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Do you think time travel is even theoretically possible?

RoadHazard

Gold Member
Forwards, yes, taking advantage of time dilation. You can't "jump" into the future, but you could theoretically create a situation where you would only age a year or whatever while a hundred years pass on Earth (or pretty much any arbitrary number). Would take a lot of energy though, so it won't actually be possible for a long time still.

Back in time, no. There's no indication that's even theoretically possible.
 
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supernova8

Banned
Surely, if we managed to build some sort of device that allowed us to travel through time (let's say in the year 3000) then we would travel back in time as far as that device allowed us, give past "us" all that technology (including the time travel device), and then go even further back (because if we could go back 1000 years, we could use it 1000 years earlier and go back another 1000 years and so on and so on). That would make the alternate (or updated) year 3000 exponentially more advanced.

So basically (assuming it doesn't cause the time-space continuum to explode) we could become infinitely powerful/technologically advanced.

It's all a bit confusing but I feel like if we had it we would know about it by now. Plus I don't buy the whole "you can go forward in time but not back in time". Surely if you can manipulate time then you can manipulate time.
 
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jason10mm

Gold Member
I think we will eventually get wormholes to allow for 2 remote.locatjons, say a few light-years apart, to be connected in close to real time. Thus you could "observationally" look back in time to the other place, seeing events that occurred years ago based on current info you were getting now. Not time travel per se, but a way to get notification to observe distant phenomenon in "advance".
 

TrueLegend

Member
Ok quite a thread.

Time is actually spacetime. So basically spacetime coordinate on a observable spacetime continnum in the infinite series of spacetime continnum (which is usually termed as singularity) is possible to acess from the fourth dimension. Mathematically what's infinite to us should be quantifiable to the beings(observers) of fourth dimension. Now that I have just typed this I realized that it's pretty easy for you to grasp what I am saying thanks to movie Interstellar. Kip Thorne is a fine physicist.
 

FunkMiller

Member
No time doesn't exist. Its a human made concept. There is only now and memory's and idea's of a future.

wasted GIF
 

Kamina

Golden Boy
Into the future, not into the past (in theory and for humans that is)
 
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poppabk

Cheeks Spread for Digital Only Future
Not in any form that would make sense to us I would guess. Thats for going backwards, going forwards we all are time travellers.
 
The only way to manipulate time is in a forward direction only. I think both mass and speed affect time relatively. In essence I could move forward through time slower than others, but everyone I know would be dead at that point and it would be worthless. Even if we moved backward through time, I don't think it would be in any meaningful way like in the movies. Time would just go backwards, but that doesn't mean everything would play in reverse.
 

MikeM

Member
Anything is possible.

Humans can fly. Go to space. Been to the moon. 150 years ago all those things would have been considered magic.

As a race, we are still very green and very juvenile. If we mature as a race and allocate more resources to science, then we could achieve virtually anything. Hell, AI might figure it out before humans do.

I hope we don’t though. The consequences of humans with such power would be beyond terrible.
 

TheMan

Member
To the past? No

With time dilation, people who travel very fast could kind of go into the future, in a way, sorta. The effect gets more pronounced with extremely high velocities
 

sono

Member
There is only “now” there is no real physical property of time however there is space time. You can’t travel through something that does not exist.

You can travel through space time at a any given speed up to the speed of light.

That device on your wrist is just a machine with arbitrary numbers created by humans.
 
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So, this is a very tricky question because time is an odd thing and we really don't understand it. Is it fundamental and continuous or discrete, or even emergent from an underlying fundamental process or is it just an illusion we have as creatures with a type of memory? Do we live in the philosopher's block universe? There are theories that predict all of the above and we really don't know.

That said, we have models and the most prominent is General Relativity which treats time travel as possible, both forwards and in reverse. See a formalized definition by it's actual name of Closed Timelike Curves (CTCs). There are solutions and implementable ways of making it feasible, such as Frank Tipler's work but it relies on either an infinity or negative energy. Wormholes could do it, but again require exotic matter and energy levels that are huge. That said, these things are theoretically possible with our physical models, thus they are engineering solutions and humans/intelligence are great at this. Look at how the Alcubierre Drive has gone from a theoretically possible solution to something we can actually physically imagine as the energy requirements are now 'only' on the order of a Jupiter-sized object (they used to be huge order of magnitude larger, so I mean this broadly, in a grand civilizational manner) in a few decades time for an example. That said there are some who believe things like even thought it's allowed, it will be prevented by the universe -- people believe all kinds of things.

To the future is simple and we've measured it and see the effects on precise atomic clocks that are in accelerating reference frames such as GPS satellites.

If you're interested, I can go into more detail, but it gets more tedious and you really need to dig into the mathematics and understand stuff like a Minkowski space and the Einstein field-equations. People here are name-dropping blackholes and such, but it's a bit more complicated in reality.
 
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mekes

Member
It is scientifically possible, but only with changing the speed at which you move forward in time.
 
Not sure if we got any gurus on such subjects here, but theoretically, do you think time travel is possible; whether future, past, or both? Oh, bonus: Who here is old enough to remember the emphasis John Titor?
Time travel is possible into the future. Not the past.

All you have to do is go really REALLY FAST. Like we're talking light speed fast or very close to it.
 

wondermega

Member
Not sure if we got any gurus on such subjects here, but theoretically, do you think time travel is possible; whether future, past, or both? Oh, bonus: Who here is old enough to remember the emphasis John Titor?
The John Titor story is fascinating - I can't readily find the Youtube link to the best Coast to Coast episodes where it was discussed, but it is so worth it for time travel nerds. Kind of a shame since the potential future it was describing has already passed, of course. On another note, my other favorite crazy Coast to Coast story is "Mel's Hole" and that likewise deserves it's own gaf thread.

Time travel has always been a particularly fascinating concept to me, movies like Primer (admittedly a difficult watch) and Predestination are must-see's (again, for the time travel nerds). I wholeheartedly believe that actual TT to the past is 100% impossible, although I feel like we will be able to someday build some crazy computers which will be able to accurately model (to degrees, and only in some cases?) certain historical reconstructions.. perhaps. But not that we will ever actually be able to go there. Pure fantasy.

As for traveling to the future, that's fascinating in a whole different way. I think we will possibly see some examples of people being cryogenically frozen (or along those lines) - proooooobably not in our lifetime - and then woken up. To the sleeper, it will feel like they just blacked out and woke up and BOOM millennia has passed. This absolutely doesn't seem physically impossible to me, although I have kept up with zero studies about the complexities of such a thing. Even weirder is what if they somehow are able to capture a "copy/save state" of a person, and then "rebuild/enable" that instance at some point in the future. In some ways very similar to the cryogenic freeze (needs some not-yet-developed future tech to unthaw the original, or in such a case "assemble" the clone). Truly the stuff of hard scifi, which people who are a great deal smarter than I am, have plenty of thoughts about, I am sure.

Would I want to be frozen at near-death and thawed out in some future time? Hmm, good for for thought for a separate thread/gaf poll..
 

Griffon

Member
Depending on the gravity time goes at variable speed (satellites have to be resynchronized with earth time all the time).

If you could live far off from the earth/sun orbit, time would advance faster on earth relative to you. That's technically time travel forward for you.
 
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Soodanim

Member
The way I remember it being put is that if time travel was possible, it would have already happened in the future and someone would have traveled back to our time.
 

RaduN

Member
From the perspective of the traveller, a time-travel into the future, means simply moving VERY fast (~ light speed)
Theoretically achievable. Couldn't say how useful though.

Traveling into the past, would however, solve the "how did it all start" riddle. We basically created everything, we are our own Gods.
But how the fuck did it happen the very first time Mr. Nolan? How the fuck did it happen?
 

poppabk

Cheeks Spread for Digital Only Future
To the past? No

With time dilation, people who travel very fast could kind of go into the future, in a way, sorta. The effect gets more pronounced with extremely high velocities
It is possible that time reverses constantly - but how would we know? It would be like time travel movies but from the viewpoint of everyone else.
 
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