Do you think time travel will ever be possible?

1. 85

   Azure11posted 12 years ago

   Do you think time travel will ever be possible?

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2. 61

   Davesworldposted 12 years ago

   You cannot go backwards in time, the universe will prevent that.  It's called the grandfather paradox and it goes like the:  You go back in time and shoot your grandfather, therefore your father was not born, therefore you were not born, therefore you could not have gone back in time to shoot your grandfather, therefore your father was born, therefore you were born and you went back in time to shoot your grandfather ... and so it goes.  You get caught in a loop from which you cannot extricate yourself.

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3. 61

   Agantumposted 12 years ago

   Yes time travel is possible right now.  We have this great device that allows us to traverse a linear time stream from the past to the future, it is our very own body.  You can store information from the past and you can even imagine what the future will bring, Sometimes your imagined future and the one that comes to pass can even be the same.

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4. 93

   Doc Wordingerposted 12 years ago

   It would be fascinating to travel through time but I don't think it will ever be possible. Consider how limited we are, as humans, when it comes to 3-dimensional spatial travel. Even if we were able to move at the speed of light, it would take many thousands of years just to transport a manmade object outside our own galazy (which also happens to be a drop in the ocean compared to the universe as a whole). And even if we were to build a machine capable of carrying humans vast distances through space, nearing or exceeding the speed of light, would our fragile bodies be able to handle the ride? Would there be enough resources on our tiny planet, or our neighbouring planets, to power this machine?
   
   If we can't master the technology and science required for intergalactic space travel, how can we hope to do something similar with time travel? Presumably, travelling through time would involve entering a hidden, inconceivable, dimension, and coming out intact on the other side. I think Stephen Hawking (or another renowned physicist) once said that even if we were capable of harnessing both the entrance and exit point of a wormhole and blowing them up so that a human could pass through, the huge amounts of radiation generated by such an undertaking would instantly destroy anyone who stepped inside.
   
   I recently watched a documentary on TV about the speed of light that gave an interesting example of how time travel could work, in theory. Suppose you erect a train track around the circumference of the earth and then build a train that is capable of travelling at close to the speed of light. A passenger then climbs into the train, powers it up and shoots around the earth for seven days (in his time). When he disembarks from that train only seven days older, about 50 or 60 years will actually have elapsed in the world outside. Of course, our own limitations as humans combined with the laws of nature mean that the likelihood of being able to build such a machine are virtually nil.

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5. 90

   JKennyposted 12 years ago

   Daveworld, makes a very good point about time travel into the past; its simply not possible, because of all the numerous paradoxes that exist. I do remember watching a Stephen Hawking documentary that stated that theoretically time travel to the future is possible. I think it may be the same programme that Doc Wordinger watched. In order to do it, we'd have to build something that could travel at the speed of light. The documentary invented a 'hyper-train' that spent a week circling the earth at lightspeed. Inside the train, the passengers only experienced a week of time, but down on earth more than a century flew by.

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