Ok, humor me with this post. Suppose they invent time travel in our lifetime.

a) What would you do?

b) Suppose the government had control of this...What would they do?

c) What ramifications would occur as a result?

d) If you met yourself would you explode upon touch? (also would you have sex with yourself?)

e) Anything else you'd like to add...


I don't think that I would try to change the past at all for fear of what it would do to the present. I might travel back a couple of weeks to bet on sports teams and make a load of cash.

If the government had control of time travel we would never know about it. They would already have changed the past into what they want it to be and we would know no different because we'd be living in the changed universe as we speak.

Also if the past changes, would our past change? or would alternate universes start to exist with different paths in life for all of us?

It hurts my head thinking about it.

Who knows man? I have dreams sometimes that really happen. Actually, it's what most people refer to as deja vu, except I remember dreaming about the place/situation, sometimes years before.

I would go back to last week and pay my cable bill

Logic says:

If time travel were possible, we would have already been visited by people from the future.

This is what I say, unless of course Time Travel creates a parallel universe

Well how do you know we haven't?

Since when have tourists ever been discreet?

If we are talking about time travel in this time and place:

a) What would you do?

Travel to the future and find the cure for migraine headaches (from which I suffer), get treatment, and go back where I started.

b) Suppose the government had control of this...What would they do?

fuck everything up all along the time line, make impossible rules that only rich people could afford to follow, give out miserly grants to historians to study past events

c) What ramifications would occur as a result?

chaos, we humans as we are today cannot handle time travel

d) If you met yourself would you explode upon touch? (also would you have sex with yourself?)

no and no, but I would take a picture of myself with myself.

e) Anything else you'd like to add...

Speaking as a Trekkie, time travel has always fascinated me, but boggled my mind completely, which leads me to believe that humans need to evolve before we can understand the paradoxes that time travel would possibly create.

logic is boooooooooooooring

I subscribe to chaos theory, in which one small change can have huge rammifactions somewhere down the line. As a part of this theory, I don't believe that if you go to the past and make changes, your future will be altered.

Going back to the past you begin a new chaos theory right at that point in time. You begin breathing, consuming, interacting with people, changing small events in an isolated area that eventually change the future outcomes of some events on that new "present" you now find yourself in. Of course if you do large, dramatic things, the effects will be that much more great, but that's besides the point.

Your interference in that "past" would create an entirely new future on that timeline. Once you return to your original starting point everything would be as you had left it. However if you had remained in the past you sent yourself to, by the time you got to the exact same moment in time you would have come back, the present on that time line could be completely different from the one you had left.

Long story short, everything that could ever happen to anything is already happening on a different time line. You'll never be able to go back to "your" past, only a past very similar to it at the moment in time you reach it.

Around here I get a headache and stop thinking about it.

Following your logic, the real trick would be to go forward in time along the "correct" timeline to get you back to where you started. Time is an infinitely branching tree in your universe with all possible timelines included, presumably in different dimensions. So if you can "return to the present" where nothing you did had any effect, you could presumably travel laterally to any alternative present that you wish as well.

Jesus. My brain hurts trying to formulate what I'm going to write next!

OK, if everything in the universe is predetermined and time is linear, then a time machine is an unworkable paradox. Any use of a time machine to go back in time would alter the past thus permanently disrupting the timeline from whence you came, and negating your existance in the past as well as everything in the timeline forward. You would alter the one and only timeline and it would be impossible for anyone to know how it would change. I think it could be possible to go forward in time in this universe, but you could never go back.

Now I don't believe that all is predetermined, so I have to believe that there is this infinitely branching tree of alternate timelines. So if that is the case, the question of whether you can alter the present by actions in the past is kind of moot. Because in order to travel through time in such a universe, you would have to build a machine that was not merely a "time machine" but an interdimensional time-space transport device. Assuming such a method could be devised, in order to use such a machine with any sort of "purpose", you would need to devise a "navigation" mechanism that would be able to carry you to any point in any dimension of space-time, of which I remind you, there are infinite dimensions. So if you could do all this, you would not care about "altering the present" because you could travel to any alternate dimension in any time you wished. You could concievably design your own ideal reality by choosing the dimension and place in space-time that you would most want to live. Maybe that is what heaven is.

Anyway, for all those limitations, I don't believe that time travel is possible, just as I don't believe that travel faster than the speed of light is possible. Both ideas necessitate operating outside of space-time as we know it, and contain too many philosophical paradoxes to actually be controlled by beings confined to space-time.

--PunkDavid

No more time travel shit! I spent a whole day reading that John Titor stuff, i can't take anymore

Speaking of alternate universes......

I was hoping I'd never hear that name again.

If time travel became a reality, Ned Flanders would be king of the world.

excellent point. for anybody who hasnt read it already i HIGHLY suggest reading Stephen Hawkings "A Brief History of Time". I swear i understood at least 1/3 of what he was talking about . It will seriously fuck up your perception of everything around you. Also for a good fictional less mind altering study on time travel, read Michael Crichtons "Timeline". Yeah the movie sucked unfathomable amounts of ass but the book is really good. ive read it twice. the science behind the theories of time travel and quantom physics is pretty interesting

That was an awesome episode.

The Time Toaster!!!!!

That is legendary!

I think what you just wrote proves two things: time travel is impossible, and there's no heaven Or, there is heaven, but you can't go there without the help of someone omnipotential...



Technically, or theoretically, faster than light travel could be possible if you warped the space around you in the right way... The space bubble in which you'd travel would move faster than light while you wouldn't move relative to the space around you.

Also, if wormwholes could be created it would allow us to travel great distances without breaking the light speed limit.

Doesn't anyone here watch Star Trek?

No jokes about the sling shot around the sun?

No jokes about an alternate universe with a Spock in a goatee?

No discussion about the fictional warp engine, wormholes, or Borg Cubes?



I'm such a geek.

Cool. Now that's settled.



Those theories work fine until you start bring multiple dimensions and infinitely branching timelines into play. See, light moves at a certain speed within space-time. If you bend or warp space, the light still moves at the same speed relative to the other objects in that space which are all stretched and warped the same. The only way to travel faster than light is to somehow be outside of space and time. A warp bubble, a wormhole, something like that. But once you're outside of space-time, where are you? Are you in one of those other dimensions of alternate timelines? Are you in between them? If space is teh absense of matter, what is the absense of space? Gets tricky.

There is another idea for trans-light speed travel. In Dune, Frank Herbert presents the idea of folding space in order to travel vast distances instantly. Basically, you are in one place in the universe, and you somehow fold space so that you are in two spaces at the same time, and then you unfold the space and have moved to the other place. Travelling without moving. Anyway, it's an interesting idea, no more or less realistic IMO than warp bubbles and wormholes.

--PunkDavid