Messing Around Time

[FrankZ]

I'd like to open this debate for everyone especially those sticked to science and fiction.

Within the next decades, or even centuries, if man happens to open a warp rift of time, or let's say discovers time travel, would you think it should be implemented or used by everyone? Do you think that time travel should be allowed to be used by everyone much like cellular or mobile phones today? In your point of view from here, and from what you see in science fiction movies, would you allow people to meddle around time? To travel around time? Would you think it is reasonable to do so?

With these opening remarks, let's start the debate.

[Toucan]

Like most sci-fi freaks I have spent a fair bit of time thinking about this sort of stuff as well.
I don't believe it is possible to change the past, though time travel might still be possible. That's going to take some explaining.

History has played out, what has happened has happened and that is that. If you are destined to travel back to a point in time 1000 years ago then even though right now you don't know that you are going to make that historic journey, you have already been there and any events you will take part in where played out long ago.

[FrankZ]

Good points, Toucan. Although what we are talking about here is whether you will or will not restrict the usage of time travel to other people if ever it is invented. You have given good points, although you forgot to conclude it with your decision. :-\

[Toucan]

But thats the point. My fault, reading my post I didn't really explain properly.
Permission or opinion in regard to it becomes moot. If a person is destined to travel in time then they have already been there, done what they where going to do and returned or died in that time, even if they haven't been born yet. It happened, there going to go back, thats that.
Likewise if some one has mind to attempt to change history, they will fail, history has already played out. Even if they where to get there they would find that they where meant to be there, because they where there.

Damn thinking about this and trying to put it into words does your head in.

[femoimal]

well, if the past (we know) is not immutable, then there is trouble ahead (or behind?). There was i think some novel written about that by Poul Anderson i think, about time patrols constantly resetting the time line that naughty communists wanted to change... Others have of course written about it as well, Ray Bradbury did the "sound of thunder" story too...

The way we should deal with time travel depends on technicalities:
- when shall we reach that technological level
- what is needed to travel
- what are the modalities
- how space/time continuum reacts to it

- about the tech level needed to achieve time travel, i just hope its still a bit faraway, so we have time to evolve a bit, and get more mature. We do not have all the time in the world to do that, but when the time comes, i hope it can take it. Faster than light travel should automatically open the gates to space travel, but Einstein so far is holding the fort.

- What is needed to go and kill your father to test some theory is also important: if you need about 500 peta-watts and 200 cryo-quantum-computers to do it, we are pretty much sure the travel will be state/super-state monopoly and hence more easily manageable. Now, if all you need is your laptop and your woman's vibrator battery to do it, we are screwed big time.

- How does it work ? Can we send a particle, a gravitic wave, some atoms, a human into time ? Can we specifically go sometime ? Can we come back ? Can we transform time-travel in a precise main-stream science ? Afeter all, time travel can be as hazardous as flying in Jupiter's atmosphere, or as fancy as going to a walk in the park. There is no way to know that yet. All depends on minute properties of time travel itself, which i of course know but shall not share with any of you. Just get abducted yourselves.

- If we do it, then, how will the universe react to it ? Ah, well, there are plenty of colorful theories here too. Some say the time-space continuum will heal itself, some that it will annihilate the time-traveler to keep in shape, branch-out into a different universe, and others say it might cough a little. To put some order in it, from the most benign : the universe might stop to exist, or just get elastic and absorb the tension and changes on its past. Or maybe there is not past. Ah, i need a cigarette.

by combining those four variables, you can get a pretty fancy danger-assessment of time travel:
- if it's easy, cheap, straight-forward, and the universe reacts to it by rebooting, i think it's better if the control is the responsibility of God controlled by the UN and advised by a board of Irish dyslexic poets.
- If it is astonishingly expensive, complicated and you can send only quantum states of single bosons that evaporate in 1,75 atto-seconds, then we may release it to the people (who of course will have to use whatsoever for it).

To make it short (lets not waste our time), the less can tackle time-travel, the better. But look at the Non-Proliferation-Treaty and you will see that regulation mass-destruction technology is at best deliciously complicated. States, companies, rebellious movements and your wife will all want their monopoly in time and improve their present. Time is pretty complex and chaotic, the results should be very difficult to predict. What will happen if all of them are allowed to nudge it is something beyond the result of my cooking.

To conclude, i would only allow myself to travel in time and push myself to be a beta-tester of Starcraft II.

[FrankZ]

Nice points, fenoimal. That's awesome, especially the SC2 part.

Anyways, here's how I think time travel will happen based on a movie 'Timeline'. Okay so basically, a team of tech experts (aka geeks) discovered not time travel, but teleportation. How it works is the main man's theory: "Fax works not by putting the whole paper into the cable, but only the data on it. So, what if we can decompose the particle arrangement of a solid, save that as data, send through this cable, and re-assemble on the other side?". Yeah, plausible, no? But after they have assembled everything, the dynamics, the supercomputahs and etceteras, and initiated the protocol-- their man did not appear at the other side. Hence, he was aimed at a reflective star above the earth which reflected the data to a wormhole, and re-assembled his particles at a different time.

[ecyor0]

As I remember, there was a short story (I've forgotten what it was called) that took the idea of "you can't change past events" to the extreme - the fellow who went back couldn't even make a dent in a sandwich, and raindrops pierced like bullets.


Anyway, onto time. Let us assume for the moment that mankind has developed a method of travelling backwards and forwards in time at will. Now, left just like that, you wouldn't have to worry about people going back and changing earth's history very easily, since if they go back in time, earth's position in space has changed - they will end up hanging in space somewhere. The sun orbits around the milky way galaxy at a speed of 486,000 miles per hour, so going back in time even one year will leave you at a point some 4,250 million miles from the sun, minus 93 million miles for the distance from the earth to the sun, leaves over 4,150 million miles to travel to get back to earth - by which time a year will probably have passed anyway, bar some exotic spaceship engine that allows massive acceleration/top speed. And this is without taking into consideration the movement of the milky way galaxy through the universe.

So you not only need something that can move in time, but in space as well (cue Doctor Who theme). Either that, or you need to take a decent sized, high-tech spaceship with you, which will assuredly tax the capacity of the time travel device. So, you would need to be either very rich and eccentric, or you would have to be time traveling after they've worked out how to hop through space in a precise manner (by which time they will have already sorted out the kinks with time travel, and it becomes a moot point).

Onto time travel itself - I see one of four possibilities (most already mentioned)

1) You can travel back in time, but you can't change the events of the past. No need to police, everything goes swimmingly.

2) Going back in time alters the course of history and creates an alternate future in a parallel universe of some kind: in which case, it doesn't affect us, it affects the other universe. We won't even notice when a split occurs. This leaves us unharmed, but there is the possibility that the ethics of creating entire parallel universes, which may end up worse off than us, will quagmire any further time travel.

3) Going back in time alters the course of history, and the future we exist in spontaneously disappears. This is the scenario that would need the most policing, so much so as to make time travel the exclusive domain of special operatives and mega-rich criminal syndicates (that would make a good series, come to think of it....)

4) You can't go back in time - only forwards and return to the present. No time machine can go further back in time than the point where it was created, thus eliminating the need for policing prehistory, but still leaving a fair amount of present-day policing to do. I think this is the one the physicists like Stephen Hawking and so on are sitting on at the moment, but I can't remember the name of the program I saw it on, so I can't back that up.

[femoimal]

reading all this, ol'chaps, i got this idea:
What if the fact that there are no -visible- alien around is due to time-travel ? Let me explain: we are all familiar with the cold-war argument that civilizations might very well annihilate in nuclear holocausts and disappear etc..etc... But what if the terminal event is time-travel ? Perhaps any advanced civilization that discovers it just evaporates because of the reasons we mentioned before.

Perhaps time-travel is the ultimate apple from the tree of knowledge.

[FrankZ]

reading all this, ol'chaps, i got this idea:
What if the fact that there are no -visible- alien around is due to time-travel ? Let me explain: we are all familiar with the cold-war argument that civilizations might very well annihilate in nuclear holocausts and disappear etc..etc... But what if the terminal event is time-travel ? Perhaps any advanced civilization that discovers it just evaporates because of the reasons we mentioned before.

Perhaps time-travel is the ultimate apple from the tree of knowledge.

~oo.. this is getting verry interresting! Splendid idea. Taken into consideration that there may be real advanced inter-galactic confederations or outside-the-earth civilizations, time travel may be already occuring. What if the UFO's people see as flying objects are no less than what they use to travel back and forth dimensions? What if these 'ghosts' we are talking about, are nothing more than silhouettes of our selves in an alter dimension branched on the galaxy?

But to twist the tale, what if one of us is an alien, merely stalking to collect human intellect. It's relation to time travel is that, what if these aliens we are gesturing towards are collecting information on our current present, and take it to their past, and so to boost their knowledge.. leaving humans behind them?

[Lithium]

I kind of disagree with what you're saying. If aliens have mastered time travel, I'm pretty sure that they're superior to humans technology wise. And whoever commands time is top-dog. Imagine stopping time, planting a grenade in your enemy's pocket and then unpausing it. That's right, time is the ultimate-everything. If you control time, you control everything.

I only see a few ways of achieving time stoppage.

1. Beat light speed
Does space disintegrate before time? That's irrelevant with this method, the faster you're going, the slower everyone else seems to be going. How? With a nanosuit. (no, not crysis)It will have millions of nanobots vibrating faster than the speed of light. Your atoms will be moving so fast that you will be anchored into the same timeframe as long as your atoms don't settle.

2. Magic
Yes, I read too much Artemis Fowl. As Eoin Colfer states, Magic is energy, or the ability to manipulate energy. If humans ever unlock the key components of their brains to manipulate energy, perhaps we can distort the time flow and slow it down, or even stop it.

3. Alternate Dimensions
As related to the above passage, use magic to grab a piece of the earth, put it in the 4th dimension and smash the timeframe by constantly flying around in limbo.

[FrankZ]

Wrong, Lithium. Wrong. Not one who controls time is top-dog. Because, someone's higher than time, more like more superior of it--- God himself. He is outside time, time does not cover him. He controls it. And the three points you have given are all wrong, and are inreferenced, or inconcrete.

Why? Your first point was rather what made them all wrong. You said, of you control time, you can beat lightspeed. But you forgot that lightspeed, is somewhat time, and so if you hold time, you also hold it, no matter what. Speed is time over distance. So don't forget.

[femoimal]

god ? well, you know lads, if i had to choose a god, it would be time itself, Kronos. But let's leave god outside of this. As Laplace beautifully replied when he was asked about it during his demonstration of three-bodies astronomical equations, "god ? i do not need this hypothesis" :smirk:

I would agree with lithium, time mastery seems like a very potent weapon. But a weapon you do not totally control is not a viable one (see chemical and biological warfare issues). So we are back to the technical issues we already talked about.

Lithium, your boldness is quite surprising. Your first idea seems absurd until you really inhibit your logical alarms. Well, a suit that goes back and forth at great speed would perhaps experience relativistic time distortion. Interesting idea. Of course, we cannot really discuss techniques here, we'll have to wait a few years i suppose.:D (man you are years ahead)

Magic is crap, or the ability to manipulate crap. If humans can ever consciously control their brains at quantum level they will probably explode themselves into small pieces of this very magic. Changing the balance of forces with your 'quantum' brain is a charming idea, but:
- if you change the strong nuclear force by just a tad, you could fusion yourself. Practical to a suicide bomber shouting Allah'akbar, but otherwise quite not the thing you would like to do to impress a girl.
- if you change the weak nuclear force, you could turn yourself entirely radioactive. Your DNA and proteins would be cut to pieces, and cerenkov electrons would lighten you up like a christmas tree, just before you melt. I would not like to pick up your remains, even with a lead suit.
- I can leave the gravitic and electro-magnetic bits to you, you have a fantastic imagination that i'm sure will come up with something interesting :D YOu would probably not survive it, but hell, hey, its for mankind !

By the way, lithium, how did you come up with your name ?

[Lithium]

Wrong, Lithium. Wrong. Not one who controls time is top-dog. Because, someone's higher than time, more like more superior of it--- God himself. He is outside time, time does not cover him. He controls it. And the three points you have given are all wrong, and are inreferenced, or inconcrete.

Why? Your first point was rather what made them all wrong. You said, of you control time, you can beat lightspeed. But you forgot that lightspeed, is somewhat time, and so if you hold time, you also hold it, no matter what. Speed is time over distance. So don't forget.

Are you just mad because what you said before my post was wrong? Ah, the drama. Well, anyways, do you really think that you can disprove those theories? Are you sure they won't work? Of course they're inconcrete, we're just discussing things and we can freely say what we want to say.

Enough with the bickering, I know there's no such thing as magic, but what if there is? If you want to talk realistic, we could all just say that it's impossible to stop/control time and shut up right then and there.

--

I came up with my name because it's my favorite song. :)

[Gunmonk]

To me the real question is "can time go backward?" the only thing I can say to that is, probably not. I'm not a physicist, so forgive my gross heresies and misinformation. It seems to me that Dimensional space only goes up... or at least human can only survive going up. the higher up you go the more compact space and time is. Now if for some reason you were ever able to make space-time collapse in upon itself, such as matter being destroyed (which according to a hypothesis I have might be possible) then you could possibly get such a rift. But lets look at what we have in our universe already, Black Holes it is only gravity tearing time and space apart around it leading to somewhere else that we cannot predict... a wormhole of sorts. yet in this time-space is compacted to a state of chaos, and moving several centimeter could very easily mean moving several light-years. as to time stoppahe, time only exists in a fourth dimension, in other words, if we are able to somehow translate down into three dimensions, time might not exist. the only other way is drugs

[Seal]

To me the real question is "can time go backward?" the only thing I can say to that is, probably not. I'm not a physicist, so forgive my gross heresies and misinformation. It seems to me that Dimensional space only goes up... or at least human can only survive going up. the higher up you go the more compact space and time is. Now if for some reason you were ever able to make space-time collapse in upon itself, such as matter being destroyed (which according to a hypothesis I have might be possible) then you could possibly get such a rift. But lets look at what we have in our universe already, Black Holes it is only gravity tearing time and space apart around it leading to somewhere else that we cannot predict... a wormhole of sorts. yet in this time-space is compacted to a state of chaos, and moving several centimeter could very easily mean moving several light-years. as to time stoppahe, time only exists in a fourth dimension, in other words, if we are able to somehow translate down into three dimensions, time might not exist. the only other way is drugs

first of all, please have some structure to your posts. that's just a wall of text. thanks.


despite that, though. physics as we know them work in normal conditions -- that is, conditions we can observe and experiment with. according to those physics time is linear and arguably goes only forward.


but we do also know that our perception of physics is not complete and all-encompassing, and will break down in conditions we cannot control nor research: such as extreme gravity, extreme heat. those conditions make physics work differently, if at all. however, there is research aiming to increase and improve the range of conditions we can make happen: for instance particle accelerators.


that said, it could be very feasible to have something impossible happen in black holes, where extreme gravity takes place, probably extreme heat as well. it's a fat chance we (humanity) could make any use out of it, though.

[FrankZ]

Lithium, don't take me wrong. I wasn't mad when I posted a reply to you, because of any viable reason whatsoever, the end, period, amen.
(Pinoy nga naman, oo. :o)

Next thing, I can't give any contradiction to any of the post above since Femoimal had already answered most of the points Lithium gave, including that widely aboriginal imagination.

Also, just a hinch. Femoimal, with your points about crap magic, explain then why there is real psychokenesis is science, and why those who were able to do it didn't explode their brain in gorey radioactive material.

Seal, beautiful points. Although particle acceleration is really doubtful, as making particles go faster would set any matter ablaze just like F*cking Awesome down there.

[femoimal]

psychokinesis ? where ? the only thing i can move with my mind is my penis. Tell me more about it !

no seriously, Moving things with your mind entails violating many rules of physics. So much could be done by tweaking the rules of physics just a bit less. If you deem, like some physicists do lately, that the brain is so complex that i may behave like a quantum computer, you may expect it to behave a bit quantumly itself, and even bend the rules of macro-physics around it (yeah, i mean, you may hope so). Introducing quantum behavior in our "real" world would be funny. Entangling particles, teleporting information and so... I can get some reading about it and tell you more if you like :)

Nevertheless, time and the brain... hmmmm Dunno. Perhaps the brain can travel only in its own past ? There was an interesting debate (sort-of) between Einstein and ...wait... here's a good link, prepare for some long reading, it looks quite interesting to me as i browsed through (i read some things about time, like the scientific american special or the french magazine "la recherche" too)

http://www.iep.utm.edu/t/time.htm

[Nostradamus]

Note: I am sorry if I cannot cite the source of this information because I simply cannot remember who said it.

I was watching the TV last year when there was a scientist being interviewed (I think he was on Richard and Judy or something like that). He calimed that he had the idea to create a time machine, the only problem being that you can only go forward in time.

His theory was that, as space and time are inextricably linked, if you use lasers to create a circle in space this will bend space itself, causing it to go round in a circle, which will theoretically cause time to go round in a circle.

Think of it like a marshmellow floating in a mug of hot chocolate. The marshmellow is the item about to go forward in time and the hot chocolate is space/time. When you stir the hot chocolate round and round the marshmellow stays in the centre. So if you stir space/time then the item will remain where it is.

The scientist then stated that in his theory the item would go forward in time and end up in a paralell universe. Therefore by his theory, one could travel forward in time and meet themselves in the future, however they could never return to the universe they were once part of.

This is all I gathered from the interview.

However my main queries are; why would you go to a paralell universe? wouldn't bending space/time just have the same effect as cryogenic freezing, all you do is tsya where you are and wait to be woken up?

I believe this second point raises a good question. Could feezing oneself be counted as travelling forward in time? As if you were frozen you would seemingly be unchanged, no older, no younger, no fatter, no thinner. So would this mean that you have indeed travelled forward in time?

[UMSLdragon]

Just because someone hasn't, I don't think that it's possible. Not to ruin your thought processes of course, but it just doesn't seem to work in my mind. Not to say that it isn't plausible, just ya. I don't think it exists. That's just me though.

As for some ideas, I liked the idea where that the time travel left you in the exact location in space and had to catch up with the earth. Now, could that mean that time only exists in space and it's relation is only space. If time travel can come about (I'll play :P) then it would be affefted by objects of the other three dimensions.

I think time is effected by objects around places, hence that you could fly to the nearest star at light speed with only a lunch and return in time for supper while some fifty years have passed on earth and your momma is pissed :)

You've got the three dimensions, which are linear (correct?); width, height, length; x,y,z. Then you've got time. Think of those three dimensions and time passing through them all... like gamma rays. 'Sept, only some pass through while most pass around. This is purely speculation. I have no idea how time works, but it sounds cool.

So, the larger the object, the more time would... change around it. So, if you've got a large enough object, it could have it's "own time." And that type of speculation, ladies and gentlemen, is how the idea of evolution came to be :P Random thought processes by people of power.

That's my idea. Time's a fun thing to mess around in. And while we're at it, how would time be relative to people. Like, at times it feels like it's gone by fast, and other times it feels like it's gone by really slow. How would that fit into this time travel? Idea's anyone?

[King_Critter]

Well, I've got a few theories. The first is exactly as Toucan explained it in the begining of this thread. If you go back in time, you've already gone back there, so you can't do anything to change anything.

Another is the theorie of multiple universes -- if you go back in time, a new universe springs into being to acomodate you. This is kind of a scary thought, because if you tried to time travel... well, to you nothing would seem to change (unless you did something major a long time ago, like sniping Jesus >.<) all your friends in your original universe would just see you vanish and never ever come back, because you'd be stuck in your newly created universe. Not cool, unless you've just escaped from prison and disapereing forever sounds like a good idea. o_0

Another idea that has been brought up already is time travel only in one direction -- forword. I've got an idea that's so simple, you can hardly call it time travel: seal yourself in a room. Generate a stasis field (no, don't ask me how one would go about doing so <_<). Set the machine to automaticly turn off in a few thousand years. The problem with this, of course, is that you're still vulnrable to outside events -- say, World War 3. A stasis field isn't going to do much about a Tsar Bomb.