Is Time Travel Possible?

[PensFanInDC]

Well, is it?

If it is, then someone has already done it either in the past or the future. I think time travel is full of so many paradoxes that there is no way that time travel is possible.

Discuss.

[Idoit40fans]

Nope, and there are no 4th dimensional beings. Just like there are no 2nd dimensional beings or 1st dimensional beings.

[pittsoccer33]

if it is possible, it would be into the future.

if you left this time right now and reappeared in the future, that would not create a paradox. there wouldn't be a 2013 you and a future you, just the 2013 you that showed up in the future.

it is my belief that when we learn more about black holes and worm holes we will have a better understanding of this. it wont so much be traveling in time as it will be bending it.

[Alejandro Rojas]

No

[Gaucho]

Nope.

[Froggy]

In theory? Maybe.

Practically? No way.

[eddysnake]

nope. oh wait, I guess it is.

[newarenanow]

In reality, no I dont' think so.

But if by any chance it was, I would guess that all the Mayans and other people that claim to see aliens are really humans in the future traveling back in time.

[Rylan]

I hope so. Fly out to space at FTL then return at FTL. Time travel right there

[TheHammer24]

if it is possible, it would be into the future.

if you left this time right now and reappeared in the future, that would not create a paradox. there wouldn't be a 2013 you and a future you, just the 2013 you that showed up in the future.

it is my belief that when we learn more about black holes and worm holes we will have a better understanding of this. it wont so much be traveling in time as it will be bending it.

Agreed. But this isn't the conception of time travel we think of.

If we could travel faster than the speed of light, you would beat the "present" to the "future." I.e. You'd appear at T+1 Day before your image appeared there.

[Pucks_and_Pols]

Time travel is definitely theoretically possible by the laws of physics.
As you approach the speed of light, time slows down, so in that sense you could "time travel."
Will it ever be as simple as it is made out to be in the movies? That is a definite no.
I highly doubt we will see anything close to fictionalized time travel in our lifetimes or even in our great-grandkids lives.
That does not mean however that we should stop trying to advance our scientific understanding and technolgies for future future generations.

[Idoit40fans]

Even trafelling faster than the speed of light, you wouldn't be "time travelling" in a manor that anyone could perceive.

[Letang Is The Truth]

ANYTHING IS POSSIBLEEEEEE

[Pucks_and_Pols]

Even trafelling faster than the speed of light, you wouldn't be "time travelling" in a manor that anyone could perceive.

Nobody really knows what will happen if you manage to travel faster than the speed of light. I am not saying that it is impossible, but the amount of energy it would take to move a human mass to those speeds is near infinite.
Now: if you can manage to break down a human mass, disintegrate it into a near weightless state, propel it through time and space, and somehow put it back together at its destination, you just might be onto something there.

But as to your point, yes, moving even close to the speed of light would not be like the fictional time travel in our books and movies. It would be more like "time-skipping" than time travel.

[Gaucho]

Unfortunately, there is no way to undo some of mankind's dire atrocities.

Spoiler:

[Shyster]

I hope so. Fly out to space at FTL then return at FTL. Time travel right there

As a plug for a good book, there’s an excellent classic sci-fi novel that deals with the effects of near-lightspeed travel in the context of a war. The Forever War by Joe Haldeman tells the contemplative story of soldiers fighting an interstellar war between humanity and an alien race. Each mission to attack the enemy involves months of near-lightspeed travel, and the resulting time dilation means that decades pass on Earth for a mission that lasts only a few months or years from the solders’ perspectives. Each time the soldiers return home, they find an Earth that has changed more and more from the home they knew. The Forever War won the Nebula, Hugo and Locus awards.

[columbia]

I'm going to say no, because we would surely have seen some evidence in the last 10,000 years of someone traveling back into out time.

Then again...

[Froggy]

Maybe when time travel is invented, it needs some sort of temporal anchor. Like you can't go back to before time travel was invented, but you can go back to that point from any point after it. There are a couple of movies that play with this idea. One called "Primer" is an especially trippy one

[Rylan]

That sounds like a good read Shyster

[MRandall25]

I think we need 1.21 Jigawatts.

[JS©]

Time travel is definitely theoretically possible by the laws of physics.
As you approach the speed of light, time slows down, so in that sense you could "time travel."
Will it ever be as simple as it is made out to be in the movies? That is a definite no.
I highly doubt we will see anything close to fictionalized time travel in our lifetimes or even in our great-grandkids lives.
That does not mean however that we should stop trying to advance our scientific understanding and technologies for future future generations.

This makes sense. I was gonna say that I don't think it's as simple as building a machine and setting a date, but I wouldn't rule it out a few generations down the road.



Sorry Dr. Brown, you tell a good story but that's all it is.

[Mr. Colby]

The pyramids weren't that hard to build... all they had to do was get like 150 people to pull the stone across a lubricated surface and then up ramps that they simply changed the angle of in order to get the next stone up

Sure, it was time consuming, but it wasn't that hard. And it's not like they were too busy playing xbox or something

[Froggy]

here's the thing. if you go back even like 30 years, there is a good amount of today's technology that would have seemed theoretically impossible. I'm extremely hesitant to say that ANYTHING is impossible, when the future holds technological innovations that I will without a doubt find to be entirely alien and inconceivable. Who is to say what our understanding of the universe is in 2 or 3 hundred years? or 2 or 3 thousand years? Whatever our future of humanity is.

[pittsoccer33]

The pyramids weren't that hard to build... all they had to do was get like 150 people to pull the stone across a lubricated surface and then up ramps that they simply changed the angle of in order to get the next stone up

please explain how you could cut, transport, and place each of the two ton stones every 9 seconds.

[redwill]

What I find fun is ... let's assume that time-travel is possible sometime in the future. If someone comes back in time and changes history, we wouldn't know it, would we? We would just have our normal memories like we always do. But those memories are tied to history, which is being changed. The instant our history is changed by time-travel, our entire personal history is changed, without us knowing it.

Assuming time-travel in the future and future-folk changing history, we could have lived a million different lives in just the last few minutes. History changing in a flashing kaleidoscope that we can't see because we're in the kaleidoscope itself.

... If that makes sense.