Time Travel arguments

[skykiii]

Discussing Time Travel is kind of annoying, because I keep running into two particular schools of thought:

First: thinking that what's true in a work of fiction would apply to real thing.

Case in point, I saw a topic here on the farms where someone said time travel could not take you to before the device which enables it was built.

.... Why, exactly, do you think that's a logical assumption to make?

Fact is, most "rules of time travel" from books, movies, video games, diaramas, benadryl highs, etc. are things that only exist for the sake of the author and/or the audience (especially if they know the audience is a nitpicky sort and eager to find plot holes). In real life we have no reason to believe that it would work anything like Back to the Future or Steins;Gate or what have you. There's so many things in reality that already work nothing like we would expect, what's one more?

The second thing that seems to always come up is, not to put too fine a point on it... Stephen Hawking and his "if time travel existed, we would have tourists from the future all around us."

It's sad I need to explain why this is retarded, but apparently I do:

ONE - It relies entirely on the idea that the future has already happened. Which it hasn't. If it had, it wouldn't be "the future" now, would it?

TWO - Why is Hawkings' and his followers default assumption that time travel would be used for tourism? For all we know, any time devices are solely in the hands of small groups who rarely use them.

THREE - Who is to say we're not being visited by tourists from the future? Just go on Youtube right now and you can find tons of videos about "Time Slips" and "Glitches in the Matrix." I guarantee you will come across the picture of the "time travelling hipster" at some point.

I know what the skeptics would say--that all those stories are made-up--... the funny thing is that this would actually be perfect cover for real time travelers. Keep in mind, the greatest protection the wolf ever had was that the Boy had Cried Wolf so many times that nobody believed him when a real wolf came along.

(although I would have to add a tentative fourth thing to that as well..... most time travelers, I think, aren't gonna go to well-known historical events. If they're anything like me, they would want to visit places that had a personal meaning for them in their own lives. So instead of looking for time travelers during the French Revolution--where they'd probably get beheaded--I'd look for them in Bumfuck Nowhere, Georgia).

Just something I wanted to sperg about.

 

[TenMilesWide]

Future operatives have been active for at least the last few centuries trying to guide us to the version of events where they come to exist, but there's different factions from different futures and they keep fucking with each other. Wish they'd let bygones be bygones and leave the past where it lie but once you've invented the time-hammer I guess every problem starts to look like a time-nail.

 

[Mewtwo_Rain]

Three: Could just be random bullshit to be honest.

However in regards to one and two:

1) I Agree. I think people are way too arrogant to believe we know anything about time travel, like the whole "alt-timeline split." I have a belief that maybe if time travel has or will happen the time line corrects itself in some manner to continue onwards in one time line. Now whether a paradox can happen is questionable, maybe but it'd be very compiluted and could lead to all kinds of insanity if so.

2) I think they are big fans of "A Sound of Thunder" by Ray Bradbury or assume maybe his vision of time travel is correct. Personally I think any government or person who obtains time travel first would hide it from others to cause irreparable damage to certain events that they want to see happen in regards to the original history. Reason why is if everyone has access they can thwart your plans to rechanging events.

In regards to "technical fourth" it really depends on the person who gets access to time travel and their intent on using it.

There's a fifth concept of time travel I'd bring up myself. There is a belief that our brains are slightly hardwired to the future, the past and the present simultaneously. It's not real time travel but more so something along the lines of a belief that some thoughts from our future self slip into our past selves mind. Not to be confused with deja vu or I'll use an example from my own life to make the point clear:

About the time I was 18, I was going to hang out with a friend one night, like normal we hung out once a week. That night though I kept having this weird thought that I shouldn't go with him at that moment, and should go to my families and then go hang with him after. That night I waited for my friend to show up and nothing. Later on it was found out he had did a barrel roll into a creek with his car, and although he was banged up the seat I would have sat in (back seat right side)was the only seat to be crushed by rocks by his accident, meaning I would be dead had I went with him like originally intended. Doesn't prove time travel but could give an inkling clue that our minds can percieve the future to some extent: Ie: Gut feelings out of nowhere.

There have been studies done that gave evidence to such a concept (sorry I don't have the links) but this could explain a lot of how our minds work, and it might even be our decisions are heavily influenced sometimes by those random dissconnects of our brain tapping into our future minds thoughts. Like when you make a joke about something about to happen and then it happens a few moments later, maybe even deja vu such as a mass deja vu I was part of once (where multiple people said it at the same time as myself)...


It's really hard to say, but either way I would agree that time travel would not work as theorist claim, and there may be elements to it more than is currently known.

 

[Party Hat Wurmple]

Time Travel doesn't exist because if it did we all know one of you guys would've stopped a certain someone from invading Russia during the winter.

Also kek @ it being used for tourism because now I can't get the image out of my head of some douchebag from the future watching Hiroshima get vaporized from a distant hill while eating some popcorn.

 

[Skitarii]

someone said time travel could not take you to before the device which enables it was built

That's a misunderstanding of how CTC's work, and it drives me insane. There's no such thing as "backwards" or "forwards" from a point of origin if time is malleable, retard

ONE - It relies entirely on the idea that the future has already happened. Which it hasn't. If it had, it wouldn't be "the future" now, would it?

Spacetime is an unproven theory

>inb4 stfu schizo

There are a million different definitions for how spacetime interacts with the four fundamental forces of the universe, and each definition changes the way space and time operate. Eighty years ago, people thought spatial distances were suspended from each other by an immaterial ether. Twenty years later, Einstein's theory of general relativity and Hubble's law on red shifts was accepted by the scientific community, and that ether theory was reworked into gravitational expansion.

time travel would be used for tourism

Time travel, by default, would be used for FTL transportation if we follow general relativity. The concept of time is so badly understood that I can't think of any other uses for time travel, IF time travel is even possible and not just a $5 trillion nothingburger.

 

[Shig O'nella]

Easy answer to why there's no time travellers hanging about. Dean Koontz* explained it:
The past is immutable - can not be changed or altered, which includes visiting it.
Any part of the future, however, can be altered up to the point it becomes the present.

All the time travellers jump forwards. QED.

(* Lightning. a surprisingly good book for a quick pulp read)

 

[Hyperbola]

Special relativity strongly implies, but does not prove, that the entire space-time history is real, not just whatever the state is at any given spatial slice. The thing is, which events are "simultaneous" is dependent on which reference frame you are observing events from. Declaring that event A and B are "actually simultaneous", and C is not is tantamount to saying reference frame AB is a "privileged reference frame" that is in some way more real than AC/BC/ the others.

If you take relativity seriously, spacelike separated events are only "simultaneous" relative to a given frame. That's the meaning behind the insistence on the phrase "space-time". In SR, time and space rotate into each other on frame changes, they aren't completely independent of each other. (Hyperbolic rotations instead of circular-trig rotations, but still.)

 

[Hyperbola]

I was reading something the other day by Karl Popper where he was recounting a lot of the ideas about time's arrow by the early thermodynamicists. Ludwig Boltzmann, and his various nemeses around 1900 Europe.

Boltzmann was responsible for identifying entropy (which was known as a bulk thermodynamic quantity) with the "orderliness" of the corresponding microstate. By a series of arguments, he was forced eventually into a position of regarding entropy as being tied to our subjective information about the state of a system, rather than being an objective quantity or function of the objective state of the world. (Somewhat unfortunate how academia of the time piled onto him late in his career - it might have been responsible for his suicide. Ernst Mach had him browbeaten and tentative about "metaphyical superfluities" like the existence of *atoms*, years after he had invented statistical mechanics and derived explanatory theories for thermodynamics from atomic theory. (Also a century into chemistry basically being unable to do without an atomic picture.))

Entropy and the 2nd law of thermodynamics *is* a weird one. It's not really a fundamental law in the same way other laws of mechanics are. As far as every other law of physics is concerned, time-reversal is a symmetry (meaning there isn't a good distinction between the system running forwards or backwards in time as far as the laws are concerned.)

Boltzmann came up with some interesting thought experiments and postulated that the direction in time we consider to be "forward" is what it is *because* of the relative entropy of the states, and that an infinite completely random universe might have different regions where time's arrow points different directions. Since high-entropy states where there are no observers are the vast majority of regions, these observer-possessing regions would be islands unto themselves. Order would always recur, here and there in finite regions, but would always be a microscopic exception to the rule.

(In a Boltzmann random universe, everywhere these islands of order occur, *both* directions in time away from the points of maximum order would be "forwards in time" as far as the creatures living there are concerned.)

 

[Mary the Goldsmith]

Doesn't prove time travel but could give an inkling clue that our minds can percieve the future to some extent: Ie: Gut feelings out of nowhere.

Maybe you are on to something, because I have a similar story, not wanna powerlevel too much but when my mom was in high school the students doing these large protests, my mom was supposed to attend one with her friends, but just as she was about to get in the bus, she says she suddenly felt very afraid, a fear she says has never felt again, and so she chose not to go, claiming she felt sick, that night the army violently repressed the protests, killing pretty much everyone that did get on that bus. Could just be a coincidence or not, we'll probably never know for sure

 

[Mewtwo_Rain]

Maybe you are on to something, because I have a similar story, not wanna powerlevel too much but when my mom was in high school the students doing these large protests, my mom was supposed to attend one with her friends, but just as she was about to get in the bus, she says she suddenly felt very afraid, a fear she says has never felt again, and so she chose not to go, claiming she felt sick, that night the army violently repressed the protests, killing pretty much everyone that did get on that bus. Could just be a coincidence or not, we'll probably never know for sure

This is why certain ideas are very hard to prove because even if it was it'd be hard to replicate millions of times considering some people ignore their gut feeling. I've known a few other people who've given me similar stories as well, and I've even felt that impulse while playing online MP games. Similar to "map knowledge" but just knowing where to throw my grenade or where the enemy was.

One detail I omitted about my event was the week before I hung out with my friend I couldn't stop humming the song "Ebony Wings" randomly. It was a weir ear worm session I was having until that night and then it stopped.

 

[SSj_Ness (Yiffed)]

Time travel is a fun idea but the closest you can probably get to it is slowing time in an isolated area while things move at a normal pace elsewhere, meaning you age slower. There was some movie like that where they went to a planet for like an hour and decades passed everywhere else.

It's supposedly based on some degree of reality, I guess there's some shit about gravity that screws with GPS satellites and that needs to be accounted for by engineers for accurate time. I don't remember or understand any of the details but I found that interesting.

 

[Biggie Smalls' Taint]

Assume time travel is real.

You can go back in time

You get future knowledge and take it back to the past (to play the shitty games that suck ass)

Past now has future knowledge

Past person iterates on it, goes back to the past (samurai jack) and brings the future knowledge to another past person who does the same in an endless loop.

You have either:

A. A never ending cycle of people passing on knowledge from the future that instantly becomes outdated when the next guy pops out of the time machine.

B. A point in time when a singularity happens and all available knowledge appears because, since you can alter the past for ever, the cycle continued thousands of years into the future until the smartest human came back and left all the knowledge in one spot so that the cycle never begins. Time travel is invented and suddenly a 50TB hard drive appears with everything in it.

C. A scientist goes back, spreads his asshole, takes a picture of it and destroys the time machine to create a closed loop and goatse. Do you see any time travelers? No. Do you see goatse? Checkmate, atheists.

Time travel is nonsense.

 

[skykiii]

B. A point in time when a singularity happens and all available knowledge appears because, since you can alter the past for ever, the cycle continued thousands of years into the future until the smartest human came back and left all the knowledge in one spot so that the cycle never begins. Time travel is invented and suddenly a 50TB hard drive appears with everything in it.

This reminds me of an aspect of the computer game The Journeyman Project. That game's premise is that the first time machine is invented, but suddenly everyone realizes "holy shit this could ruin everything" and instead of abusing it, they decide to set up an agency to guard against altering time. They somehow have a computer that can detect changes to history, and as part of this... they have a hard drive or whatever back in prehistoric times that has all recorded history on it, and whenever a time wave is detected, they compare current history against what that data thing in the past says (apparently its never affected because its in the past).

Thinking about it now, doesn't this create a chance that like, Atlanteans or something would find that thing and it would, itself, fundamentally change history?

(Maybe that happens in the future games. I don't know--the first game is only about robots going back in time and changing key past events to make humanity more hostile so that we end up not joining into a Galactic Federation).

 

[I (Don't) Have A Gun]

Human's cannot directly experience the flow of time. We indirectly experience the flow of time because we have memories of the past and our brain creates a "timeline" a series of memories ordered in a chronological order by our brain. If you go to sleep or get knocked out you don't know how much time has passed because you have no memories to build a 'timeline' with. I guess you can look at a clock but that would just be you replying on a present observation and comparing it to your memory and making an assumption.
So our understanding of what time is and how we move through time is perceptual. We perceive there was a past, and we conceive of the past as a separate thing from the present. But this means we only ever indirectly know of this nebulous thing called time.

One way of time travel could be to simply reverse entropy. Reverse the state of every particle in existence (except your own obviously or else you wouldn't remember anything) into a previous state. You would perceive it as being the past, in fact for all practical purposes it would be the past (except on some nebulous metaphysical level which would be irrelevant here).
I guess you could argue this isn't time travel, it's simply changing the state of the present into a previous state... but then you'll also need to make an argument for what time is (as some material or physical property of reality separate from our perception of it and separate from the state of matter in existence). But the advantage of this is of course that you don't have to worry about paradoxes.

But it does bring up some interesting considerations. If the particles in your body are not altered, but the particles in your body are constantly being replaced (as you eat food, grow new cells etc.) what impact would that have on the past? For example before travelling back in time in this way you eat an apple, when you travel back in time does that apple exist? The particles of the apple are inside of you, so they weren't reversed so reasonably there wouldn't be an apple because the particles of that apple would still be in their future state (i.e. in your stomach).

TLDR; I think I made a post more confusing and scattered than OP's...

 

[Tetragrammaton]

to go back in time you would need to find a way to reverse the universe around you all while you stay safe inside some form of machine or whatever. that idea alone makes me doubt time travel would work in a scenario that involves reversing time to return to the past.

however something i dont see brought up much is that if an alternate reality exists for every possible scenario then this would mean that there is a reality out there in which the technology required exists and has existed for years. so there could actually be people who visit here from other times or realities we would just never know.

 

[skykiii]

1) I Agree. I think people are way too arrogant to believe we know anything about time travel, like the whole "alt-timeline split." I have a belief that maybe if time travel has or will happen the time line corrects itself in some manner to continue onwards in one time line. Now whether a paradox can happen is questionable, maybe but it'd be very compiluted and could lead to all kinds of insanity if so.

When in doubt, I always tend to assume the Hitchhiker's Guide novels have the right of it, as there's usually an odd roundabout wisdom hidden in Adams' jokes ("flying is the art of throwing yourself at the ground and missing" or "people who have power must not know they have it" for example). In this case he says that all that stuff about shooting your grandfather usually just sorts itself out.... but damn does it cause grammatical headaches when it comes to issues of verb tenses and the like!

Regarding your and other people's stories.... I used to have these weird occurences where I would feel like I suddenly had all this knowledge I never gained anywhere, but it would always be a flash and then be gone. I might've been seeing into alternate timelines too. Once I was playing a Gameboy RPG and exploring a dungeon, but all the sudden I saw pathways that weren't there. Again only for a moment. These happened a lot in my early 20s but stopped happening after awhile.

Part of me has always had this theory: I wonder if, when we die, we get a choice of whether or not to live our lives over again from the start. And perhaps this explains some of the flashes of insight we have--we know what's gonna happen because we literally saw it before. Why we don't just remember EVERYTHING is a question I think only God can answer.

 

[Saint Agustin]

Time travel, as a theoretical concept, can be real. We can't due it due to our bodies abilities to withstand the pressure of lightspeed (yet).

Also the brain in itself is already a mini time chamber, where our own body and perceptions is delayed by nanoseconds so we could process the information and we don't go mad on all the things we sense everytime all time.

I'm on the theory that everyone has a flow of time separately and unique, all of it unified by global consciousness.

 

[N Space]

Time travel to the future is possible thanks to time dilation, be it from relative speed or from gravity, however, time travel to the past has never been observed and is strongly suspected to not exist because it breaks causality, the standard example of that is the grandfather paradox.

 

[Norbert the Tiger]

[M]ost "rules of time travel" from books, movies, video games, diaramas, benadryl highs, etc. are things that only exist for the sake of the author and/or the audience (especially if they know the audience is a nitpicky sort and eager to find plot holes). In real life we have no reason to believe that it would work anything like Back to the Future or Steins;Gate or what have you.

I will not opine whether time travel back is possible, other than to say I doubt it.

One thing I was thinking about was in relation to a question I have seen on twitter and elsewhere, which is some variation of: you could go back to being ten or have ten million dollars, which would you take. A lot of the responses seem to borrow from Back to the Future, the idea that you could just take a Sports Almanac and bet on the winners and clean up.

It could never work that way, at least not completely, because I see it you would be unravelling those events from things had occurred in the past, which had not happened yet. So just as Marty's parents had not yet taken an interest in each other yet thus insuring they marry and have kids, things like sporting events would not always turn them out as we know them. Eg the 2007 Super Bowl, the Rams losing to the Patriots in 02 (although unless if something interfered with the Patriots stealing signals the way they were, that might occur 100 percent of the time), the Broncos upsetting the Packers in 97-98, there are other examples. Even if you could time travel to just a day or two before, computer models of these events suggest a high number of times these upsets would not happen they way they did.

A lot of things would probably turn out somewhat similar to how they did, so if you time traveled to 1989 and bought apple stock or bought microsoft in its infancy, there is a good change things would turn out similar but not the same.

Anyway, Back to the Future II (and to a lesser extent III) are not good films for many other reasons but the idea you could just grab a sports almanac and bet on things that happened and have them turn out exactly the same way does not hold true to me.

 

[Zbk3VmLfujjzjxBd43tL]

Fact is, most "rules of time travel" from books, movies, video games, diaramas, benadryl highs, etc. are things that only exist for the sake of the author and/or the audience (especially if they know the audience is a nitpicky sort and eager to find plot holes). In real life we have no reason to believe that it would work anything like Back to the Future or Steins;Gate or what have you. There's so many things in reality that already work nothing like we would expect, what's one more?

Only because it's pop culture distilled versions of what science actually says about time travel. Time travel backwards can't happen because it violates causality. The only real solution is that the very act of time traveling backwards creates a parallel universe you go to where you can kill your grandfather/seduce your grandmother or whatever.

I know what the skeptics would say--that all those stories are made-up--... the funny thing is that this would actually be perfect cover for real time travelers. Keep in mind, the greatest protection the wolf ever had was that the Boy had Cried Wolf so many times that nobody believed him when a real wolf came along.

(although I would have to add a tentative fourth thing to that as well..... most time travelers, I think, aren't gonna go to well-known historical events. If they're anything like me, they would want to visit places that had a personal meaning for them in their own lives. So instead of looking for time travelers during the French Revolution--where they'd probably get beheaded--I'd look for them in Bumfuck Nowhere, Georgia).

Problem is it's sheer numbers. More people grew up in NYC than Bumfuck Georgia, so logically NYC and every major city in the world should be crowded with time travelers wanting to relive their past. They should also far outnumber the people still around. Remember, there have been only 110 billion or so people who have ever lived, and 8 billion are alive right now. If we assume Earth has an average of 5-8 billion people for the next several millennia, then that number will rapidly increase and shift us to most people who will ever live have not been born yet. Also your time travel system should almost certainly permit FTL travel too so we can colonize every single star in the galaxy within a few thousand years so that's countless billions more people. So even if only a tiny, tiny portion of people can ever travel back in time, that still amounts to a thousands of years worth of people, so thousands of people. Probably actually an infinite number of people, since if you can travel back in time, you can prevent any destruction to your civilization and harvest the resources of the universe when it was younger, meaning you avoid the heat death of the universe.

And no shit people would want to hang out during the French Revolution or any other famous historic event. Look how tourists act now and look how crowded any famous historical site is. You should be having giant brawls between commies and tankies who love Robespierre and all the Marie Antoinette fans/monarchists/whatever, each one of them traveled from the future.

Time travel is a fun idea but the closest you can probably get to it is slowing time in an isolated area while things move at a normal pace elsewhere, meaning you age slower. There was some movie like that where they went to a planet for like an hour and decades passed everywhere else.

It's supposedly based on some degree of reality, I guess there's some shit about gravity that screws with GPS satellites and that needs to be accounted for by engineers for accurate time. I don't remember or understand any of the details but I found that interesting.

IIRC this is 100% confirmed to be observed with objects orbiting black holes. So if you had a large black hole in your radiation-shielding then you could park your ass right above the event horizon and if you looked out the window you would notice objects moving much faster because for you, time has slowed.

A lot of things would probably turn out somewhat similar to how they did, so if you time traveled to 1989 and bought apple stock or bought microsoft in its infancy, there is a good change things would turn out similar but not the same.

Not necessarily. Maybe you write your Congressman (who you donated to of course) and warn him about an anti-Soviet warrior putting his army on the road to peace. This gets brought up enough times that some glownigger actually looks into who "Osama bin Laden" is and realizes "oh shit, this dude is bad news" so the World Trade Center is never bombed, nor are a bunch of embassies in Africa, and we start a war with Sudan or some shit.

Or maybe you donate a fuckton of money to the Ross Perot 1992 campaign. Being a big donor of his, you get to meet him one night and you insist repeatedly DO NOT DROP OUT. Perot doesn't drop out and wins enough electoral votes to keep either Bush or Clinton from getting 270. Bush turns out to be more open to what Perot wants so Perot's electoral votes go to Bush who gets re-elected but half his cabinet is full of Reform Party guys. Bill Clinton retires to Arkansas and ends up just another obscure Democrat fundraiser who dies mysteriously in prison after he gets caught partying with Jeffrey Epstein (Hillary divorced him in this world since he wasn't able to be a stepping stone for her ambitions).