Time Travel a la Stephen Hawking

[Skeptisma]

I've been mesmerized by Hawking's Into the Universe series and one of the episodes is on time travel. Now, assuming the connecting wormhole proximity is close, and our ability to increase their size to allow a human to pass through, it seems very plausible that this could actually happen. If anyone else has thought about time travel I'd like to see what you all think about a few questions/ideas I have:

- We've all heard the "number one rule" of time travel: don't be seen. Assuming our descendants are capable of coming up with the technology to harness the 4th dimension, do you think they would come back to our time now?

-In no way is this meant to be a conspiracy theory, but it is curious to think about some of the older UFO sightings and chuckle to yourself about the possibility that they could be from the future... we didn't have the technology to truly explain a lot of the sightings back in the 30s, 40s, 50s... or previous times - it's an interesting thought.

-If you could time travel, in either direction and survive the potentially extreme conditions and not disrupt history, what one place would you go? Who/what would you visit?



Just picking one instance in time to visit is a pretty daunting task. Although I'd love the opportunity to visit America at its birth (anthropologically-speaking) or the Renaissance, or Galileo, or the Egyptians, or Newton (the list is endless really), I think I might pick the time of the great Greeks. Although, it would be fun to see if Jesus really lived when Christians believe he did, but since his existence has no real impact on my life I'll let that one be.

[Darwinian]

If time travel was possible then it poses the question, where are all the tourists from the future? The normal answer to this is of course that it may be that in order to travel back to the past then you must have already created a time machine to travel back to. Again, the problem with this is that as soon as you switch your machine on for the first time you would be inundated with countless visitors from all different periods of the future wanting to be the 'first' to travel back to the beginning of time travel.

Anyway, I could go on for hours about the problems and solutions of time travel but it's late and I can't be bothered :S

If I could time travel, assuming that I couldn't change the past as this would either create a new time line or catapult me into one of the infinite universes as described by the many worlds theory, I would go back to last Saturday, before 8 p.m. and buy a lottery ticket having first noted down last Saturdays winning numbers...

[Nitsuj]

Can't beat that.

Anyway, I guess I would go back and try to prevent some natural disaster, like the Titanic or 9/11. And even if they didn't believe me and the event happened anyway, I would be seen as a psychic.

[Darwinian]

But if you did prevent the sinking of the Titanic it would have never happened. So you would never have gone back in time to try to prevent it in the first place.

Therefore you could either not travel back in time or, your attempts would be futile as you can't change the past. But, the present is simply the past to someone from the future meaning that everything has already happened and you are simply following the complex interplay of cause and effect and have no real control and of course no free will.

Unless of course it was your free will that caused the events which cannot be changed to be that way in the first place.

From here on it starts to get a bit complicated...

[Nitsuj]

I'm just replying to a freakin' question!

[Skeptisma]

If time travel was possible then it poses the question, where are all the tourists from the future?

Well, this is actually one question that is quite interesting to think about. Hawking printed out an invitation for a "Time Traveler Party" of sorts, and put it in a place where it could potentially survive many years into the future. The invitation had the exact coordinates of the party, geographically and time, yet no one showed up.

Hawking says that we actually may not be able to visit the past because of paradoxical issues. Let's say you were able to create a wormhole that had an adjoining wormhole right next to it but one minute into the past. This makes it possible for you to see through to the other side where you just were. If you shot yourself dead, how would you have died? Who would have shot you?

I see his points, and they are quite reasonable, but he also says that the paradox problem really only exists for the past... the future is still highly plausible. So, yeah, I guess that if time travel to the past were really possible we'd maybe have seen evidence of that already. We wouldn't have any visitors FROM our past because the technology wasn't there... maybe folks in the future are just on the edge of their seats until the time when we discover the technology and can pop in and say hello.

[TheDarkestOfAngels]

I've been mesmerized by Hawking's Into the Universe series and one of the episodes is on time travel. Now, assuming the connecting wormhole proximity is close, and our ability to increase their size to allow a human to pass through, it seems very plausible that this could actually happen. If anyone else has thought about time travel I'd like to see what you all think about a few questions/ideas I have:

- We've all heard the "number one rule" of time travel: don't be seen. Assuming our descendants are capable of coming up with the technology to harness the 4th dimension, do you think they would come back to our time now?

My guess is no. Either because humans didnt' survive long enough to invent time travel or because travel backwards in time cannot be done. It's hard to say because with all the talk of time I've heard (I did see that program you're talking about) we still know very little about time and many of the things Hawking discussed in the program in regards to backward time travel.

-In no way is this meant to be a conspiracy theory, but it is curious to think about some of the older UFO sightings and chuckle to yourself about the possibility that they could be from the future... we didn't have the technology to truly explain a lot of the sightings back in the 30s, 40s, 50s... or previous times - it's an interesting thought.

Sightings actually go all the way back to ancient times and may even be on record in odd places, but honestly, I'm more willing to believe they're space aliens than humans from the future.
Of course, anything is possile but very little is provable. An interesting thoughts still.

-If you could time travel, in either direction and survive the potentially extreme conditions and not disrupt history, what one place would you go? Who/what would you visit?

The future, preferably around the 24th or 25th century just to see how far we've gone and what the science fiction of that era looks like.

Though I do have some interest in visiting the past. I would't mind seeing humanity around the time where we first appeared, particuarly during the time when more htan one human species were on the same planet at the same time.

Just picking one instance in time to visit is a pretty daunting task. Although I'd love the opportunity to visit America at its birth (anthropologically-speaking) or the Renaissance, or Galileo, or the Egyptians, or Newton (the list is endless really), I think I might pick the time of the great Greeks. Although, it would be fun to see if Jesus really lived when Christians believe he did, but since his existence has no real impact on my life I'll let that one be.

That would be interesting, but even if I brough video evidence, signed autographs and photographs, foot prints, artifacts, an eye-witness from that time for testimony, and several experts to travel with me and independantly confirm and collect evidence, I think the religious folks would say that all the evidence is doctored and the eye witnesses liars and there's a conspiracy among everyone who goes back in time so they can hold on to their superstitian.

[Darwinian]

Or perhaps time travel is possible but in order to travel back in time you must also travel at least as far in distance that light can travel in that time.

So, in order to travel a year back in time you must travel at least one light year in distance. This would therefore prevent you from being able to create paradoxes, meet yourself, influence past events for which the outcome is known by you etc.

Also, if time travel from the future to the past was possible, wouldn't that mean that the future was pre-determined? I mean, from our perspective the past has already happened and is fixed in history, but what if I was to travel back to the 1950's and told someone there that I knew the precise details of the next 60 years because to me it has already happened? What makes 'our' present any different to someone from the 2070's who has just arrived here and now?

Which also means that past can be influenced by the future by the very fact that someone from the future arrived to the past and influenced it. The fact that he travelled back in time to arrive in the past was always going to happen and is still the original version of history.

[Paul the Human]

I've always disliked the idea of time travel, because I've never encountered an idea that actually worked without creating hypothetical paradoxes. If I had to say one way or the other, I'd have to say that I do not believe time travel is possible. 'Time is the name given to our linear perception of existence', is one thing I've heard (somewhere) that makes sense to me. 'The Past' is not a physical location, therefore one cannot physically travel to it.

Let's say that I was able to travel 20 years into the future. The 'future' that I would find would not be the same 'future' that would have been had I not time traveled. Instead, it would be a future in which my personal influence had disappeared on the day I left, i.e. a future in which I have not existed for 20 years.

[SleepingDemon]

Even if Time travel is possible, I don't believe we should ever do it. I think most people would love to go back and re-write history. Kill Hitler during his childhood to prevent the holocaust, kill Pol Pot or Idi Amin or attempt to prevent the Titanic or the Hindenberg. Human tragedy is a very sensitive issue, and we would feel a sense of accomplishment having made it so human tragedies never occurred.

But you have to understand, if you were to go back and warn the captain of the Titanic, preventing it from ever sinking, it would have happened to another ship. Before the Titanic, ships weren't forced to carry enough lifeboats for ever passenger. The tragedy of the Titanic made us set up safety rules and regulations for luxury liners for the first time in history.

If you killed Hitler and prevented the holocaust, more than likely Israel would have never become it's own nation. See what I mean? There would be repurcussions for everything we do, if we were to travel back to the 20's and leave our laptop, and they were able to reverse engineer the technology, we would jump our technological advancement 75 years, opening up the possibility that we would create a technology before we were mature enough to use it. At first this sounds wonderful. But when you look at what our technology was used for from the 20's up until the 70's you have to ask yourself do you really want to give America, or any other nation for that matter a technological advantage that is decades ahead of everyone else? There will be consequences to everything we do in time travel. And I doubt we have the self-control to do nothing with time travel.

That being said, I too would travel back to last Saturday with last weekend's winning lottery numbers.