Time Travel

[ste_mc_efc]

1) because time is a human concept, while it might seem like time exists it is merely intervals relating to the position of the sun/moon in relation to the earth as it travels around the sun. The earth is covering the same ground, yet we think of time as linear, so while things may have happened in the past who is to say there is a way of distinguishing past events to travel to them? ie the same point in our orbit round the sun has been reached X times, how can you possibly convert a point in time.

2) as per the end of point 1, how could you define a point in time.

3) wormhole theory is just that, besides anything else lots of people in the past are dead unless you believe there exists infinite points in time that you could travel back to.

4) there are three physical dimensions, we know we can travel in directions but how do you propose that would work in time?!?!

5) the structure of the concept of time is CONTINUOUS, we talk about the "present" but in fact there is no "present", only the past and future. By the time you've typed "present" it is the "future" and then that becomes the "past" and so on. Since time as a concept doesn't stop, unless you believe that old trick with the atomic clock which has time travel as the explanation when in fact it could be any number of things including a distortion effect caused by the speed travelled at, unless you believe the clock was in the past and we were just seeing it's physical shape later than it actually was - if there is an easy way to put that please do! Do I know if the house I am in now exists in the now, the past or the future as it is the same house. But unless we start tying ourselves up in knots about what objects are in the here and now then we have to assume everything occupying the universe at this moment in "time" is in the same time.

I do love the atomic clock argument, as if there is a cause and effect relationship ie that it proves in some way time travel is possible.

6) and the macdaddy of the arguments against time travel. If it were ever possible, and people believe that there is a future to go to as well as a past, then why have we not been inundated with time travellers in their police boxes, phone booths, USS Enterprises etc?!?!? If it is possible then are we to assume noone has yet worked it out!?!?!?

7) to me, unless there is physical evidence something can be done or has happened or does exist, we have to assume it doesn't. There is no evidence god exists so we have to assume he/it doesn't. We've not been visited from people in the future, or the past since if there is a past to travel back to then there is every chance they might discover it. But then the world seems pretty consistent to me, if you've ever seen that series about the Bermuda Triangle where reality changes, or indeed Butterfly Effect (excellent film), then why does the world seem to be as it has been, slowly progressing or not as seems to be the case, or perhaps it keeps changing and there's no way of knowing as our memories etc seem the same but could well change and if we wrote down reality and it changed then so would our written account of it.


Time travel is the realms of fantasy until proven otherwise, just like god and heaven, immortality and other things people wish were possible/exist. It is one of those things people will talk up as possible since there is no way of disproving it. Timeline yesterday was quite a good watch, comparing human teleportation with a fax even though the sending fax tells the recieving fax what order to put dots on a page, not what order to put bits of a human back together in and so it is completely different. I've typed into a keyboard, people can see what I can see so it is merely a case of what I am typing being stored in a data format that other PCs can share and display, or I can transmit the orders via text, fax etc. It's not quite the same with living organisms, if at all. Save time travel for fantasy novels and films, space travel is possible but time travel is based on a great number of never gonna happens

Your first five points are basically the same point reworded, and all rely on time being linear, which is may or may not be. And it also relies on our assumptions about time being accurate, which is almost certainly isn't. At best we have a the gist nailed down but highly simplified.

And our* quantification of time is not how you described it at all. It's not related to the position of the sun/moon any more. It's based upon a standard relating to radioactivity of caesium 133. (which is almost, but not quite, exactly the same as 1/86400th of the time it takes the earth to rotate around it's axis)

As for point 6 I have a similar counter that is used against the "but we haven't met any aliens, so intelligent life can't exist elsewhere" argument. If a society is so advanced as to master a complex technology such as a time machine or a spaceship capable of interstellar travel they will almost certainly be advanced enough to be discrete about it. I'm not saying that aliens/time travel does exist, just that this argument doesn't even come close to disproving it.

Point 7 starts promising, but just because there is no strong evidence for something you shouldn't assume it cannot be. As if there is no evidence against it, must you then assume it must be? Basically if there is little/no evidence then you shouldn't make firm assumptions at all. It's counter-productive. And would basically stop science completely, as any theory wouldn't be investigated, as people would jut say "yeh, but there is no evidence for it".

As for the last part unless you believe there is a part of each person that is not matter, there is no current reason to think "teleportation" is completely impossible. It wouldn't be the exact same matter that is transported, obviously, but all that would be required is the conversion of matter to information, then information back into matter. Obviously the methods of conversion would be extremely complex.

*that is to say the units adopted by all countries except burma, liberia and somewhat surprisingly the USA.