Time Travel And Interdimension Travel

Time travel to the future is possible.

But do other dimensions exist?

It's time for you to travel to bed, punkin'.

The best argument against time travel is where are the future time travellers now.

Sure, sure. Knock yourself out.

Yes we've done it already, in terms of microseconds, actually shorter than that.

The laws of physics don't prevent it or rule it out. The problem is if time travel was really possible on a large scale, we'd be seeing it now, which we don't.

The problem with time travel is objects in space are always moving, rotating, and/or orbiting objects that are orbiting even larger objects (stars orbiting the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way for instance), and the universe itself is expanding or shrinking.

So the earth is never really in the same exact place in space as it does it's one year rotations. So by time traveling back by one year increments, you are likely to arrive on a different spot on earth, but go back far enough and you will probably just appear in empty space, floating around. Travel back less than a year and you would definitely be floating in nothingness. Travel back 12 hours and you'd land on the other side of the earth due it's rotation.

I always wonder why science fiction never addresses this flaw in the typical time travel scenario where no matter how far back or forward you go in time, you always land on the same spot on the Earth. Does Datalounge have any physicists or screen writers to explain?

I believe in linear time and object permanence.

Not only is the earth rotating and orbiting around the sun, the sun itself and its planets are orbiting around the center of the Milky Way galaxy at a speed of 483,000 miles per hour.

R6, great point. Imagine a movie or TV show involving time travel and the hunky lead guy or beautiful leading lady go back in time the first 10 minutes into the script and oh, crap, it's over because they materialized 100 ft. above the ground or in the same space as a slab of concrete and now they're dead.

Ironically, if I could go back in time I'd go hang out with my dad when he was a young adult just so I could get to know him.

It's been done with atoms, disappearing and reappearing elsewhere. The 'beam me up" concept is theoretically possible but it's not whether all your little pieces can be broken apart and shot across time and space to somewhere else but whether you'd be perfectly put together again on the other side. Of course, to us, present time that is beyond the human time scale, can feel like time travel.

Seeing light in the night sky that has traveled through The Universe, since the time of the dinosaurs, for instance. When you look at stars, you are seeing something that has traveled through a present that is utterly incomprehensible to humans: A continuous "trip" that's continued for millions of years.

Dimensions: Well, we see light bending in space in weird ways and completely disappearing. We see light surrounding dark matter and we now believe dark matter is an actual stuff that has qualities, volume and mass, that can impact things around it. We know we can scrunch information in a super, micro way and transmit it in a way that defies what kind of space and dimensions such stuff -- the stored, imprinted information as a retrievable thing -- we'd always expected that volume of stored information to need. If something (human craft) had access to a porthole, like what wormholes might be, such condensed information might be able to pass and stretch through it and emerge intact enough to be useful on the other side, after the journey.

If I could travel back in time, I'd write all the Beatles songs before they wrote them.

what about the stars? we see them shine to us but they've been dead long time ago. It's like parallel universes.

R7 What made you come to that conclusion?

I watch How The Universe Works on the Science channel. But nothing beats book reading. Understanding dark matter and dark energy is the key and they are just beginning to understand it

It would b very dangerous and expensive beyond belief as there energy required is immense.

I would love to go back in time. I would like to see New York City in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s.

I’d love to go back to the 80s. I was born in 1988 so obviously they were a blip in my life. I think it would’ve been fun to be a teenager back then. I love all the old teen movies.

Guess what - they say that even if you could do it, it would be a one way trip - you wouldn't be able to come.back from where you left off. Also, they say that you could only go into the future, that it is not possible to travel back in time, only forward

R1, Yes, there may be as many as ten dimensions - humans can only experience three of them

I liked the movie 12 Monkeys for its time travel aspects. If anyone is interested in this topic, I recommend you check it out.

I believe it was Einstein who thought travel into the future was conceivable, but he nixed the ability to travel into the past. That sucks because I only want to go back in time.

r11, The Beatles never existed. They were 3 sets of lookalikes and an additional replacement for one of the Pauls who got disfigured.

R17 I was born in 1990 and i would choose the 80s as well.

I would travel to the 70’s. As someone who grew up in the 80’s I really don’t want to see those awful outfits and hairdos again. Atrocious!

[quotes] So by time traveling back by one year increments, you are likely to arrive on a different spot on earth

Even travelling back just a few seconds would put you in outer space. So your time machine also needs to be a space ship.

Why is it impossible to travel back in time? The past has already been established. Why couldn't a person go back to what had already taken place?

Bump forward.

R25 I dunno. Some mathematical hijinx, I guess.

The arrow of time moves forward. Physics allows for this, but you get into trouble very quickly by changing the arrow of time.

The laws of entropy state things go from ordered to disordered. This means you're going to violate this law as going back in time would reverse this.

The way to go back can be done with wormholes, IF they exist and IF the universe would have a shape that would allow such things to exist..

Then you have the non-physics paradox problems like "If I went back and killed my father, I wouldn't be alive to go back and kill him"

[quote]The way to go back can be done with wormholes, IF they exist and IF the universe would have a shape that would allow such things to exist..

Technically, yes but you'd only be going back in time to a point at or later than the time you left. E.g let's say you open up a wormhole to a destination 1 billion light years away. You instantly travel to that destination. Looking through a telescope, you see the pinpoint of light that is our sun, which has taken a billion years to travel to where you are now. So you're seeing light and a sun that is what it looked like "a billion years ago", from your current vantage point. But when you go through the wormhole and travel back to earth, it'll be back to the same time (plus however many hours/days you spent at your destination) you originally left.

In some ways if you think about how many laws have been repealed back to the stone age.

I think UFOs are from another dimension.

Traveling to a time in the future which hasn't happened yet is something I cannot wrap my mind around. The concept cancels the idea of free-will. If the future already exists, then we have no say in the daily events of our real time lives.

Ignoring the fact that the galaxy itself moves, an orbiting earth is a perfect excuse for time travel to be constrained to multiples of 365.25 days. Spend 3 weeks in the past, and the closest you could return to your departure time would be 3 weeks later, or 49 weeks before. Returning a few seconds after departure would require being away for a year.

My biggest dream, the time travel!

r32, you wouldn't be traveling to a non-free-will future per se... more like taking a shortcut to get there while time unfolds normally for everyone else while you're "out of the loop".

[quote]Traveling to a time in the future which hasn't happened yet is something I cannot wrap my mind around.

Then this will probably blow your mind: We are *always* travelling to a time in the future.

Time travel negates humans and all other living creatures from having free will. Looks like old Presbyterianism had it right all along. We ARE programmed from birth in every action we take. We are simply a manipulated mathematical equation.

No. Just no.

Time travel will never be possible it is contrary to the existence of the present.