What if....

P

PeterPanParadox

Temporal Novice
What if the reason why we don´t have any proof of time travel existing in the future is because the world ends before it is inventing. This is not normally the way I think but it could make sense. Scientist believe we are roughly 100 years from inventing a working time machine.
 
PeterPan,

Scientist believe we are roughly 100 years from inventing a working time machine.
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Scientists don't even know whether or not time travel is possible other than relativistic (Special Relativity) accelerated time frame travel to the future. If it is possible they expect the time to be in many hundreds of years if not thousands of years before a working time machine is invented that can transport something other than individual subatomic particles.

Michio Kaku, for whatever its worth, with his futurist thinking cap on expects tens of thousands of years, given the energy requirements alone.

But if it is invented and if it isn't what we expect it to be today - done through CTC's in spacetime that limit travel to the past to the time that the CTC is created - then it does beg the question of where are they? Did mankind cease to exist on Earth for whatever reason (maybe they just moved away) or are we simply not very interesting to them? Or both?
 
So, Zeshua, John Titor, and that F# guy are all frauds according to them? I would take the scientist word over the self acclaimed TTers...... wait, unless we do make contact with Aliens and get the technology from then... but then again. There has been no concrete evidence of time traveling existing. So, maybe the world did end.
 
But there's also the possibility that you can't travel any further into the past than when the first time machine was built/turned on. This would mean we don't have visitors from the future yet because we haven't built the first time machine for them to pop up in yet.

In the (generally not so well known) movie "Primer" this is how it works, for example.
 
PeterPan:

Scientist believe we are roughly 100 years from inventing a working time machine.
Click to expand...

Can you cite whichever scientists actually said that, and under what conditions? If I recall correctly, the scientists back in the days of H.G. Wells (<1900) may have been saying the same thing, which was part of the reason he wrote The Time Machine.

In my view, any technology that has not yet even been demonstrated in a lab environment (What we call Technology Readiness Level 4) cannot have an accurate prediction for when an operational model of the technology will be working.

But as for your initial thought... just because life ends on earth does not mean others, elsewhere may not invent a time machine, right? I mean, if you are going to consider what's possible we have to remember that any trip through time is also a trip through space (because the field is space-time). If one is willing to believe in UFOs and beings from other places coming to visit us, who is to say that such visitors are not from another time (and place)?

RMT
 
You are completely right, RainmanTime. I jumped the gun a little. It was Michio Kaku but I honestly think I was mistaken I think he was talking about teleport-transportation. I am not usually one for this dooms-day talk. Just all these time travel claims gave me something to think about.

/ttiforum/images/graemlins/smile.gif
 
But there's also the possibility that you can't travel any further into the past than when the first time machine was built/turned on.
Click to expand...

That's the most likely scenario based on what we know of spacetime mechanics. If we bend spacetime into a closed curve and follow that curved path into the past then the most distant point into the past is somewhere along that closed curve. That most distant point in the past is the instant that the curve was initiated...when the gadget was turned on. That would explain why we have no time travelers today. We haven't yet invented a time machine that can form a closed timelike curve.
 
I don't know if you saw Primer, but in that movie they showed one example of this. It wasn't possible to travel back any further because of how the machine works:

If you want to travel back in their machine, you'd first have to turn it on, so that it's running (A).
Then you wait the amount of time you want to travel back (while NOT being inside the machine) and then shut the machine of.
The nature of the machine was, that when you turn it on, it will "wind up" and when you turn it off, it will "wind down".
So when you now have turned off the machine you wait until it is almost fully wound down and then immediately get into it (B).

Now the thing is, if you want to travel back one hour, you have to spend one hour in the time machine, because you're traveling back at the same speed, only in the other direction.
And as soon as you PASS the moment of when the machine was turned on, you immediately travel forward again.

It's parabolic. An object in it is always traveling from point B (or from where it enters) to point A and back, etc...
It's a really interesting type of time travel and the film is a MUST see for any real time travel fan!
It's not a hollywood flick though, it needs some brain matter to grasp what is happening and probably needs more than 2 reviewings to even remotely get what's going on.
And it's a kind of time travel that's pretty consistent. Unlike such films as, for example, Timecrimes (also known as "Los Cronocrímenes").
 
It's parabolic. An object in it is always traveling from point B (or from where it enters) to point A and back, etc...
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It's not actually parabolic. A parabola (or a hyperbola) never crosses itself. If it crosses or joins itself it is a circle or an elipse.
 
Ok, that's right of course, and in the film he draws 2 parabola which then look like a circle.
But what he (and I) really meant was that the travel from one of the points to the other is parabolic, because of the winding up and winding down of the machine.
I don't know why it was important, but maybe if the machine is still winding up/down the travelling object in it is not moving at full speed through time.

Like: When you enter at the B end (future point) the machine will appear to wind up because of the backwards movement of the observer inside of the machine.
In the film they said that they perceived the winding up and winding down to be slower while inside the machine, which is a good point that they first don't travel at full speed backwards.
They only then travel at full speed when they reach the point when the earlier you on the outside turns off the machine for it to wind down.
After you pass that moment the machine is running on full power(?) and your speed is the same backwards like it was forwards.
When you then reach the point in the past where the machine was fully wound up after having been turned on, you actually hear it wind down again (since you're moving in the other direction).

So that was what I actually meant with the nature of the time travel being parabolic.
Ok, to be more precise: It's parabolic in both ways, effectively making it circle-y in its entirety?
Is circel-y even a word? :D
Well, I guess something can only be a circle or not, and not just partly.^^

EDIT:
Ok, forget circle-y, I haven't used my brain here. You already had the right word: elipse.
Sorry^^
 
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