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Time Travel

DrPepper
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Posted 05/22/09 - 07:21 PM: Subject: Time Travel	#1
I got in an argument with someone online about the practicality of time travel. I don't see how this will ever be possible. I know we never thought we'd be able to fly and now we have commercial jets that fly 500 miles/ hour;. But to me this is different. My question is is time travel practical? If not, is it fair for me to say it's not possible because I can't comprehend how it would work? Is time travel something that 10,000 years from now we will take for granted? What are your thoughts?
All the truth in the world adds up to one big lie. - Bob Dylan

swstephe
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Posted 05/22/09 - 08:24 PM:	#2
We always knew flight would be possible. Birds did it all the time. We had examples of people flying for centuries. Some critics claimed it wouldn't be possible on dogmatic grounds, (if man was meant to fly, he would be given wings). Probably a better example were the people who thought we could never travel faster than 60 MPH because we would be killed by the acceleration. But anyone with a basic understanding of science could show that they were nonsense concerns. Well, you are time travelling right now, at about the same rate as the earth. You could vary your speed by a minuscule amount by changes to speed or gravity, according to relativity. What kind of time travel do you expect? Sometimes people expect travelling through time the way they would travel spatially -- but they are simply confusing metaphors with reality.
Ethics is the measuring of morality. Morality is the measuring of good. Good is the measuring of benefit. Benefit is the measure of values.

komnoki
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Posted 05/22/09 - 08:52 PM:	#3
Time travel, I think, is practical. Eventually, humanity will invent a way to use atomics to develop a way to travel at near-light speed, which then you can achieve "time travel" into the future. It could be a few centuries to a few millenniums before we get that far. Time traveling into the past is a completely different matter, as we don't even have the slightest clue on how to get started. If I were to guess if humanity could time travel into the past, were it possible, I would guess in the range of many millenniums or a very bright person to discover to-the-past time travel. Some time in the far-distant future, we may take time travel for granted but I doubt it likely. I don't think that it will be anything to be comparable to the average family vacation, and something for only the extremely powerful and smart, as time travel is a dangerous thing to say the least.
Life is short. Eat more lemons.

wuliheron
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Posted 05/22/09 - 10:47 PM:	#4
The astronauts that came back from the moon were three minutes younger than if they had stayed on the earth, the result of moving so fast for three days going there and three more coming back. When people start going to other planets this will increase to more noticeable differences. However, it does not appear time travel will ever be terribly practical due to its expense. Theoretically you could travel to another star and back in the hope that when you arrived back on a future earth they might have developed a cure for some deadly disease that you have acquired, but the expense would be beyond all but the wealthiest individuals. There is a scientist in Conneticut who is attempting to warp spacetime in the laboratory by pushing two concentric counter-rotating laser beems through a Bose-Einstein Condensate in order to increase their inertial mass. He hopes to actually make time travel into the past as well as the future possible but, again, the energy expenditure required is calculated to be enormous. That is, if it is possible at all.

Angie
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Posted 05/23/09 - 04:21 AM:	#5
I wonder if it is really worth the effort what does the past hold that we need to relive it? Let's see the Christian Wars is that something I would like to see again, no I think not. How about the slave trade would I like to relive that where men were dumping human cargo off the sides to collect tthe insurance monies. No again I think not. How about living through the 60's well if I could go through that again with what I know now maybe not a bad idea. To me the future is so unsure and looking towards a better tomorrow is possibly the most important aspect of life. Just to see my children marry, my grandchildren graduate from school is all I really want to look forward to not back to a past that was so full of hatred, anger and self righteousness is not a aspiration for me. If you study history than are you not already traveling back and to travel forward without the surprise of the unknown and how I would handle that is almost leaving me with out hope and without hope I would not survive. What would you work towards if you could just travel towards the future? What would you change if you could travel to the past?

upstatemind
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Posted 05/23/09 - 05:55 AM:	#6
Angie wrote: I wonder if it is really worth the effort what does the past hold that we need to relive it? Let's see the Christian Wars is that something I would like to see again, no I think not. How about the slave trade would I like to relive that where men were dumping human cargo off the sides to collect tthe insurance monies. No again I think not. How about living through the 60's well if I could go through that again with what I know now maybe not a bad idea. To me the future is so unsure and looking towards a better tomorrow is possibly the most important aspect of life. Just to see my children marry, my grandchildren graduate from school is all I really want to look forward to not back to a past that was so full of hatred, anger and self righteousness is not a aspiration for me. If you study history than are you not already traveling back and to travel forward without the surprise of the unknown and how I would handle that is almost leaving me with out hope and without hope I would not survive. What would you work towards if you could just travel towards the future? What would you change if you could travel to the past? Just because you wouldn't want to experience past events does not negate the practicality of time travel.
I will force feed you enlightenment and you will crap gratitude The first outbreak of strength is our free will - Dustin Randall Hudler

Y3K
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Posted 05/23/09 - 06:55 PM:	#7
Angie wrote: I wonder if it is really worth the effort what does the past hold that we need to relive it? Let's see the Christian Wars is that something I would like to see again, no I think not. How about the slave trade would I like to relive that where men were dumping human cargo off the sides to collect tthe insurance monies. No again I think not. How about living through the 60's well if I could go through that again with what I know now maybe not a bad idea. To me the future is so unsure and looking towards a better tomorrow is possibly the most important aspect of life. Just to see my children marry, my grandchildren graduate from school is all I really want to look forward to not back to a past that was so full of hatred, anger and self righteousness is not a aspiration for me. If you study history than are you not already traveling back and to travel forward without the surprise of the unknown and how I would handle that is almost leaving me with out hope and without hope I would not survive. What would you work towards if you could just travel towards the future? What would you change if you could travel to the past? I would like to present you with a very interesting idea: Consider that EVERY HUMAN ON EARTH went through a time machine to a point in the distant past of their choosing (How about the Pax Romana? I hear it's pretty peaceful there.). Now every human on Earth is gone, but enjoying themselves in human golden ages. The planet is no longer in danger. Perhaps a different form of sentient life will pop up, a smarter form of sentient life. In this scenario, humanity has essentially gone to heaven, in a less scriptural way, paving the way for future prosperity. How about that? Huh? Anything bad about that? Huh? Seriously, I like this idea.

unenlightened
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Posted 05/23/09 - 08:00 PM:	#8
wuliheron wrote: The astronauts that came back from the moon were three minutes younger than if they had stayed on the earth, the result of moving so fast for three days going there and three more coming back. How does that happen when the moon is only about 1.3 light seconds away?
...most of our actions are the result of the past, or according to a future ideal. That's not action, that is just conformity. J Krishnamurti "Philosophy, to the Philistine, is an evolutionary process, watched over by some sort of brisk dynamic Providence, and culminating in the supreme insight of modern thought." John Cowper Powys

wuliheron
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Posted 05/24/09 - 12:36 AM:	#9
unenlightened wrote: How does that happen when the moon is only about 1.3 light seconds away? That is only when you are going at the speed of light. The astronauts were doing a mere 8,000 miles per hour. Not even really fast enough for serious Relativistic effects to take place. Essentially, for any massive object the faster you go the shorter you become in the direction of travel, the wider you become perpendicular to this, and the slower time passes. It is a balance of spatial and temporal dimensions that is conserved because theoretically space and time form a continuum, that is, something whose parts are so close together they cannot be seperated. Another way to think of this is that the faster you move the higher your mass becomes and the more space-time is warped around you as a result. At the speed of light, time ceases altogether for you compared to the rest of the universe. That is why we can see exactly what happened13 billion years ago on the other side of the universe. The light from those stars has been frozen in time for the last 13 billion years, utterly unchanged.

swstephe
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Posted 05/24/09 - 03:54 AM:	#10
I find the idea that the Apollo astronauts experienced 3 minutes a bit of an exaggeration. The speeds they reached wouldn't make much of a difference at all, (I used to do these calculations as a kid). If anything, it would be the reduced effect of gravity. GPS satellites have to compensate for this all the time, but on the order of thousandths of seconds per year. I would expect the difference on astronauts to be about the same. I've found several articles that talks about "fraction of a second". Do you have anything demonstrating the math to justify 3 minutes difference? People here still seem to think it is a practical limit that can be overcome. Imagine that you converted all the matter in the universe, (assuming it is infinite, were able to bring it all to a single point, convert it at 100% efficiency to work, (violating entropy and thermodynamics), you still wouldn't have enough energy to push a single electron to the speed of light. Sorry, but your flux capacitor and a Delorean and enough road to get to 88 mph is a nice dream, but a far cry from reality. Now you want to go back in time? Well, if you can't travel faster than the speed of light, forward is your only direction, unless entropy somehow reverses itself. There is talk about wormholes, however. That is basically a shortcut through space. If you can arrive at your destination before the light from "now", then you are technically in the past, (or future -- depending on which side you are on). But you are at a completely different spot in the universe. The closer the other end, the harder it is to beat light to a place. But then, you haven't really defeated anything, you have simply created a new universe with sub-sections that are closer together. Finally, "time" is all in your head. It is a function of the relativistic changes between observed motions. Why spend all this energy and resources changing what is basically a figment of your imagination? Figure out what you want to do with your time travel device, then do something that achieves similar results. You want to travel to 17th century England? It seems like it would be cheaper to just build a replica, complete with people preconditioned to think they are in 17th century England. It might not be as satisfying, but it achieves the same results.
Ethics is the measuring of morality. Morality is the measuring of good. Good is the measuring of benefit. Benefit is the measure of values.

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