Stupid question

Discussion in 'Free Thoughts' started by Lady Historica, Jan 11, 2011.

  1. Lady Historica Banned Banned

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    Lets say someone in the future was inevitably going to make a time machine. Say each action or movement we take is calculated and all forms of "experience" were reproducible. Every moment had an effect that brings certain paths into existence and alternatives to be buried in our dreams of future reproductions. Would they be able to send themselves emails at any time and have it appear in their inbox?

    Technically all you would have to do to find if you survived "The end of the World" in 2012 wouldn't be to build and insure it by building a hut that brings your further from your neighbors, but rather to simply send yourself an email. If you get a response from a computer I would guess that's what took over, but if it seems oddly human maybe there is hope you survived "judgement day". What if you were Jesus and had to displace your judgement on all people. Could your morality handle that kind of weight?
     
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  3. NMSquirrel OCD ADHD THC IMO UR12 Valued Senior Member

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    if this works..then thats how time travel would first manifest itself.
    we could send messages back through time..
     
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  5. Lady Historica Banned Banned

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    Maybe if he connected it to the internet Just as the Germans found a way to measure the exact time on clocks around the world a long time before our cesium clock calibrations, Mr lasers over there can pick up cosmic remnant signals that calculate the exact position of objects in time. Then all we would have to do learn how to manipulate them.
     
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  7. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    The Dimensions of Fate, with Arthur, Marty, and Mary Jane

    I know it's not much of an answer, but:

    • Get loaded.
    • Read Adams' Hitchhiker trilogy (five books total, plus a short if you really want).
    • Watch all three Back to the Future movies.​

    I read the books and watched the movies when I was a kid, so temporal paradoxes pinged my sense of metaphysical conflict. However, having lived with these ideas and smoked many brain cells into an alternate dimension, I've come to the conclusion that those sorts of queries about time are pointless. No, I don't mean that in a hostile context. It's just that we cannot resolve them, and thus run around in circles until we fall over at some arbitrary point and call it the answer.

    They are fascinating questions; I just came to terms with them as unanswerable long ago.

    Of course, all of this goes out the window if one thinks they can affect the past without the past affecting the future. That's the big catch. Otherwise, we're stuck with "fate".
     
  8. domesticated om Stickler for details Valued Senior Member

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    I wonder if the universe has an error handler for null references?
     
  9. NMSquirrel OCD ADHD THC IMO UR12 Valued Senior Member

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    i have always liked the idea of , there is only one reality until time travel is created, then when the first person travels back in time it would begin multiple realities as the traveler affects the time line..
     
  10. NMSquirrel OCD ADHD THC IMO UR12 Valued Senior Member

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    isn't that a black hole?
     
  11. jmpet Valued Senior Member

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    I would like to hold out the belief that time travel to the past is possible at some point in the future- we only need to invent the technology to do it. One problem with time travel is that the Earth moves a million miles through space every day (around the sun, along with the solar system, in the spiral arm of the galaxy, along with the galaxy). If we could pop out of existence today and land in yesterday, we'd find ourselves a million miles away from the Earth.

    I hate having to throw in alternate universes into the mix- it makes it more complicated.

    One can therefore ask "where are all the time travelers from the future?" to which I say since we haven't yet invented time travel, we haven't yet gone back in time. We need time to unfold and the technology to be invented first before we can travel back, so since we haven't yet, there are no time travelers.

    In other words, in the future when we do invent a time machine we'll go back and change history to one that has time travelers in it all along. We're still virgins as far as time travel goes.

    As far as paradoxes go, we're just going to have to allow them to happen.
     
  12. Stryder Keeper of "good" ideas. Valued Senior Member

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    The problem with that though is that every "split" would be the birth of a whole universe from nothing. While you might think that mirrors the creation of our own universe, it technically doesn't.

    What is more plausible is that all "Parallels" are born from the same cataclysm point, they are all exact duplicate copies and make up the multi-world state of the universe. Only over time would we learn how to "tap" these parallels by creating paradoxes.

    You might ask "Why is it more plausible?", well that's actually due to the overall theory on how the universe is built, a split leaves an "open" universe with no true answer to it's birth, a universe catalysed by multiple universe starts (A Singularity) tends to find with a lot of the current physics models.
     
  13. Stryder Keeper of "good" ideas. Valued Senior Member

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    13,105
    There are other reasons for "time travellers not existing", for instance if you produced time travel and had the patent, it wouldn't necessarily be protected. After all there is corporate espionage and the nature of many different countries political ideologies which might look upon your "Individual Property" as being non-existent based upon their political ideology.

    So as the inventor of time travel you would take steps to protect your "assets" (and stop the criminality of one country attempting to misuse your efforts on another etc.) Firstly you would arrange for all those people that currently work on time travel or theory to work together as one effort, this means no individual owns the rights, no individual makes the laws, the design is shared (This stops certain ideologies pertaining to "state vs individual" rights.)

    You also invent at the same time a "time travel firewall", the firewall basically "Locks physics" to make time travel impossible until such a time as the particular group is formed to make the firewall in the first place. The encoding to the firewall could potentially be a composite of biometrics of the inventors of time travel.

    This generates a rather interesting predicament should someone attempt to "wipe from existence" the inventors and replace them with thieves, as doing so would mess up the "physics lock" in such a way as to make it mathematically incalculable to be able to navigate the firewall (in fact the whole universe from that observational perspective would lack form). This protects the history of the inventors and their invention while making sure we don't need "time cops".
     
  14. jmpet Valued Senior Member

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    Time travel will be the most complicated invention we make up, whenever we make it up. This is not the action of an individual but a government entity with billions to spend.

    I can only imagine the fallout from other governments if we invent time travel- we'd be able to go back and unmake their history if we saw fit.

    One thing is certain- once we invent time travel we will inevitably corrupt our timeline. May not be a bad thing as we would percievably be "improving" it (i.e. stopping 9/11) but in the long run, reverse time travel technology will mutate history to a very large degree to where we have laser guns in the wild west and dino hunting becomes a sport.
     
  15. Sarkus Hippomonstrosesquippedalo phobe Valued Senior Member

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    Ah - but then you're just using the sun rather than the Earth as the central frame. Why the sun? Why not the galactic core? The Sun orbits the galactic core at around 230 km/s, so in one day this is a further 20 million km.
    And why would such a device not be its own reference?
    All stuff to consider!

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    This assumes that we are the "first pass" through our timeline... but since there would, in your scenario, only ever be a single pass through, if time-travel is possible in the future then possible conclusions from there being none at the moment are: this era is too dull for people to come back to; the earliest time that time-travel can only take you back to the moment time-travel became possible.

    Personally I'm the opinion the latter is the likeliest, if time-travel into the past is possible at all, which I highly doubt - although wormholes look interesting in this regard.
     
  16. jmpet Valued Senior Member

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    Man I HATE wormholes! They're unstable, they're light years away from us and they operate under subatomic physics.

    One way I think of it is Flatland- the 2D universe where you are given a death sentince if they make a box around you. To jump to 3D you could just hop over the barrier but to do so you'd need to disappear from Spacetime and reappear outside the box magically, as everything there is flat.

    In that regard, time travel would involve us popping out of the percievable universe to reappear somewhere else.

    I think we first need to invent time travel before we can alter out history to where time travelers exist and we're not at that point yet.
     
  17. Lady Historica Banned Banned

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    So If you had to build a time machine for judgement day, how would you build it?
     
  18. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    Time can already be slowed by relative speed. Or gravity.
     
  19. Lady Historica Banned Banned

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    sorry
     
    Last edited: Jan 11, 2011
  20. Nasor Valued Senior Member

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    Worse still, someone might just go back in time and patent it before you get the chance to invent it.
     

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