john-the-begger on 13/8/2007 at 07:15
I used to have a pdf on time travel released by the u.s airforce research laboratory. I must of deleted it but if your really interested you can order it from (
http://www.usa-federal-forms.com) http://www.usa-federal-forms.com
Ultraviolet on 14/8/2007 at 00:15
Quote Posted by john-the-begger
I used to have a pdf on time travel released by the u.s airforce research laboratory. I must of deleted it but if your really interested you can order it from (
http://www.usa-federal-forms.com) http://www.usa-federal-forms.com
Now THAT is something. I can't imagine what the US government could possibly have to say about time travel.
Peanuckle on 18/8/2007 at 07:50
Quote Posted by Nicker
3. What would time travel bode for grammar? Will there be new, hybrid tenses like
past-future perfect and
simple present-past? Should we devise such a system now and teach the new grammar to future generations so that when they travel back in time to visit us we will be able to communicate clearly?
Oh God no. Grammer was hard enough on me as it is. So was spelling.:laff:
As for why no-one has ever come back, maybe the governments of the future have outlawed backwards travel in order to safeguard history. That or all attempts are met with fatality, so they stopped.
The government would obviously want time travel for military apps and homeland defense stuff. They could put AA guns on the twin towers!
37637598 on 18/8/2007 at 08:15
Quote Posted by Peanuckle
They could put AA guns on the twin towers!
Screw AA guns, we would just go back to the day a caveman took a shit and called it IRAQ, and prevent it from ever happening!
wow I am totally not a racist...
but serously, I'm not a racist.
BEAR on 20/8/2007 at 00:47
i dont think that was how it happened
RocketMan on 20/8/2007 at 21:50
Quote Posted by Nicker
1. Where are all the time travelers from the future who should be visiting us today?
2. If we agree that time travel is impossible will we be spared any more lame SciFi stories where they go back in time to fix the present?
3. What would time travel bode for grammar? Will there be new, hybrid tenses like
past-future perfect and
simple present-past? Should we devise such a system now and teach the new grammar to future generations so that when they travel back in time to visit us we will be able to communicate clearly?
Obviously there are more things to consider than simply folding space.
1. Had anyone considered that the human race might be extinct due to some man-made or natural disaster? We are currently a type-0 civilization (ie. one that does not even have control over its own planet yet) and it may take perhaps 1000 years or more to reach type 2, where we are comfortable travelling within and using our solar system's resources. Even then we will be hopelessly far away from all of the interstellar objects that might enable us to create CTLs.
2. I don't think time travel to the past is impossible. There are a couple of mathematically permissable theories that do not create causality violations such as those involving multiple quantum histories, ie. multiverse. What I figure must be impossible is any "machine" that reverses time locally. Pretty much any mechanism that holds water involves a craft that MOVES and is not itself a time travel machine but carries an occupant towards a large interstellar object of immense gravity that predates everything we know of. In this way that object is the machine and would be used a la einstein to create a CTL in space-time. But in this case, even though you are visiting the global past, the occupant and ship are still travelling forward into their own local future so that if they were to run into themselves beginning the trip, they would have more experiences and memories than that "self".
There is only 1 theory I am aware of that permits local time travel to the past and would theoretically affect the age of the traveller and any matter in his local closed system. It involves a balloon of ultra-dense material that expands and contracts around the time traveller causing relativistic drag in one direction or the other. It is also opaque I think so that no observer can see the contents of the balloon, allowing quantum uncertainty to allow the occupant to exist in many times, with a probability wave function that can be shifted to one time or the other by inflating/deflating the balloon. I dunno how hokey of an idea this is though.
Time travel might also be permissable by using hyperspace instead of large gravity distorting objects. But this of course means we have to finish solving string theory, test that it works, master the calabi yau spaces of at least one upper spatial dimension and then inflate that so that someone can pass through it and even then we need shit loads of energy on the order of big bang energies to make it all work.
37637598 on 20/8/2007 at 22:45
We wont have the technology to travel through time before the world ends, sorry to say. Humanity will be mostly wiped out within the next 100 years and those who survive will die shortly after.
The_Raven on 21/8/2007 at 00:39
Quote Posted by RocketMan
There are a couple of mathematically permissable theories that do not create causality violations such as those involving multiple quantum histories, ie. multiverse.
Beat you to it. :p
Not articulated -or extrapolated- as well, though.
RocketMan on 21/8/2007 at 04:10
my bad....i only have enough mental stamina to read about 70% of this thread.
