Is Time Travel in any way possible?

Any physicists here?

• I've seen science shows about it. I think they think it's possible, but only one way, traveling to the future, not the past.

• Yes, it does seem possible... Only under certain unique circumstances, though. (Not to sound cunty, but there are a couple of good articles on the topic on Wikipedia, OP.)

• Well, how many incidences have there been where someone appears from the future, except for an episode of "Star Trek" or "Bewitched."

• Well would they announce themselves if they were from the future?

• R1 I think we've seen the same shows.

• Stephen Hawking believes time travel is impossible because if it were we'd be constantly visited by people from the future.

• Yes, but it is a one way trip to the future.

• Time travel to the future is already theoretically possible; Einstein's theories show us that the faster an object move, the slower time moves around it relative to an observer. So all that would need to happen is that a person would have to get inside a vehicle (like a spaceship, for instance) that is moving very, very fast - the closer to the speed of light, the better. In this case, time inside the fast-moving vehicle will be moving more slowly than time outside of it. Once the vehicle stops, less time will have passed inside of it than outside. Hence, anyone inside will have travelled "into the future". There are also theories that a backwards time-travel device could be invented (though it would be more useful for sending data, rather than physical objects) but that you would only be able to reach backwards in time to the point where it's invented. So theoretically, once the machine is invented, it will immediately be flooded with messages from the future. But we wouldn't be able to move into the past beyond that point. Unless we're in an infinite multiverse, and backwards time travel can and does happen in other dimensions but not in ours.

  gonna%20get%20more%20stoned%2C%20now

• [quote]Stephen Hawking believes time travel is impossible because if it were we'd be constantly visited by people from the future. Perhaps he didn't consider that we will most likely kill ourselves off and there are no humans in the future. So time travel could be possible but we will never discover it having made ourselves extinct first.

• "Unless we're in an infinite multiverse, and backwards time travel can and does happen in other dimensions but not in ours." The infinite multiverse looks more and more likely, so I found this to be the most fascinating part of your excellent post.

  R2

• I think it's through the mind. My instinct tells me that it has something to do with how life is like a dream/dream reality/matrix/etc.

• We may just not be visible so we don't interfere with the past.

• Theoretically, as others have mentioned, but only to the future, and only via technologies and energy expendatures that render it essentially impossible not only by today's technology, but by any forseeable future's technology.

• You could "theoretically" travel to the future (one way). As you travel close to the speed of light, time slows down (for you), but not for everyone you left behind. You can see into the past, but only for large bright objects from far away. The starlight you see in the night sky can be from hundreds, thousands, or millions of years ago depending on the distance.

• "Time travel movies often feature a vast, energy-hungry machine. The machine creates a path through the fourth dimension, a tunnel through time. A time traveler, a brave, perhaps foolhardy individual, prepared for who knows what, steps into the time tunnel and emerges who knows when. The concept may be far-fetched, and the reality may be very different from this, but the idea itself is not so crazy," Hawking writes. The laws of physics actually accommodate the notion of time travel, through portals known as wormholes. "The truth is wormholes are all around us, only they're too small to see. They occur in nooks and crannies in space and time," Hawking writes. "Nothing is flat or solid. If you look closely enough at anything you'll find holes and wrinkles in it. It's a basic physical principle, and it even applies to time. Even something as smooth as a pool ball has tiny crevices, wrinkles and voids. "Down at the smallest of scales, smaller even than molecules, smaller than atoms, we get to a place called the quantum foam. This is where wormholes exist. Tiny tunnels or shortcuts through space and time constantly form, disappear, and reform within this quantum world. And they actually link two separate places and two different times." The tunnels, unfortunately, are far too small for people to pass through -- just a billion-trillion-trillionths of a centimeter -- but physicists believe it may be possible to catch a wormhole and make it big enough for people, or spaceships, to enter, Hawking writes.

  http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1269288/STEPHEN-HAWKING-How-build-time-machine.html

• John Titor, time traveller.

  http://www.johntitor.com/

• Yes, it can be done. I am from the past. Just stopped in for dinner. Headed back now.

  Ben%20franklin

• The Titor stuff is weird.

• The Titor stuff is LAME. Wasn't WW 3 supposed to have started in 2004?

  PPSM

• The world is a rhomboid Without a circumference And nobody knows What this simile means.

  least%20horizon

• That's not a simile. (Was that the point?)

• R19, what's weird is that even the guy discovered to be playing Titor died someone (his brother?) kept up the foundation and posting as him.

• When you realize tat time is a construct that man has developed (concocted?) to mark some sort of passage, it's very easy to see that what is happening now in our reality has happend before in another's reality and is happening in the future in yet another's reality. There is no such thing as time. There is only now, this milisecond. Add to this the Brane theory with it's eleven dimensions, you realize that it's all truly illusion. When you accept the illusion, THEN the fun begins because that's when you start to realize what life is all about.

  Anon

• R23? Pure ignorant bullshit.

• R23 here: to ward off the grammar and spelling trolls, I apologize in advance for the spelling errors. My computer is three years old and too frequently these days the keyboard doesn't type as fast as my fingers want to go.

  Anon

• [quote]There is no such thing as time. [quote]My computer is three years old R23 doesn't buy the shit he's peddling.

• Limited travel to the past is possible in theory using wormholes, if they exist, and if they're stable enough to travel through, and if we can move them. You basically drag the mouth of the wormhole around at relativistic speeds. Time passes slower at your end of the wormhole than at the other end. Any spaceship that passes through the wormhole from the future will exit into the past.

• In the future, we'll all have a little worm hole cabinet in our homes.

• [quote] In the future, we'll all have a little worm hole cabinet in our homes. My mother had one and called it basement, filled with castoff furniture from the 60s and 70s.

• yeah I guess the John Titor sfuff is kinda lame, but hell we are on DataLounge, right???

• Anyone care to discuss alternate universes? Is there another version of me in an altverse that went to Brown instead of Columbia?

• Does it matter?

• Hawking is full of shit.

• There is no such thing as time. Time is a human invention because our perception of the world is linear. If your premise is 'the earth is flat', then, you will have all sorts of interesting things you think possible. Time travel is just one of those interesting things based on a artificial concept called time.

• Yes, R31. Only if you're interesting, R32.

• Read the Wikipedia article titled "Multiverse", R31. It's very informative.

  R34

• Mark Roth has discovered a way to induce suspended animation. We'll be able to basically stop someone and then restart him or her whenever we want. That could be used for time travel but someone in the future has to wake you up.

• I read somewhere the concept of time is a side effect of language.

• r38, sounds interesting, but I suspect the sun rising and setting has more to do with it.

• [quote]Is Time Travel in any way possible? Of course! Just search the threads here on DL... for any thread about Judy or another bitch-fest thread about who should have won an Oscar 60 years ago. DL is a fabulous trip back in time for many a ruby-skippered queen with too much free time.

• I suspect that copious amounts of pot are required to enjoy this thread.

  Pollyanna%20Prisspot%2C%20School%20Marm

• That John Titor stuff was a hoax, but it would make a good movie.

• I just read the John Titor site - his comments are eerily believable, but his predictions are off by about 5-8 years. I think if one believed him at all - which I do not, I hasten to say - one would also have to accept that the world-lines (what Titor calls the parallel worlds) have either diverged much more than he suggests, or that everything is for some reason delayed. The start of the tea party etc. in that scenario could be the lead-up to the U.S. civil war he mentions, and the all out nuke-fest would take place around 2019, not 2015.

• Yes, the Titor site is amusing, to say the least. I don't believe it at all, but he's really good at making some of his predictions sound credible. If someone were to travel through time, what would it take for them to be believed? Bring evidence back from the future? (Or the past?) Would a solid description of the future be enough? Would any changes created in a visit to the past make the whole point moot?

  The Abstract Object That Is Croatia

• If you think about it, as our technology progresses, at some point time travel will be possible. The sun has 5 billion years left in it's life cycle, with something like 1 billion years where Earth remains in a "temperate" zone; that is plenty of time for mankind to break the time barriers. So, why are there no time travelers? It has to be that we're destroyed before we do it (either by natural, man made, or external forces - Aliens, etc.). I for one think we're attacked and destroyed. The planet has a lot of resources and we're ruining it.....

• The reason we have time is to keep everything from happening at once.

  Anomynous%20

• If that's the case, R46, then why wouldn't we want everything to happen all at once? There's nothing morally objectionable in that, so...

  Philosophy

• If it's all the same I'd rather have a holodeck.

  The%2013th%20monkey

• Absolutely impossible. After reaching the speed of light (you have to exceed the speed of light to travel back in time), matter will be converted to energy, destroying the matter (and the person). Even if you could reconstruct the energy back to matter, the person wouldn't be the same after being vaporized into energy. Also as a result, humans will never exceed the speed of light (and thus time travel). String theory is screwed up.

  derwood

• r47, that is an old, classic joke. The fact that you respond to it seriously, snottily, makes me embarrassed for you.

• The fact that you overreacted, and thought that was a snotty - not genuine - response makes me feel sorry for you, R50. You must have many friends in life.

  See That Last Sentence? Now That's What A Snotty Response Looks Like

• "Once the vehicle stops, less time will have passed inside of it than outside. Hence, anyone inside will have travelled "into the future"." Does this mean that once the person leaves the vehicle and enters the surrounding area, that person would have traveled into the future, but that while the person remains in the vehicle that person has not as of yet time-traveled? Or are you saying that the person has traveled into the future merely by being inside a vehicle that has made a qualifying journey? The vehicle has entered the future upon landing, but has the person inside it? And, if I understand correctly the vehicle had continually entered a multiplicity of futures during the coarse of the trip as its surroundings were progressively "later" than itself, right? Also, if the time differential is only with respect to a person watching outside the vehicle, how can it apply to a person inside the vehicle even at the point of disembarkation?

• "You mean other than the mad cow pandemic, the breakthroughs in high-energy physics and the unknown functions of the 5100? I realize I've only been on this board for a few weeks but I assume you've read the other postings I've made about these issues months ago in order to be so definitive." "John Titor", writing in the year 2000, with some of his few predictions. The high-energy particle physics is interested in relation to what happened with CERN a few months ago.

  http://www.johntitor.com/

• Time is an artifical construct of a physical existence within three dimensions. There is no such thing as time in other dimensions where life exists.

• Just smoke copious amounts of pot. Time will become irevelent and cease to exist. No need to pack your luggage.

• Our unflexible way of thinking prevents certain discoveries. Our awareness is focussed on time moving forward in a very linear fashion. If we were able to, say, see time as a spider web construct with strings and knots crossing other strings, etc. we would have no difficulties to travel back and fourth by finding and assembling those tools and rides to make it happen.

• Sorry, I meant: If we were able to, say, see time as a spider web construct with strings and knots CONNECTING other strings, etc. we would have no difficulties to travel back and fourth by finding and assembling those tools and rides to make it happen.

• OK, r57, good luck with that spider web thingy. See you on the other side.

  Anomynous%20

• You can't simply will things into existence. My deciding the sky is red does not make it so. Your believing time is a spider web does not change it from moving forward only.

• r59. Apparently some people willed a globe shaped earth into existence when everybody else (including the Christian Church) believed the earth to be flat and earth to be the center of the universe. Our current state of what we call knowledge doesn't necessarily mean that in the distant future the very same knowledge is valid or accurate anymore. It's that holding on to past beliefs that keeps us from evolving and discovering new things.

• R60, no they didn't they just finally stopped being stupid. And it relates in no way to the global experience of time moving forward and forward only.

• r61. Time will tell who is right.

• I remember the radio interviews that Art Bell did with John Titor. WEHT to Art Bell?

• You're smug, patronizing and wrong r62.

• R63, he moved to some island with a young, mail order wife.

• r64, your refusal to think outside the box keeps you stuck. History is filled with what people thought to be the truth and later it turned out to be false or not the final answer or solution with so much more to discover. The odds to be right are in my favor while you are some sad old clown clinging to some recent scientific wisdom like it's your own personal lifesaver keeping you from drowning.

• I was surprised to see a reference to John Titor here on DL. I knew "John Titor". I can tell the following: he was as straightforward and unassuming person as I've ever met; he knew Central Florida like the back of his hand; he was powerfully built, but not in a threatening or imposing way, just a big guy; and he was very, very well informed about computer technology. I once asked him if his time travel may have altered future events in his own timeline or possibly created a new universe/timeline. He agreed both were possible, but didn't know enough theory to do more than make an educated guess. Other than that, you wouldn't particularly notice him on the street. Also I can tell you that the Larry Haber, the attorney for Titor's foundation, is not Titor, nor is any member of Haber's family, as the wikipedia article suggeste.

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Titor

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• R66 you don't know anything about me. Add presumptuous and arrogant to your long list of faults.

• R67 is Haber!

• I think it's cool that anything, in addition to my anus, is subject to truly meaningful dilation. I feel less....alone.

• Excellent, R67! Can you tell us more? Were the Habers the grandparents/parents of John Titor? (This is getting good!)

• r68. Your list of my faults is as complete and valid as your limited thought process.

• R71, I mentioned that Haber is not Titor, nor is any member of Haber's family. I am not Haber, R69.

  R67

• There are economic prohibitives that make time travel impossible. Ticket pricing and booking accomodations for travelers are beyond impossible. Also, most would die of food poisoning from their last meal traveling into the future, those headed to the past would crap themselves to death just from those past moments of defication. Just be happy where you are, and fly coach.

• Did John Titor find the world we live in depressing, R67? What do you think about the fact that some of the things Titor predicted didn't happen the years he said that they would i.e. civil war in the U.S. by 2007?

• I've told all I can without breaking a promise, R75. I obliquely answered your second question in a previous post when I said we discussed the possibility that his entry into our timeline either altered events or created a new timeline that was close to his own but not identical. His opinions on our time are available on other websites.

  R67

• R72 was the inspiration for Pee-Wee Herman. Must be fun being retarded.

• R67, in the mid-2000a there was quite a John Titor fad on DL. I recall several threads and references to him.

• There are no time travelers because the human race becomes extinct before it can come close to developing that kind of technology. It sucks, but we do not make it as a species.

• R72 etc., actually, you're the one who comes across as having limited thinking. R8, thanks for the excellent summary. Does this mean, then, that, at present, time travel is theoretically possible for just a few seconds into the future?

• R80, presently it's possible to travel a few milliseconds into the future, though in theory we could go much further. The time dilation experienced by astronauts on the International Space Station makes them about 0.007 seconds younger than their terrestrial counterparts after six months in orbit. However, a theoretical ship constantly accelerating at the rate of 1G would reach the center of The Milky Way in 21 years to those on the ship but 30.000 years to anyone back on Earth.

• When we talk about a fast moving vehicle "traveling into the future", that's not quite what's happening. It's that there is a difference in the rate of time for moving objects. It's all about relativity. Right now, I am sitting stationary at my computer typing this. Except that the planet upon which I am sitting stationary is itself whipping through space at hundreds of thousands of miles per hour, while simultaneously rotating on its axis. So to someone who is not on earth, I would appear to me moving quite fast indeed. Here on earth, I seem to not be moving at all. Which one is "correct"? Well, you can't really answer that question. Time is the same way. Is time moving "slower than normal" inside the fast-moving vehicle, or is time moving "faster than normal" outside of it? So the vehicle doesn't travel through a wormhole or anything to get to the future - it doesn't travel "through time", it travels through physical space but at such a rate that affects the amount of time that passes. So it's not so much "time travel" as it is time manipulation. And at the moment, we can only generate speeds that very slightly affect time dilation. Science has a long way to go before it could actually "send someone into the distant future", though doing so is well within the accepted laws of nature.

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• We can travel to the future but not the past because the past already happened and is gone.

• [quote]Any physicists here? I could see how you'd think that possible given all the rocket scientists, Harvard-educated psychiatrists, actuarials and award-winning economists posting daily.

• Haven't any of you seen Flight of the Navigator?

• How would you announce boarding for a flight to the future. It would stress grammar to the point of being more ridiculous than it is, as spoken today.

• Not only possible but happening.

• The answer of course is no.

• We don't exist at a point in space and a point in time. We exist at a point in space-time. Which means you cannot be in the same space at a different time.

• No, time travel isn't possible but travel between alternate universes is.

• [quote]Hawking is full of shit. Actually, the bag strapped to his chair is full of shit.

• All this reminded me of a Queen song I haven't heard in a long time. From Wikipedia: "'39" was May's attempt to do "sci-fi skiffle". "'39" relates the tale of a group of space explorers who embark on what is, from their perspective, a year-long voyage. Upon their return, however, they realise that a hundred years have passed, because of the time dilation effect in Einstein's Theory of Special Relativity, and the loved ones they left behind are now all dead.

  http://www.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3D7Ti9EA_ks28

• Unless you are a subatomic particle, some of which can apparently pop into and out of existence at random, the answer is no. The more interesting fact to me is the remarkable stability of our time frame, which on earth has existed long enough for one-celled organisms to evolve into jellyfish, squid, grass, trees, mosquitoes, lizards, hawks, pandas, pigs, lemurs, and us, among many other hundreds of thousands of species over billions of years.

• It seems entirely logical to me that time travel would at least be theoretically possible. If I am travelling through time already as are all others, then surely the rate at which I travel through time isn't necessarily fixed.