How possible is changing time?

[ShadowGonissa]

I've been thinking about it, and well, it really doesn't seem possible to change time.

Example: It would be cool if I got to assassinate Andrew Jackson.

For those of you not well studied in US History, Andrew Jackson was one of our earliest presidents, and possibly the worst one we ever had. The reason I want him assassinated is because he is personally responsible for the infamous trail of tears.

See, these white farmers wanted more land, and they wanted the Cherokee Indians to be driven from their homes to accomplish this goal. Thing is, the Cherokee were in no way a threat. In fact, they had adopted many practices of the colonies; they were now a farming people. They weren't going to attack.

But it got to Congress to drive them from their lands, and Congress voted against it. At this point, Andrew Jackson ignored the vote and told them to enforce it for themselves. Then he took the army and shoved away the Cherokee.

What a jerk.

However, I can't assassinate him, even assuming I had a time machine. Some Cherokee broke out of the trail of tears and met with my family, which was living down in Alabama at the time. They married into us, accounting for my 1/16th Cherokee blood.

Now if I went back and shot Jackson before the trail of tears, I would prevent these Cherokee from being my anscestors, wiping out the existence of many anscestors, and even myself. See, if my one direct Irish descendant hadn't married his Cherokee wife, then none of his half-Irish, half-Cherokee children would have come into existance, and none of their children either, because their existence, and mine as well, depends on getting the EXACT genes we did from our parents.

Thing is, if I don't exist, then I didn't assassinate Andrew Jackson. But if I didn't assassinate him, then the trail of tears would have gone on as it did, and the Cherokee would've come to Alabama and I would exist. But since I exist, wouldn't I try to assassinate Jackson? And since I shot him, I don't exist, and if I don't exist, I didn't shoot him. Circularity.

According to this, I can't assassinate Jackson.

But even if I wasn't related to him, it wouldn't work. Say that I was a Korean person, not related in any way, and I go back to kill him. But if he was assassinated, then my younger self won't feel any desire to kill him. So I don't go, and therefore he doesn't die, but then I want to go, so I do, but then history says he died, and since my younger self doesn't know that I did it, I won't go. So he's alive.

Again, Circularity.

So it's not possible to change the past at all, because by changing it, we change our desire to change it, therefore erasing the fact that we ever changed it at all.

What do you think?

[Kingscrab]

Could i go back in time and assassinate him? Then i would get the 3 minutes it took me to read that back because you would have never written it. Yay!

Besides, i'm part Iroquois so what do i care.

[frazz]

Ofcourse! Andrew Jackson! He's the reason for everybodys trouble! Heaven forbid Adolf Hitler or stahlin should be killed.
Congrats Shadow, you have disproved time travel. Though one solution would be alternate realities. Even still time travel would result inevitably in the collapse of cause and effect.

[GenocideAlive]

Again, Circularity.

What do you think? Man, that was deep, Gonissa. I've got another one:
--

There is a Creation (life on earth, earth, etc.), so there must be a Creator.

God made it.

Whom created God?

--

If I was all-powerful, then I could create a rock so heavy that nobody could ever lift it.
But if I'm all-powerful, then shouldn't I be able to lift it?

--

I always lie.

--

These are called "paradoxes". Neat, huh? Man, it's a big world out there.

[ScottieIWU]

Think about it this way, the past is fixed. Assuming the physical time travel were possible, then whatever damage you've done has already been done. The fact that it's the past means you cannot change it. So clearly you never discovered the ability to time travel and never went back into time to kill the vilest of all villans, Andrew Jackson.

However, in all seriousness, I think of time as a kind of one-way road. It is most logical to assume that the past is fixed and nobody can ever change it, therefore we could travel into the future as much as we wanted, but never into the past.

[Neo]

I've always thought of time as fluid, rather then fixed.

Has anyone seen that movie Butterfly effect? I really liked the way they did it. Changing even little things can have far reaching consequences.

-Neo

[kongurous]

Jackson wasn't all bad. One problem(the Trail of Tears)may have occured, but he DID stop one of the Carolinas from breaking away from the US after its governer/senator/whatever didn't agree with him. You want to kill this man for relocating a group of people when he also stopped a civil war from ripping this country apart?

Every leader has done some good in their life, and that good outweighs that bad. If you destroy this person for their bad, you destroy their good and what it brought.

[Modred]

Jackson wasn't such a bad guy...just a jerk. And it wasn't the Congress he opposed, it was the Supreme Court. The Cherokee brought a friggin lawsuit against the US and won; Jackson just chose to ignore the Court.

Anyway, what if going back in time and changing history simply changed history? A la "A Sound of Thunder" (the short story by Ray Bradbury, from what I hear, the film was horrid). The person that caused the change doesn't cease to exist, he simply becomes an anamoly in the changed world.

[FallenLord]

I prefer the "highway of infinite lanes" understanding, that avoids the circularity. But on the subject of assassination, I would have taken out Lincoln. Any liberty that existed before the war died at Appomattox.

There is a Creation (life on earth, earth, etc.), so there must be a Creator.

God made it.

Whom created God?I addressed this in a different thread a while back. Just as it is impossible to falsify the statement that supernatural forces exist and/or affect the natural, it is also impossible to falsify the statement that super-supernatural forces exist and/or affect the supernatural. I.e., the suggestion "God dun it" does not imply "something dun God."

[Giantfish]

Well, if your change the past, you would alter the future. But in order for that future to exist, you must continue to exist in order to have changed the past and created a new future. But you can't come back to the present as you know it because that is what no longer exists.

No one has ever "played around" with time before so everything here would simply be speculation. This was mine...

[frazz]

Man, that was deep, Gonissa. I've got another one:
--

There is a Creation (life on earth, earth, etc.), so there must be a Creator.

God made it.

Whom created God?

--

If I was all-powerful, then I could create a rock so heavy that nobody could ever lift it.
But if I'm all-powerful, then shouldn't I be able to lift it?

--

I always lie.

--

These are called "paradoxes". Neat, huh? Man, it's a big world out there.
That's rellevant. </sarcasm>

And I like to think of the rock thing this way. either
a. God is not bound by our puny human logic. He creates a rock so big that even he himself could never lift it. Then, in his infinite power not being bound by puny human logic he lifts the unliftable rock. It doesn't make sense cuz we are not Omniscient.
or
b. God is bound by the laws of logic. There can be no unlliftable rock. therefore he cannot make it. This is the same as saying God cannot make a triangle with 190 degrees because this is undoable in our mortal world. Thus, God is Omni potent in our world within the bounds of logic in our world.

[GenocideAlive]

That's rellevant. [sic] </sarcasm> I'm hurt. After all, I live to find relevance in your eyes. :cry:

And if you don't mind me borrowing a page from your playbook, there, your logic was extremely sound. I like the way you acknowledge that it's logically impossible then say a god could do it anyway. </sarcasm>

And how the hell is this thread turning into a debate about Andrew Jackson? Gonissa has some sort of irrational grudge against a 200 year old guy that she's doesn't know or has even met--I think it's fairly safe to say that reasoning with her about it is going to go nowhere.

[Leosam096]

Man, that was deep, Gonissa. I've got another one:
--

There is a Creation (life on earth, earth, etc.), so there must be a Creator.

God made it.

Whom created God?

--

If I was all-powerful, then I could create a rock so heavy that nobody could ever lift it.
But if I'm all-powerful, then shouldn't I be able to lift it?

--

I always lie.

--

These are called "paradoxes". Neat, huh? Man, it's a big world out there.

I tell you the truth...for it is written in the Bible

"I Am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End."
He wasn't created or anything...He goes beyong our puny little heads....He has no beginning He has no end. He doesn't "have" them, He "IS" the Beginning and the End.

also,this thread talks about Time...so here we are...this would definetly point to this.

cheers!

[WeekendLazyness]

I prefer the "highway of infinite lanes" understanding, that avoids the circularity. But on the subject of assassination, I would have taken out Lincoln. Any liberty that existed before the war died at Appomattox.Sounds interesting, could you explain further?

Also, anyone who takes Genocide's examples of paradoxes as a personal attack against god needs to remove their head from their ass right now. He was using them as examples, he was not using them to disprove the exsistance of god. Honestly, why does every thread in IR have to turn to a discussion about religion?

[Leosam096]

we are truly sorry...
i've heard those before...but not as examples, but from aetheist professors who question the power of God.
i am sorry if this pointed out like this.
so can we just get on with the purpose of this thread?
talks of religion go to another thread.

cheers!

[Darklord]

Hmm... You go back in time, kill Stalin, and then the future without Stalin is tacked onto the end of the present where you travelled back. So, when you travel "forward" until your own time, you don't actually travel, but instead morph time, duplicate a part of it, change one condition, and tack it on to the end of what already happened, so time still moves straight forward, in a line in the short run, in who knows what in the long run. This is possible due to "personal time": There is a median, on which events are rigidly placed, but this median is a hypothetical entitiy, like the axes in maths. Instead, each person is a line weaving back and forth, which determines in what time they live. Now, one of these lines just suddnely change graphs. (Ever wonder why some people just *disappear*?)
Either that, or time travel is possible, but was incorporated into history the first time around. So, Hitler was never assassinated, because the assassin was in fact sent back to kill Dutourd, who never then grew up to become President of France when they invented the nuke and used it recklessly, leading to a destructive war that laid half the planet in waste, only leaving the CERN facilities in Switzerland, where they managed to build a workable time machine. Of course, this never happened, and so the assassin actually hallucinated the entire thing (Paranoid schizophrenia. Nasty stuff). However, the fact still remains that Dutourd would have destroyed the human race had he not been killed. Stalin would have met with the same fate, but his legacy led to the Tokyo Treaty in 2065, which enabled scientists form around the world to cooperate fully, thereby letting them finally draw up a working faster-than-light propulsion system, so Stalin was left alone for the good of mankind.

Ever wonder why history seems like it has been guarded so that the worst atrocities are relatively few, and that there always were ways it could've been worse? Or why so many events converge to form coherent advances in humanity as a whole?

At least, those are my ideas on ways to get around the time travel paradoxes. Might not work. Might work, but seem like a bad CGI job. Or might work so perfectly smoothly that they are all true without even suspecting it themselves.
And, btw., if there are any solid, proven laws of nature/physics/whatever that prevent these from coming true - aside form the "time travel/FTL is impossible" adage - please inform me, so that I avoid repeating the mistake.
Thank you.

[frazz]

Also, anyone who takes Genocide's examples of paradoxes as a personal attack against god needs to remove their head from their ass right now. He was using them as examples, he was not using them to disprove the exsistance of god. Honestly, why does every thread in IR have to turn to a discussion about religion?
If you want to keep a debate free of religious discussion, then don't use paradoxes that are nearly exclusively used to try and disprove God. Sorry if I took it the wrong way.

So you're saying that all the possible weaves of time work together, seemingly for a greater objective, such as preserving humanity, or sending it to a specific goal? Sounds like- well, no religion here.

But I don't get it. You're saying that there are infinite realities, but we live in an optimal one? It's all vey confusing, could you please paraphrase?

[sweet8D]

If the thread creator wants to talk about Andrew Jackson, LET HIM!!! I found it extremely interesting, myself.

What an interesting topic. If we went back and assasinated all the bad people in the world before they were bad then we wouldn't have the world we do today. Technology's advances were caused by the cold war, the cold war caused by WWII, WWII caused by German extremists (and many causes) but the list goes on. Simply put, if we wanted to kill everyone in history who we hold a grudge against then not only would next to none of us exist, but it wouldn't be much of a world to live in.

Sidenote: Did anyone see the South Park where the future citizens were immigrating to the past and taking all the jobs? It was golden.

[Ghost213]

I saw that episode of south park. Also I would like to comment on the theory of time travel. In the movie Event Horizon, a inter-dimensional ship with an anti-matter gravity drive was created. The way the ship got where it was going was simply by activating the gravity drive, folding the time-space contium around itself in a wormhole fashion. But back to time travel. Ideally, we should hope that time travel is an impossible dream, the effects themselves would be catostrophic. Say you go back in time, using the method for inter-dimensional travel in Event Horizon. The idea of folding fabric upon itslef shortens the distance, but can also create a riff if the folding was not careful. And assuming you did succeed in your mission to travel time, if anything in the past were altered severely, you would not return to your origional present. Having created an altered past, you would alter the present, creating a new dimension. Each and every bit of time exist as seperate dimensions, simply meaning infinite possibilities. So if you alter a time, you create a new one, one not so planned for. The origional would continue on, but you would have truly created a new line for time to follow, meaning that at the same exact moment, two forms of the same time would exist, tearing apart the fabric of space simply by inverted parallelisim.

I suggest don't go back in time, it could have very catostrophic consequences.:smash:

[Darklord]

So you're saying that all the possible weaves of time work together, seemingly for a greater objective, such as preserving humanity, or sending it to a specific goal? Sounds like- well, no religion here.

But I don't get it. You're saying that there are infinite realities, but we live in an optimal one? It's all vey confusing, could you please paraphrase?Sorry, I'm not quite clear on this. That post may or may not be aimed at mine, so I'm going to answer it as if it were. If it isn't, I apologize.

The gist of what I said was that, if time travel is possible, future humans w/time travel probably went back and modified history already. However, history as we know it was modified the first time around, so nothing changes.

The entire thing about the timelines preserving humanity to the best of their ability was due to humans coming back in time and optimalizing them. And that the events we think too horrid to bear are, in fact, either necessary for development, or else weren't modified because of/were the result of a modification of something much worse (Such as: Holocaust vs. Destruction of Humanity, or Communism vs. Reversal to Stone Age). Or, you know, time travel may be possible but illegal. Or we might just all kill ourselves within the next decade, and so never develop time travel :cool: .

[WeekendLazyness]

If the thread creator wants to talk about Andrew Jackson, LET HIM!!! I found it extremely interesting, myself.Unfortunately, that's not how Warboards works. When someone creates a topic, it's best to stick to it. Otherwise it is off topic and most likely spam.

Anyways, I believe time travel to be impossible myself, for a couple of reasons:
1) Thinking about it logically: The past is what has happened already. The future hasn't happened. How could you possibly travel to either?
2) If time travel were possible, the only way I could think that paradoxes would be avoided is that fate exsisted, i.e. if you're going to kill someone, it has already happened. Your actions have been predetermined. This also brings in to play the fact that time would be constantly repeating itself, over infinte periods of time. This doesn't seem plausible to me because no one has been able to explain why I'm living this reality and not the infinite other ones.
3) I do not believe in fate.

Paradoxes of course could be avioded in the way explained in Back to the Future, where whenever someone is faced with a decision, the universe splits into muliple paths where each choice would carry on from there. Again this doesn't seem plausible because I ask again why I'm living this path, and not the infinite others.

Of course you could state that infinite paths and time loops are possible because the universe is infinite, but then again, some mathematicians claim that some infinities are greater than others, thus the infinite paths or time loops wouldn't fit into an infinite universe.

[Darklord]

Not as much travelling in time as warping spacetime. Think of it this way: When time and space are one and the same, and we can move freely in space (Gravitational forces notwithstanding), why should we not be able to do so in time? Thinking about it logically, time, being one with space, should be possessed of the same qualities. Which leads me to believe that the only thing we lack in order to travel in time could be to find the direction to walk in.

[WeekendLazyness]

Not as much travelling in time as warping spacetime. Think of it this way: When time and space are one and the same, and we can move freely in space (Gravitational forces notwithstanding), why should we not be able to do so in time? Thinking about it logically, time, being one with space, should be possessed of the same qualities. Which leads me to believe that the only thing we lack in order to travel in time could be to find the direction to walk in.Because space and time are not the same thing. Whereas space as we can see it is made up of three vector dimensions, time is merely a scalar measurement.

[Kingscrab]

If the thread creator wants to talk about Andrew Jackson, LET HIM!!! I think the creator of this thread is female. Besides, she has apparently lost interest in her own thread as she hasn't posted since starting it. Jive Turkey! :lame:

[IceFlare]

Lets say it were possible to alter time and travel back in time. How come we don’t see any people from the future right now with us. When they invent time travel in the future, they will mostly like to travel back in time, how come no one has traveled back to our time? This is why I don’t think its possible.

[sweet8D]

They are just not telling you that they are from the future... But if they had any decency, they would let me know so they could go back and prevent some things that I did in the past... Actually, could you tell anyone you suspect of being a futurite to look me up? I could use a favor.

[wa123]

simply!
only possible when you can travel at a speed greater than light!
Now get outside and do some running, practice your speed.

[sweet8D]

Won't we morph into globs of energy if we go faster than light? That would be cool-I'd like to be a glob of something, anyway...

[Yoda]

GA, stop bringing religion into every IR thread and thus turning what seems like almost every thread into a religion argument.

Time-travel could be made possible, from what I've heard of it. But it would be in many Hundreds of years that they invent a way of doing it. If ever.

Secondly, it raises the circular problem. Suppose I want to go back in time and "kill" Hitler to save the 6 million jews and all the other Nazi victims and WW2 from happening. I somehow manage to do this. Then suddenly none of that happens. Life continues "normally" and none of those catastrophes happen. But if that happens, then why would I have an incentive to go back and kill Hitler in the first place?

Suppose I kill someone many years ago and his/her descendants disappear from the face of the earth? I honestly hope that time travel never happens, although of course everyone has things in their past that they would want to change.

[ShadowGonissa]

THANK YOU, Yoda. That's exactly what I was trying to say.

Okay, first of all, I don't hate or have a grudge against Andrew Jackson, because he is indeed partially responsible for my existence. I was just using him as an example.

[kongurous]

Okay, first of all, I don't hate or have a grudge against Andrew Jackson

Then why make a thread stating you wanted to go back in time and kill him?

If the Trail of Tears didn't occur, the displaced Native Americans would still have existed. But that also raises another question: would someone else have displaced them, if Jackson didn't? Going back and killing Jackson to stop the Trail of Tears may have just delayed it, instead of stopping it entirely.

[Protosschick99]

She was just using him as an example.

I think the trail of tears was messed up--Imagine what the world would be like if it DIDN'T happen?

[WeekendLazyness]

Thank you Yoda921 for bringing up everything that has already been said in the thread.

Sweet8D, I once read that if time travel were possible, it would not be possible to go back in time before the machine iteself were invented.

wa123, it's pretty much not possible for anything made of matter to travel faster than the speed of light. If you did, you would gain an infinite mass. Just consider the equation E=mc^2. As you add energy to something, the mass spirals upwards. This is why it's also extremely hard to make anything but small particles travel at relativistic speeds.

[Kingscrab]

Lets say it were possible to alter time and travel back in time. How come we don’t see any people from the future right now with us. When they invent time travel in the future, they will mostly like to travel back in time, how come no one has traveled back to our time? This is why I don’t think its possible. Wrong. I am from the future. I am changing the course of history even as I write this. You don't know it now, but 10 years from now when you look back and think about this cryptic post, you will wonder about how reality might have been different had i not written it and thus revealed my presence to your archaic civilization. I shall then laugh at you from my intergalactic wormhole. :ghost:

[kongurous]

She was just using him as an example.

That matters why? She still said she wanted to kill him, and then says she holds no grudge against him. How can you kill without a grudge? She obviously isn't being paid to do it, no-one else here, or anywhere else I've been, has expressed the same desire to go back in time and kill Jackson.

[GenocideAlive]

That matters why?
Cross Reference: Cronyism.

It's rather popular here and elsewhere, in which members that are particularly fond of one another (friends, etc) will defend one anothers' glaringly flawed or irrational decisions.