Time Travel!

[Blue Tiger]

Ok, for a completely new disscussion!

I find that this topic is highly interesting and confusing at the same time.
Such a subject is naturally full of "ifs", "buts", and asumations, but its all the more fun becuase of it!!

So, im thinking of all the different situations and possibilities that you can have if time travel were real and you could participate in it.

So, you have the basic question, What would happen if you went back in time and killed your grandfather? Would you dissapear? Would your parents dissapear but you just stay there? Thus a paradox is created?
Then theres what if you killed someone from a very longtime ago in the past, would a whole load of people dissapear from the world today, all their descendants? Because without that person, all those people would not exist...

Also, could you go back in time and bring back a dinosoar egg?

Also, going back in time and killing (sorry for the repetitive "Killing" thing, but...) Hitler, how would that change the world? would someoen worse have atken his place?

And finnaly, what if you went back in time and told people about something like something about dragons for example and make them believe that dragons were god or something similar, you could easily make them worship something. My younger brother sadi to go back in time with a group of people, all dresses in werewolf costumes and run through the streets of some old city, then tell the terrified people to worship you, lol You would end up coming back to the present day and find staues of werewolves everywhere!

So, the possibilities are ebdless, discuss your ideas, thoughts and oppnions on this subject... for a bit of fun!!

[Falconer]

Time travel consists of relocating oneself out of the normal time flow and back further than your original position. Since time can be considered a dimension like the three spatial ones, then when you travel back in time, you send a copy of yourself, which means that when you meet yourself, nothing interesting happens.
Another means of time travel involves transferring your consciousness into the body of someone else, presumably yourself. This may be easier than the former method, but carries certain ethical issues.

As for changing history, that is out of the question. For an example, say you go back a week to a Red Sox game and decide to change the outcome so the Yankees win. How? If you try to go onto the field, you will be stopped. If you attempt to enter the dugout, same thing. Let's say you take an extreme choice: shoot the pitcher. You pull a gun, but then the fans would mob you. Or say the most extreme case happens: you use a bomb or nerve gas to destroy the stadium. Then what? The Yankees have still not won. In short, the law of the conservation of reality holds fast: there is very little any one person can do to alter the course of history. Think of a river, flowing through a channel. The river has eroded a certain path, and only through great effort can you divert it. Lesser attempts may move it for a while, but it will eventually flow back into it's original path.

For more mundane events, such as killing your own parents, that would not destroy you. Rather, when you return to your own time, you would find a world where you didn't exist. No one would know you, but you would still be there. As for killing another person, their descendants would remain, as that person's spouse would just remarry. The genes for the dead dude still exist in the population.

[alondor]

to your time is a river analogy i say you are right with a slight change :time is a river that branches off multiple times so what changing even a small detail would change what reality you are from hence you would be in one reality and remember another so yes you could do small things like shooting a monkey or something big like shooting hitler as a baby

[vampirehunter42]

Oddly enough I agree with Falconer on this. Time will not let you change things. Something will happen to change things, or at least even things out.

So, you have the basic question, What would happen if you went back in time and killed your grandfather? Would you disappear? Would your parents disappear but you just stay there? Thus a paradox is created?

Really you would not be able to do it. Somehow you will be stopped. (the same for the other killings)

But as Falconer posted, you will return and never had been around. Think "Its a Wonderful Life." type thing.

Then there is what if you killed someone from a very longtime ago in the past, would a whole load of people disappear from the world today, all their descendants? Because without that person, all those people would not exist...

Also, could you go back in time and bring back a dinosaur egg?

I would say no. Even if you can get it, and return it and hatch it. The creature would die quickly with its system not being ready for the diseases of our time. And the same can be said for the person getting the egg. (come to think of it, same can be said for the above and below as well.)

Also, going back in time and killing (sorry for the repetitive "Killing" thing, but...) Hitler, how would that change the world? would someone worse have taken his place?

That will depend on when you did it. But I think Germany after being left in the wake of WWI, would have done the same. He was influenced by a number of things, and had a number of followers with his same ideas. I think things would have been about the same.

And finnaly, what if you went back in time and told people about something like something about dragons for example and make them believe that dragons were god or something similar, you could easily make them worship something. My younger brother sadi to go back in time with a group of people, all dresses in werewolf costumes and run through the streets of some old city, then tell the terrified people to worship you, lol You would end up coming back to the present day and find statues of werewolves everywhere!

This would not have worked. Something like that may have had a short lived following but the stronger religions would have crushed it in time.


But I must say my influence on this are the Dragonlance novels. They have had a couple of stories of time travel (with magic) and has major events remain unchanged.

[alondor]

vampire siad that germany would have responded the same way to WWI but what would happen if you stopped that from happening entirely.

Another question is what would happen if you went an gave a bunch of people fom oh lets say the 1500's?

[vampirehunter42]

Yes, WWI was due to an uneasy balance of power among the European Great Powers. Everyone had problems with everyone else, then the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand broke the presure pot. Something would have happened, WWI was a pushing fest that everyone started to get into.

[Falconer]

Oddly enough I agree with Falconer on this.

And so you should.

Hitler really just played on the damage done to Germany by the League of Nation's treaty. Effectively, the treaty was designed to send Germany's economy into the stone age, and the Germans were understandably upset. If not Hilter, than perhaps someone more competent, which would not be good.

to your time is a river analogy i say you are right with a slight change :time is a river that branches off multiple times so what changing even a small detail would change what reality you are from hence you would be in one reality and remember another so yes you could do small things like shooting a monkey or something big like shooting hitler as a baby

What you are talking about is the parallel universe hypothesis, which has not as yet been proven. Even so, in that case you are not changing the present so much as moving down the stream and back up another branch to a world that already existed.

[alondor]

WWII might not of been as bad if Germany had not been the ones to start it any idea why they were blamed with WWI?

[vampirehunter42]

Ok here is one.

The Library of Alexandria was burned down in 48BC. It was the greatest collection of ancient work of all time. And it may have even over shadowed even some libraries now.

So what would happen if either you stop the burning or grab a couple of armloads of scrolls an things before they burnt?


(sorry, I am trying to change this away from a WWI and WWII talk. They can flame up fast.)

[Blue Tiger]

Indeed, moving on...
How about if the Conquistadors didnt kill all the Aztecs? Their culture may still be alive today...

If we did have some of those scrolls from that library, what would be in them? (my history knowledge is obviously lacking in this area)

[Jishdefish]

I tend to agree with the multiple-universe theory, it makes sense in general big-bang theory and general relativity type theorizing. It would be an all-around replacement of the 'dark matter' theory. If there were an infinite number of planets, stars, and galaxies effecting ours in a slightly higher or lower universe then everything would be balanced out, no? In this kind of universal-type universe, you could kill your grandpa, and prevent an alternate version of you from being born, but you would still be there, assuming you could get back to your own time stream. I don't think time could be traveled without going outside of time first or at least outside of 'our' time, which means that you must travel the incorrectly termed 'dimensions.' Really 'universes' is more accurate.

As for the 'something would always stop you' theory... What if, God forbid, a very bad man from the future sent back an army to the 20th century? I tend to think that would effect someone's time-stream somehow and his/her descendants, and his/her descendent's descendants.

But, assuming time travel is possible, we must live in a universe around which there have been no discoveries of universe-travel or it just hasn't happened yet or happened but happened inconspicuously and we don't even notice that our history has been changed as it has always been that way to us. Or there is the very likely possibility that it isn't possible to travel outside your own universe to a similar one. But, then again, since this theory of mine seems to be infinite in the number of possible universes that means that the value of the possibility can't be absolute zero, so is it possible that universe travel is very likely to exist somewhere but is just infinitely rare and almost non-existent in all of all universe space-times.

Very confusing, sorry.

[Falconer]

As for the 'something would always stop you' theory... What if, God forbid, a very bad man from the future sent back an army to the 20th century?

Lord in heaven, do you have any idea of how much raw energy that would require?

I just watched "A Sound of Thunder", a movie made from a book by Ray Bradbury, and I concur with their formatting. If any changes were made, than our time would change so that we never knew the old past existed, which would neutralize Jish's proof that time travel hasn't happened.

[Corva]

I'll refer you all to the Novikov self-consistency principle. It basically states that a time loop has to be stable i.e. if you went back in time to shoot your grandfather the gun would jam. Don't try getting out of it with another weapon; it would still fail. There might be an old newspaper article around, however, when you return, documenting one mans 'lucky escape' when a maniac attacked them.

If your grandfather died after being attacked at that time, however, and you went back to stop them, but accidently killed your grandfather, then that would be a predestination paradox. Not really a Paradox, but it's still interesting.

Going back in time and bringing a Dino egg back does not produce a Paradox under the Novikov principle. That Dinosaur egg was 'destined', if you like, to be removed from its own time. If you went back in time and kidnapped somebody, bringing them to our time, it doesn't produce a paradox provided either:
a) That person disappeared around that time anyway
or
b) They returned to their own time with little disruption.
To use 9/11 as an example, I could go back in time and send everyone on that plane into our time, saving their lives, and the plane carries on regardless. Now, I've just saved their lives, but provided they never found the bodies of anyone on the plane anyway, it doesn't produce a paradox.

And that is why I don't believe in Death.

[Falconer]

Then you're cool with me shooting you, right? (just kidding)

Though you are right, in a sense.

[alondor]

Personally the thing i am worried about happening is that if time travel becomes possible then it would also become possible that millions of different time variations could modify thier time line and all end up in the same universe in which case what would happen to the copies, to use
SG-1 as an example would they get sick and slowly die or would they just be stuck in our dimention until they realised that our time sucks

There is also the possibility that the government is conseeling a bunch of time traveling goof balls and stopping what they think would be mass histeria

[vampirehunter42]

Ok here is one close to the idea of the site...

A number of myths and ledgons have a close date and place to where they happened.

What would happen if you used the time travail to go back and take a picture of said creature. And maybe take a part of it for examination. At this we are not affecting the past, we are only taking a picture and cutting a skin sample or whatever of a dead creature. Would main stream science accept the evidence or will they still find something wrong about it.

[Corva]

It would depend on whether they can accept the Time Travel. If you got a skin sample, though, they'd be able to sequence the genome, so they'd have to accept the creatures an unknown one. Geting a live egg would settle the matter.

[vampirehunter42]

An here is an add on I though of.

What if you don't find one? (sorry, but I must ask it)

[Falconer]

No apologies there, if you listen to killjoy Falconer that would be a pertinant issue.

The monsters in myth and legend are fearsome creatures, capable of killing and laying waste to human villages. Taking a DNA sample is a difficult prospect without changing the myth.

[Corva]

It doesn't have to be alive to take a skin sample.

[_Dragon444]

Basically, I see time as a vast, storm-tossed ocean, where any choice can change not only the future, but also the past. Please note the question about the Library of Alexandria. Who knows how many historical texts were lost when it was burned to the ground. Without those texts, we know nothing of numerous chapters of Greko-Roman history. Now, if we had them, we would subsequently have learned from them, preventing many "repeats" of history.

If someone could travel time, they would metaphoricly be "flying" above the ocean I mentioned above, then landing at another point. They wouldn't change anything much in the place they just left, but, by changing something where they moved to, they could alter everything in the "waters" nearby. Not only past and future, but also many other "timelines" (or dimensions).

My theory is much more confusing than most others though, so I won't go into much more detail.

[alondor]

Ok hear is something i heard somewhere, and i quote "Our actions are diverse that it is impossible to predict the future"

There is another quote as well "You can not change the future because whatever you do has already happened"

those quotes i believe are very true

[Blue Tiger]

yes, those quotes are very true, especially the last one. For instance, if you tried to change the future by saying "I will drive there today" and you dont, you didnt change anything but your mind which you were going to do anyway. Basically, anything thats about to happen is allready going to happen. This is like the destiny/fate thing, where the future is set, no matter how surprising an event is, it was allready going to happen anyway.

Also, if you did go back in time, that event will keep repeating over and over, the people of the time you went back to will see you, and when you in the time before you went back, you will eventually go back again, lkie in the Pern books, eg dragonsflight.

[Corva]

Who here's read Twilight *raises hand and looks around* Well, I've forgotten if it's in the first book, but Alice has the ability to tell the future. But if it's a person, it only works for what they've decided. If they change their mind, the future changes.

[vampirehunter42]

Ok I have been thinking on the going back in time thing and the interaction with things. I am now seeing it more like in "A Christmas Carol" and the Ghost of Christmas Past. "These are but shadows of the past." Or something like that. I see time travail as a method of study of the past, everything will just be like a television show that just keeps going with you as the watcher. And nothing you do can change the actions of what is going on.