Ramifications of Time Travel

The friendliest place on the web for anyone that follows U2.
If you have answers, please help by responding to the unanswered posts.

A_Wanderer

ONE love, blood, life
Joined
Jan 19, 2004
Messages
12,518
Location
The Wild West
Okay purely hypothetical.

Time Travel is allowable in the universe what do you think its effects would be?

>Multiverse proposition, by effecting something in the past the universe splits according to the various outcomes.
>Paradox mania, what you do in the past effects the future.
>No paradox WTF? You kill your own grandfather and you continue to exist (although not for Fry's reasons as in Roswell that Ends Well :wink: )

Interested in peoples thoughts on the matter.
 
If you had a linear progression of time and you altered something in the past then it would alter the past and upset the future, hence you get paradoxes. But if one has a multiverse then by going back in time you would really be going back to a different reality, altering that reality would not effect your origin reality hence no paradox.

Think of it like a tree with branches, every time the universe is faced with a quantum probability all possible outcomes are played out in new alternate universes and these spawn new ones etc.

One can think of it with the cat being both alive and dead in the Schroedinger's Cat paradox.
 
Last edited:
Yeah...Stephen Hawking's has spoken of the parallel world's theme before in his works.

Ok I'll tackle this in the context of the 'kill your grandmother theme'...there are two possibilities that I can think of that result here:

1- The theory that the past is totally defined, (everything that has happened or must happen, including the time traveler's attempt to kill his grandmother), cannot be altered and nothing will change the course of history. In other words, the time traveller will experience endless "mishaps" in trying to kill his grandmother and will never achieve the murder, therefor keeping time (or at least events) intact.

2- This one is more complex and involves the quantum rules which govern the subatomic level of the universe. Um, in simple terms, when the time traveller kills the grandmother he creates a new quantum universe, a parallel universe where the young grandmother never existed and where our time traveller is never born. The original universe, however, still remains.
 
Last edited:
I personally cannot accept the concept of a Causality Protection Mechanism within the universe that prevents anybody violating such rules by obstructing their actions. It seems like a cheat for a very difficult question. Time Travel could exist if there was absolute time, and that gets into a whole new set of questions.
 
Yes it does get into alot of questions. Not everything has to be difficult though, some things are just simple in themselves. But I understand your sentiments on that theory.

I'm not sure about the idea of absolute/linear time though....I'm thinking quantam physics might even apply to consciousness, but that gets into a whole bunch of other questions too...
 
I have always been a time travel movie and story loving person and would love to travel time. But someone pointed this out and I never thought of it:

Current theory is that there may be an infinite number of parallel dimensions. You can never change your OWN space/time dimension by going back in time, because you were never there to start with, so returning to your space/time of origin nothing would be different. You could only go to another similar dimension and affect the changes you ALREADY had made in that dimension. Confusing, no?

That said, there is another major problem in Time Travel. The entire universe is in motion, so the exact spot in the Universe must also be calculated in addition to time. Example, I want to go back to Christmas Day 1916. The entire galaxy has rotated literally millions and millions of miles away from the spot the Earth was in on that day as compared to 2004, so one would not only have to travel thru TIME, but also across physical space to the exact precise correct spot. If I went back to Dec 25, 1916 today, from Texas of August 2004, I would arrive almost certainly in the middle of empty space or worse yet, a star or supernova or something since the exact physical spot in the universe I inhabit this moment is nowhere NEAR that of TS on Earth 88 years ago.


So now my head is spinning. But it's still an interesting subject.
 
Last edited:
U2Kitten said:
I have always been a time travel movie and story loving person and would love to travel time. But someone pointed this out and I never thought of it:

Current theory is that there may be an infinite number of parallel dimensions. You can never change your OWN space/time dimension by going back in time, because you were never there to start with, so returning to your space/time of origin nothing would be different. You could only go to another similar dimension and affect the changes you ALREADY had made in that dimension. Confusing, no?

That said, there is another major problem in Time Travel. The entire universe is in motion, so the exact spot in the Universe must also be calculated in addition to time. Example, I want to go back to Christmas Day 1916. The entire galaxy has rotated literally millions and millions of miles away from the spot the Earth was in on that day as compared to 2004, so one would not only have to travel thru TIME, but also across physical space to the exact precise correct spot. If I went back to Dec 25, 1916 today, from Texas of August 2004, I would arrive almost certainly in the middle of empty space or worse yet, a star or supernova or something since the exact physical spot in the universe I inhabit this moment is nowhere NEAR that of TS on Earth 88 years ago.


So now my head is spinning. But it's still an interesting subject.


That would all work to be true if time was strictly linear and absolute. What if it isn't? :hmm:
 
I have a thing that looks just like a flex capaciter on my dashboard ('97 Chevy Cavalier) My kids joke about it all the time. :lol:
 
back2thefutureone108.jpeg

great scotts!
 
Even if someone went back in time to begin with; the changes made then would already have effect here because we would not have gotten here otherwise.

ie. let's say I go back in time to kill my grandfather before my father is born. That would simply not occur becuase if I were successful then I would not be born in the first place to go back and effect that change.

The only time machines that could possibly be made are ones that only go forward in time. Otherwise there is no way in hell we would have absolutely NO record in the history of time of anyone "bizarre claiming they were from the future".

This is definitely a BIG deep thinker.
 
DaveC said:

Otherwise there is no way in hell we would have absolutely NO record in the history of time of anyone "bizarre claiming they were from the future".

This is definitely a BIG deep thinker.

My brother said that one time, that as Rufus said in Bill and Ted, "Time HAS told" and if there were any weird wild eyed scientists claiming to be from the future we'd have heard it. But then I thought, but what if they DID change history, so (like the alternate 1985 in Back to the Future II) the past as we see it now is the future of the things that were changed, or the point at which the time line spewed into a tangent...

(which has been my sig for weeks now:D )
 
Last edited:
If time travel were possible and you tried it, you would never be heard from again. The planet moves. If you stood right where you are and went forward or backwards, the planet would move out from under you and you would end up in among the stars somewhere. How do you time travel and stay on the earth?
 
this thread reminds me of Napoleon dynamite when uncle rico and kip buy a time machine off the internet !
 
Back
Top Bottom