Do You Think Time Travelling Will Ever Be Possible?

[Ho-oh'sRealm 0]

Do you think that humans will develop a machine that will allow us to travel back in time, and revisit/relive events of the past? To tell the truth, I don't think so.

 

Time isn't something electricity, or even anything can manipulate. Time is more of a special "element". No matter how hard you try to "edit" it, or "change" it, you can only create an illusion of what it could be, but it's not really happening. Perhaps humans will develop a machine that will allow you to experience your past experiences, but really, they would only be illusions. I think that's as close as we can get to 'time travelling'.

 

So, what do you think?

[shadowx 0]

it IS possible. We have already done it.... Now, i say that but in reality of course no-one has gone back in time... However, GPS satellites, i think there are 24 in space, orbiting us right now, they *are* time travelling.

Let me explain... Time, and space have a link somewhere, and somehow. We dont understand it but we know it is there. Many theories suggest that time travel might be possible if we could travel faster than light, because as you travel faster time slows down (how, i have no idea... but more on this later) so in theory at the speed of light time does not exist. You could travel at the speed of light around the earth for a week, and yet when you slowed down and stopped nothing will have changed, it will still be the same time and date that you left (minus the time it takes to speed up to light speed and slow down to a stop of course, for time only stands still AT light speed, not slower).

Now, i said we have already done it... Those GPS satellites are travelling very fast, even though i think they are geo-stationary (eg if one was above you it would never seem to move, it always stays above one place on the planet) they are still moving through space fast, in the same way that if you spin a disk with lines on it the lines on the outed edge move faster than those on the inside (imagine the hole on a CD is the earth and the outer edge of the CD is the path of the satellites, when you spin that disc the inner hole/earth spins slowly while the outer edge/satellites spin very fast, even though they stay in line with each other) Anyway..... The satellites have clocks on them, atomic clocks that are EXTREMELY accurate, because GPS sends a time signal from your device, to the satellites, the satellite responds straight away with its own timestamp and your device calculates the difference and then calculates the distance travelled, hence how far you are from the satellites.

Now, the weird thing is this. Those clocks on the satellites, which are extremely accurate (probably something like loosing one millisecond every thousand years (thats one second every million years...) always go out of sync, always. The people that own the satellites constantly have to send up sync data to reset the clocks according to atomic clocks on earth. And not just one satellite, ALL of them, with the same time difference (lets say one millisecond (= 1ms)) why?!

Because they are time travelling. Because they are going so fast time itself slows down for them. So they are actually 1ms in the past (and lets say that happens every day, which it might not) then in about 3 years time those satellites will be one second younger than the earth, hard to understand i know.... Lets take it to the extreme...

Me and my twin split up, one of us stays on earth but the other is lucky enough to win a trip in a spaceship around the earth orbit. So off he goes on the space ship at 7am 1st january 2000. I wave goodbye, he will be gone for a year.

One year later i wait at the landing strip and he lands at exactly 7am 1st january 2001. EXACTLY one year after he left. I am of course a year younger, and wiser. And so is everything on earth. Yet he is only 8 months older. He has managed to stay 2 months younger than me. If he had a clock and a calendar, and every 24hrs he ticked off one day he would still only have counted 8 months. If he was actually pregnant (lets say we are both women now...) and one year had passed here on earth she would only have passed 8 months so the baby would still be unborn, she would have another month to wait on earth to give birth after 9 months.

Its not just clocks TIME itself is slower when you go fast. ITs a scientific fact and not a theory or a conspiracy or a secret project. Its a well known scientific fact and the GPS evidence is real, again its not an example, it really does happen every day!

From wikipedia:

 

Special and general relativity
According to the theory of relativity, due to their constant movement and height relative to the Earth-centered, non-rotating approximately inertial reference frame, the clocks on the satellites are affected by their speed. Special relativity predicts that atomic clocks moving at GPS orbital speeds will tick more slowly than stationary ground clocks by about 7.2 μs per day.

For the GPS satellites, general relativity predicts that the atomic clocks at GPS orbital altitudes will tick more rapidly, by about 45.9 μs per day, because they have a higher gravitational potential than atomic clocks on Earth's surface.

When combined, the discrepancy is about 38 microseconds per day; a difference of 4.465 parts in 1010. To account for this discrepancy, the frequency standard on board each satellite is given a rate offset prior to launch, making it run slightly slower than the desired frequency on Earth; specifically, at 10.22999999543 MHz instead of 10.23 MHz. Since the atomic clocks on board the GPS satellites are precisely tuned, it makes the system a practical engineering application of the scientific theory of relativity in a real-world environment. Placing atomic clocks on artificial satellites to test Einstein's general theory was proposed by Friedwardt Winterberg in 1955.
[edit]

 

[BCD 1]

I don't think its possible. If we consider Einsteins thoughts that if we could travel faster than the speed of light we would actually be seeing the future. But to beat the speed of light, thats not possible. Light, that is photons which are said to be massless travel at 3 x 10^8 meter per second. For us human beings to travel that fast considering our mass is not possible. So time travel according to speed of light theory is probably not possible.

[shadowx 0]

Nut the theory that light speed is unbeatable is flawed because no-one has tried!Its like saying that a Ferrari is the fastest car in the world, and because its the fastest car we know no car, or plane, or bike or bullet can ever travel faster. Its simply not true!I have a theory that if a spaceship were to travel at 1mph slower than the speed of light and i walked from one end to the other i would be travelling faster than light, because i am at (lightspeed-1mph)+(walking speed) where walking speed is about 3-5mph. In theory no spaceship can travel faster than light, because to propel a spaceship we currently have to shoot matter out the back (rocket engine, Ion thrusters or even jets of gas for minor movements) so the fastest thing we can shoot out the back is light itself, and because every action has an equal and opposite reaction the light gets thrust outwards at light speed hence the spaceship MUST be thrust forward at light speed, but only at the SAME speed as the light coming out the back (so if i were to send a jet of gas at 200mph out the back of my rocket, the rocket can only travel 200mph or slower, no faster) so unless we find a way to make light travel faster a propulsion system like this will indeed limit us to light speed. However, if we were to create a warp engine/drive (which is possible given current scientific theories) we could travel faster than light. This works by making a vacuum in timespace in front of the ship and a bulge behind. Imagine the spaceship is a cork in a champagne bottle. When we shake the bottle the pressure behind the cork increases, this is the bulge behind our spaceship when the warp drives are switched on. Now imagine attaching a vacuum cleaner to the neck of the bottle, trying to suck the cork out. This is our vacuum in timespace in front of our spaceship. So you have a massive bulge of "pressure" behind the ship and a massive timespace vacuum in front of it. So the ship gets pushed from behind and pulled from infront. This involves warping the fabric of space which i find a ridiculous idea but many theories suggest that gravity itself manages to do this (imagine a heavy lead ball placed on a cotton sheet suspended by ropes. The ball warps the fabric making a depression). So in theory that will make us speed faster than light!

[BuffaloHelp 24]

E = mc^2Speed of light is constant. So to gain higher "force", E, to travel faster than time, as the equation states, a mass, M, will be directly proportion to the increasing E.As you travel faster, the mass increases. And since higher mass is affected by friction and gravity you'll need to overcome two forces to travel faster than light. If a device can do that you *could* pass the light and "come back" to see the past. Which is considered time traveling.

[weberk 0]

You can travel backwards or forwards in time by riding a plane and changing your timezone.

[Ho-oh'sRealm 0]

You can travel backwards or forwards in time by riding a plane and changing your timezone.

^Lol'd.

 

Well, if you want to consider "time" as another dimension. Okay, put it this way. There's 3 dimensions of "space" and 1 dimension of "time". So, taking a look at that "dimension". How would machines even manipulate or come "close" to that dimension? Machines are mindless tools that are programmed to do humans' bidding, and are powered by some sort of energy source (water, heat, electricity etc.) and I fail to see how they could reach into another dimension. As advanced as we are in technology at the moment, I don't think we'll come close to making a time machine in the future.

 

Speed of Light < Time Travelling? baww, more of human desires and dreams. Whoever made up time travelling is plain...unfunny. People, perhaps we haven't proved that we can travel faster than the speed of light, but at the moment, we're not even close to coming to the speed of light. Light is yet another source of energy, which machines rely on. So, can machines be better than the sources of energy they rely on? Perhaps we've made machines to have more purpose, but that still doesn't mean machines are faster, or for that fact, better, than its source of energy.

 

[/rant]

[kleong 0]

If you are talking time travelling as in those in the movie, Back to the Future, then nope. I don't think there will ever be a day that it is possible. however, i do hope that we can travel to the past and see how is it like. You know, just to see if the past is the same as what the movies have always portrayed.

[shadowx 0]

If you are talking time travelling as in those in the movie, Back to the Future, then nope.

Exactly, ive already said how time travel IS possible, and it IS happening right now! Every day, if you didnt read my post (admittedly its a long one, i probably wouldve skipped it) then read it, it explains how time travel is happening right now to GPS satellites.

 

So it IS possible, there is so no "not true" option here, its like saying the sun isnt bright. It is, we know it is. And we know time travel is possible. We do it every day.

 

What we cant do however, is control it, we cant say "i want to go back in time to 1972 and smack a pony" we cant do that. We can however make time travel *slooooooooower* so its not strictly time *travel* but time manipulation which is a small step to time travel. (Think wright brothers, they took a fan (Air manipulation) and turned it into a propeller (Air Travel)) so perhaps one day...

 

Science says it is possible, every theory that exists says it can happen. In theory i suppose electrons time travel as they can appear in more than one place at the same time (another scientific fact... Perhaps electrons arent bound by time so hence they can everywhere and yet no-where, like me going back in time to see myself in the past. Id be in two places at once.

 

This is all science fact

 

not fiction or theory, the only fiction, or theory is IF we can ever control it like in a time machine.

 

 

 

RE: The "travel faster than light and wave goodbye to yourself" theory...

 

It goes like this, you get on a super plane, and fly around the earth landing in the same spot you took off from faster than the speed of light. When you land you see yourself getting on the plane and wave goodbye to yourself.

 

This would work because the light that bounces off your body travels in all directions, lets say you land 10m back from where you take off. So the light from your body needs to travel 10m to the place where you will land. But you travel so fast that you make it to this point before the light does, so you can stand there and the light finally reaches your eye and you see yourself, in the past, boarding the plane.

 

But, this is only light... Because you, and the plane you got on, are right where you are now, 10m back from where you see the plane and you in the past. So the plane is no longer there, all you are seeing is the light. If you threw a rock at it the rock wouldnt hit the plane at all. The plane is behind you!!!

 

ITs a bit complicated but it does make sense. I dont personally think this is time travel at all, because technically you arent in the past/future, you are just seeing the past.

 

It's the same way that stars and galaxies work. Let's say there is a star 10 lightyears away that is exploding. The explosion will only last 1 year. It explodes in 2000, but on earth it takes the light from the star 10 years to reach us, so we *see* the explosion in 2010. Let's say that in 2005, we sent a spaceship at twice the speed of light and it arrives at the star in 2010. Scientists in 2010 see the explosion and ask the spaceship to look at the star (pretend we can communicate instantly with it) but the star isnt there anymore! The spaceship looks but its just not there! The scientists on earth can still see the huge explosion, and the spaceship should be right on top of it. All the positioning systems work fine but the spaceship cant see any star. Thats because the star exploded 10 years go, the explosion lasted a year and finished 9 years ago, but the light is only just reaching the earth.

 

It's the same principal as the plane around the world trip, the plane isnt there now but the light is.

Edited November 6, 2009 by shadowx (see edit history)

[BCD 1]

Nut the theory that light speed is unbeatable is flawed because no-one has tried!

If anything can beat the speed of light, then it must be massless like photons. BuffaloHelp explained this, E=mc^2. So for us Human beings to travel at the speed of light, our body would need to break into massless photon like particles and then combine back after the travel. This is what would be visualized according to the theory.

[shadowx 0]

But there *are* massless particles out there, on the sub-atomic scale we have things like WIMPS, trillions of these things pass right through the atmosphere, you, me, a bus and the entire earth, the solid metal core and out the other side without anyone ever noticing. We can get a rare glimpse of an interaction in a few places on earth using heavy water and very sensitive light sensors but on the whole they could literally pass through a trillion light years of solid lead, without even noticing it was there.Thus they must be massless, or very nearly so. Even Photons are affected by gravity via gravitational lensing so technically they must have mass, no matter how small, otherwise gravity would have no effect, for gravity needs a mass to act on.Also in a perfect, true vacuum (which is not what space is) there would be no friction from anything. And if we hypothetically pus this perfect vacuum in one of the great voids in space and hypothetically say there is not a single unit of gravity, then there is no force, other than inertia, to oppose the acceleration of the item to faster than light speed.I think the main obstacle here is a method of travel that doesnt rely on propulsion.

[user681 0]

it IS possible. We have already done it.... Now, i say that but in reality of course no-one has gone back in time... However, GPS satellites, i think there are 24 in space, orbiting us right now, they *are* time travelling.
Let me explain... Time, and space have a link somewhere, and somehow. We dont understand it but we know it is there. Many theories suggest that time travel might be possible if we could travel faster than light, because as you travel faster time slows down (how, i have no idea... but more on this later) so in theory at the speed of light time does not exist. You could travel at the speed of light around the earth for a week, and yet when you slowed down and stopped nothing will have changed, it will still be the same time and date that you left (minus the time it takes to speed up to light speed and slow down to a stop of course, for time only stands still AT light speed, not slower).

Now, i said we have already done it... Those GPS satellites are travelling very fast, even though i think they are geo-stationary (eg if one was above you it would never seem to move, it always stays above one place on the planet) they are still moving through space fast, in the same way that if you spin a disk with lines on it the lines on the outed edge move faster than those on the inside (imagine the hole on a CD is the earth and the outer edge of the CD is the path of the satellites, when you spin that disc the inner hole/earth spins slowly while the outer edge/satellites spin very fast, even though they stay in line with each other) Anyway..... The satellites have clocks on them, atomic clocks that are EXTREMELY accurate, because GPS sends a time signal from your device, to the satellites, the satellite responds straight away with its own timestamp and your device calculates the difference and then calculates the distance travelled, hence how far you are from the satellites.

Now, the weird thing is this. Those clocks on the satellites, which are extremely accurate (probably something like loosing one millisecond every thousand years (thats one second every million years...) always go out of sync, always. The people that own the satellites constantly have to send up sync data to reset the clocks according to atomic clocks on earth. And not just one satellite, ALL of them, with the same time difference (lets say one millisecond (= 1ms)) why?!

Because they are time travelling. Because they are going so fast time itself slows down for them. So they are actually 1ms in the past (and lets say that happens every day, which it might not) then in about 3 years time those satellites will be one second younger than the earth, hard to understand i know.... Lets take it to the extreme...

Me and my twin split up, one of us stays on earth but the other is lucky enough to win a trip in a spaceship around the earth orbit. So off he goes on the space ship at 7am 1st january 2000. I wave goodbye, he will be gone for a year.

One year later i wait at the landing strip and he lands at exactly 7am 1st january 2001. EXACTLY one year after he left. I am of course a year younger, and wiser. And so is everything on earth. Yet he is only 8 months older. He has managed to stay 2 months younger than me. If he had a clock and a calendar, and every 24hrs he ticked off one day he would still only have counted 8 months. If he was actually pregnant (lets say we are both women now...) and one year had passed here on earth she would only have passed 8 months so the baby would still be unborn, she would have another month to wait on earth to give birth after 9 months.

Its not just clocks TIME itself is slower when you go fast. ITs a scientific fact and not a theory or a conspiracy or a secret project. Its a well known scientific fact and the GPS evidence is real, again its not an example, it really does happen every day!

From wikipedia:

That is really interesting lol...
would you mind posting the source??

[rougue 0]

RE: The "travel faster than light and wave goodbye to yourself" theory...

 

It goes like this, you get on a super plane, and fly around the earth landing in the same spot you took off from faster than the speed of light. When you land you see yourself getting on the plane and wave goodbye to yourself.

 

This would work because the light that bounces off your body travels in all directions, lets say you land 10m back from where you take off. So the light from your body needs to travel 10m to the place where you will land. But you travel so fast that you make it to this point before the light does, so you can stand there and the light finally reaches your eye and you see yourself, in the past, boarding the plane.

 

But, this is only light... Because you, and the plane you got on, are right where you are now, 10m back from where you see the plane and you in the past. So the plane is no longer there, all you are seeing is the light. If you threw a rock at it the rock wouldnt hit the plane at all. The plane is behind you!!!

 

ITs a bit complicated but it does make sense. I dont personally think this is time travel at all, because technically you arent in the past/future, you are just seeing the past.

 

It's the same way that stars and galaxies work. Let's say there is a star 10 lightyears away that is exploding. The explosion will only last 1 year. It explodes in 2000, but on earth it takes the light from the star 10 years to reach us, so we *see* the explosion in 2010. Let's say that in 2005, we sent a spaceship at twice the speed of light and it arrives at the star in 2010. Scientists in 2010 see the explosion and ask the spaceship to look at the star (pretend we can communicate instantly with it) but the star isnt there anymore! The spaceship looks but its just not there! The scientists on earth can still see the huge explosion, and the spaceship should be right on top of it. All the positioning systems work fine but the spaceship cant see any star. Thats because the star exploded 10 years go, the explosion lasted a year and finished 9 years ago, but the light is only just reaching the earth.

 

It's the same principal as the plane around the world trip, the plane isnt there now but the light is.

we need light to see, so if you do get on the super plane and travel faster than light are you really gonna see where you are going? i dont know, but i think i'll get one hell of a splitting headache!! maybe!! so when you reach that destination you cannot see, at one light-year away and look back, wont it take you another light-year just to see? isnt it that the things you passed on the way you can only see through the aid of light? and now that you were travelling faster than light you are now in the dark and just waiting for the light to catch up so you can see and think you are seeing the past when infact you are not? coz you'll have just travelled 1 lightyear faster than light and waited another light year (makin a total of 2 light years) just to see what you could have seen if you were travelling slower than light?

 

 

God is the one who created time so i think we should just leave that one to him, coz truth be told, to a human who is nothin compared to the wisdom and inteligence of God the concept of eternity is really something we cant understand!! and time is just a very small portion of eternity! He created the light and travels way faster than it... where his thought is, there he is, get it? thats how fast he is... we cant travel faster than our thoughts can we? coz what we see, hear and feel is what makes our thoughts isnt it? 

 

time has a beginning, and everything that has a beginning has an end, time is just a portion of eternity..! therefore time is life! i am therefore forced to conclude on this wise, that if we waste time, we are basically wasting life, which we absolutely no control over! 

 

CONCLUSION: we cant control time neither can we control life, we can only put it to use.

[Baniboy 3]

God is the one who created time so i think we should just leave that one to him, coz truth be told, to a human who is nothin compared to the wisdom and inteligence of God the concept of eternity is really something we cant understand!! and time is just a very small portion of eternity! He created the light and travels way faster than it... where his thought is, there he is, get it? thats how fast he is... we cant travel faster than our thoughts can we? coz what we see, hear and feel is what makes our thoughts isnt it?

 

time has a beginning, and everything that has a beginning has an end, time is just a portion of eternity..! therefore time is life! i am therefore forced to conclude on this wise, that if we waste time, we are basically wasting life, which we absolutely no control over!

 

CONCLUSION: we cant control time neither can we control life, we can only put it to use.

erm... Evidence, please? And how has that anything to do with science. Very off-topic if you ask me. Especially when you have no evidence for almost anything you claim there. "time has a beginning"? *erm... any evidence?* Define eternity(with logic, of course) and I could even think of time as a linear thing. You do have a point there tho, everything that has a beginning isn't eternal.

Now to the thread itself...

@Shadowx:

Photons don't have mass. You're trying to use the theory of general relativity(which relies on the fact that photons travel at the speed of light) to prove that photons don't travel at the speed of light. Now take a look at that... I suggest you take a look at special relativity, too.

 

Photons have no mass(no rest-mass, no anything), but they do have a momentum

 

You can't move faster than the speed of light(or even reach the speed of light). This isn't a practical fact, it's a mathematical impossibility. As far as I know, light's speed is not relative (as the movement of particles usually). The speed of light is absolute (yet again, a mathematical problem.) It cannot be reached. Photons never accelerate to the speed of light. This is because they are already moving at the speed of light.

 

For more information, take a look at this page where a question is answered by Laura Whitlock: http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/.

 

 

A little quote here(hope this helps you out a bit to understand):

So even if you are traveling at 150000 km/s, a beam of light would still pass you going 300000 km/s or approach you going 300000 km/s. What happens is that as you travel faster and approach the speed of light, distances shorten and time slows down so that light still travels at 300000 km/s relative to you. This is not just a theory... these effects have been observed in experiments. According to Einstein's equations, it is impossible for anything with mass to reach the speed of light.

So no, if you're on a space ship and traveling at almost the speed of light, the speed of light will still be 300 000 km/s faster than you as the quote above also states.

 

As for this thing

However, if we were to create a warp engine/drive (which is possible given current scientific theories) we could travel faster than light. This works by making a vacuum in timespace in front of the ship and a bulge behind.

You wouldn't be traveling faster than the speed of light through space. So time traveling that way is impossible. Light next to you would still bypass you at the speed of light. You aren't moving through space, space is moving.

 

More info here: http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/

Edited November 11, 2009 by Baniboy (see edit history)

[Ho-oh'sRealm 0]

Very well explained.Also, for us to travel back in "time", every second, every minute, every day of our past lives would have to be happening in a parallel universe or dimension, or else recorded somewhere. Otherwise, we'd just be going nowhere.Travelling at the speed of light/faster is possible, but probably not for humans. We would be dead before we even came close, and if we travelled in machines, I doubt we be able to sustain that speed still.Makes sense?