like 9/11) it would happen no matter what. And that if you even move a rock wrong it could change everything for better or worse.

So do you feel it should be banned and kept away from dangerous hands?

 
I'm not sure how you could ban it? Those who know how to time travel wouldn't tell anyone and most people would have a hard time believing it.

The only way and reason to ban something is if it was illegal or it can be proven to be harmful. You can't ban something until harm has been caused. An example would be cyber crimes, they couldn't implement laws on cyber crimes until they had happened.

It's a bit like saying you want to ban someone from using magic. It would be very hard to do, and you have to have good reason to do so. Time travel could be abused, but how can you stop people if they have changed things or do it without anyone knowing until much later?

 
Well either way how would you know?

If something was changed in the past that affects our present we wouldn't know since the current timeline would be erased.

Or it could make a new worldline so we'd never know the difference.

 
Well first you have to prove that time travel exists in the first place. And then if a person time travelled, how would you catch that person ? Would there be a time travel police that would chase after you into other universes. Assuming these police caught you, how would they bring you back to your present time to charge you ? What if time travel is legal in the alternative universe ?

 
It's hard to say when the effects are unknown. Are there effects on the traveller? Will travel disturb the current universal function? What by-products are there from the device? Would a traveller become enamoured with the God like ability to change events?

The truth is we love to feel control over things, but in reality all things are wild and free. Time travel technology would be the unstoppable force, allowing the holder to simply stop the ban from ever occurring, or go back and hide its existence.

 
Yeah, given the fact that we still don’t know for sure if we can time travel, it’d be difficult to ban at this point. I think that even if it is proven possible to time travel, banning would still be dependent upon so many factors. Mostly the fact that we may never really know the effects of someone traveling through time, changing little (or large) things. There are so many unknowns involved.

 
I thought time travel was already banned... by the laws of physics. :D
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I think backwards time travel has been banned by the laws of physics. I think not being able to travel faster than the speed of light actually proves time travel to the future and that is what most research is focused on. I am also not an expert, but I think that some of the super-collider experiments have already proven time travel exists as they moved particles into the future. Stuff that was supposed to decay in X amount of time, instead decayed in X*8 amount of time because it was moving at near the speed of light.

 
Do you believe time travel should be banned? I believe two theories would make it a solid ban as they say if something is meant to happen (like 9/11) it would happen no matter what. And that if you even move a rock wrong it could change everything for better or worse.So do you feel it should be banned and kept away from dangerous hands?
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If time travel to the past is actually allowed by the laws of physics - which is in doubt at this time - how do you successfully ban it? You have to maintain the ban, without a single slip up, forever. Forever is a fairly long time.We couldn't keep the atomic bomb program a secret for two months, let alone forever. Unrestricted submarine warfare against unarmed merchant ships was outlawed in 1907 and is still a violation of international law. It took a couple of weeks at the opening of both WWI and WWII before that went out the window. When you say "it should be banned" who enforces the ban, how do you get every country on the planet to go along with the ban and how do they detect a potential violation of the ban?

Somewhere, sometime someone would get curious and a program would try to develop the gadget.

 
If nothing else, there is no easier way to create interest in a topic than to ban it from discussion or practice. The Church couldn't keep science down, the U.S. government can't keep drugs or alcohol down, Bill Clinton couldn't keep Ms. Lewinski down, etc. The trick is to approach the topic and let the public think it's demanding the ban rather than suffering from it.

 
If nothing else, there is no easier way to create interest in a topic than to ban it from discussion or practice. The Church couldn't keep science down, the U.S. government can't keep drugs or alcohol down, Bill Clinton couldn't keep Ms. Lewinski down, etc. The trick is to approach the topic and let the public think it's demanding the ban rather than suffering from it.
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Precisely. You can't ever keep the base science a secret. Prior to making the "big" breakthrough research scientists publish papers on the topic as it is being developed. Other researchers read the articles and take up their own research projects that are somewhat in parallel to the original. They all tend to make the big discovery at about the same time.In WWII the German fission weapon program (codename The Uranium Club) was always behind the Allies' program. But they had virtually all of the same information as the Allies. Even during the war physicists continued to publish papers that were distributed internationally, even between warring nations. Heisenberg's group communicated with Nels Bohr who communicated with both Oppenheimer and Fermi in the US. Had Germany given its atomic weapon program sufficient support early on they would have developed their own weapon. The same is true of Japan - and Japan controlled North Korea and its vast uranium reserves. The secrets were out. It was just a matter of commitment of time, people and resources.

Add the implications of time travel and keeping the details secret becomes, for want of a better word, impossible.

 
I think it would be hard to ban, since it is not proven as yet or seen so would be no need to do it in a book I read goosebumps Don't go to sleep it does deal with the time police and change of realities and each time Greg in the book goes to sleep in the bed he turns into someone different. One time he is a 16 year boy, and in one he is 12 and a old man in one time and, this is causing changes in the universe each time he does it. It is explained the time police make sure there is balance and when he started changing bodies, they had to chase after him and stop him. So a ban would work if, it is used for crime or something bad and would be interesting to see what happens if a ban would happen.

 
Wouldn't banning time travel be like banning people from leaving a nation. So the worlds that allowed time travel would think of worlds that banned it like we think of North Korea. Banning time travel is not something that could be reconciled with human rights or freedom.

 
History has proven that "banning" things creates crime and never stops the action that is banned. See Prohibition.

 
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How many North Koreans visit America every year? Is there a black market for vacations to L.A.? Totalitarianism works.

 
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