I was riding home from campus on the bus yesterday, and, it being the Fall season, I noticed several houses had leaves scattered all over their lawns. Since I take the same bus route to campus and back every day, I am relatively familiar with these homes. Many of them are standard urban residences, being two-story wooden houses. A few are a bit more posh. But there is one that looks like something straight out of a Rockwell painting; the archetypal "American Dream" home. It was on this particular bus ride that I looked out of the window to check out the picturesque home and saw the most neatly trimmed lawn that I've ever seen. Not only that, but it was green and completely free of leaves. This house is bordered on both sides by neighbors who had made no apparent effort to clean their lawns and as a result the difference between this home and the others was made all the more incredibly stark. While amusing in and of itself, this occurrence had sparked an internal dialogue in my mind, one that, by nature of my tangential thought, eventually ended (as most do) in questions of philosophy, and in particular, theology. It wasn't until later that day when, having finished my homework, constructed a TV stand in my room, and seen an older post on the forums, that I reviewed the circumstances which had led me to a particular theological conclusion. Having remembered that it was started with my fascination regarding the owner of the picturesque home's dedication to lawn maintainence I realized that, indeed, time travel is bad. Determinism, for all its faults regarding free will, is a more or less accurate view of the universe. Everything is the result of something, and knowing the circumstances of a preceding event can allow us to predict the results of the event. The thing that most determinists don't discuss, perhaps for fear of the philosophical implications (read: responsibility of action), is that the most minute of events can have impacts with several orders of magnitude larger than their initial consequence may make apparent. Had the owner of that home never cleared his lawn then I would never have entered the same tangent that resulted in my reaching a theological conclusion. I would never have reflected on the circumstances that led me to this conclusion and never mentioned it to Ronald, Link, and Matt on Skype later that night. And most assuredly I would never had made this topic. When people see this topic, they too will have information passing through their minds that never would have otherwise would have, and who knows what consequence that that information would have on their future thoughts and behaviors, especially if they think as tangentially as I do. But why does all of this make time travel bad? Because time travel, no matter the method, will change something. And when something is changed, there is a very significant chance that everything changes. Of course this is something of a foregone conclusion, one that I myself have mentioned in passing even on these forums, but the importance of this idea has never made itself more aware to me than it was yesterday. It's an epiphany of latent knowledge, but undoubtedly it will have effects that are more immediate and more tangible than all that. Now, some people, particularly the more philosophically educated determinists, will take this as a signal that they've been right all along. They'll probably say something like: "In this world, is the destiny of mankind controlled by some transcendental entity or law? Is it like the hand of God hovering above? At least it is true that man has no control, even over his own will." I'm afraid they're rather wrong.
Have you seen The Butterfly Effect? It deals with this same issue. Don't late the cast fool you its a good movie. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0289879/
The butterfly effect (the movie is based on this principle, sort of) is part of what I was referring to, yes.
But what if you can control what changes or even stop change with your time travel device. Its a Nazi Sci-Fi movie all over again..
While I was walking to my dorm on a brisk October afternoon. Wearing a black peacoat and smoking one of my cigarettes clutching at my neck line despretly trying to preserve any warmth I could, looking quite dashing I might add- my short black hair gently swaying with the breeze. Thinking about this post, wondering if we could if fact time travel without causing reality as we know it to collapse and die around us. I stop for a moment to savor the dry brown leaves fall from a lone tree whilst the sunset begins its end. I begin to think about this problem. I begin to mutter under my breath "well what if we were invisible, it is not so far fetched". Sure we could not have a direct conversation with a man but the pure thrill of being in the time. Potentially hovering above the battle of Hasting a specter to vast armies clashing below us. What would that change? Would we disrupt the air currents leading to end of the human race, or possibly nothing substantial. I would like to believe that there would be a far of team of observers, watchin us through their telescopes to make sure we do not warp the fabric of the universe. What say you? If things were intact changed for the worse could it be possible to go back in time and stop ourselfs from completing the infernal contraption. We would not jeopardize our own wellbeing, simulations would be tested, countless theories presented. And humanities best and brightest would be the fret to venture into the realm of the yesterday.
To really oversaturate your post with eloquent prose, you need to divide your commentary more. Salient points are made all the more salient by virtue of their: floating significance. Additionally, you lack appropriate medial punctuation that would let us know where to pause and where you want emphasize. Commas and semicolons, while not as useful in academic settings, are very helpful in the more 'verbal' syntax of an internet forum. The final element to consider is the aesthetic structure of your post, in other words amplifying the physical, tangible beauty of your words. Spacing is important, but far more so is the length of sentences and the individual length of words used.
I was hoping to basterdize your oddly descriptive post, I only assume I did a good enough job. But I must say that your notes are better than every one of my English teachers.
There's always a point to everything I do. Unfortunately the smalltext feature in the text editor is more user-friendly, and thus cannot be used to hide the exact purpose this particular thread and the particular way I worded it.
Its all very obvious, if you go back in time and have sex with your great-great-great-great-great grandmother, when you are born you are yourself, Time travel=Solved.
@ Kali For better or worse, you are not the only one who thinks this. I've reflected on such ideas in the past and, on my own, come to the same conclusion. Part of it is 'Look, I'm saddened by what happened in/ in the *insert historical tragedy*, but in reality, things could have been worse and eliminating *insert important figure/circumstance in history* would have made the situation completely unpredictable. So no, I would not want to time travel to do anything on the off chance [which, as you pointed out would inevitably occur] that it would change something that I am completely content with.' @ Rom Except, you know, for the fact that such an act would screw up your family's future genes.
By going back in time, you would create a paradox. A good example of this that I have heard is the 'Mad Scientist' paradox. Essential, a Mad Scientist creates a time machine. He picks up a gun, and enters the time machine, ending up 10 seconds before he walked into it. Then, he shoots himself. But - If he shot himself before he entered the time machine, then he couldn't have gone back in time and shot himself. But he is dead, so somebody needed to have killed him. But he couldn't have, because he shot himself before he could enter. Similarly, if a Time machine appeared before you right now, and if you were to go back in time to even 2 hours ago from now, you would create a paradox. Because if you were to change even the slightest thing, you wouldn't have been there at the right time to enter the time machine, and even if you were, you would have likely reacted differently when you went back. Thus, a paradox. My point is, even if we did figure out a way to go back in time, who knows what the effects could, or how it could possibly damage space-time. I believe travel into the future is possible, though. You just wouldn't be able to go back. Edit: Although if String-Theory is correct, you may be able to travel back in time, in a different dimension that shared the same timeline as ours.
You have told pretty much everything that I know about time travelling: 'It's bad because it screwes up the past, present, and future!'
Let me ask you something, how can we know if anyone has ever gone back in time to change something? Let us say that in an alternative timeline WW 2 never happened, but in it's place something else happened that was worse, a man is sent back in time to stop the event which unltimately led to this problem and in doing so indirectly caused WW 2. No one would ever know any better.
Unless he came from another dimension, that would probably be impossible. I mean, if he were sent back to change some big event, he wouldn't have been conceived/born. Which means that nobody actually went back in time and made this big change, even though somebody must have, because it has been. Basically, instant paradox, and possibly destruction of the universe.
Assuming time works in a linear fashion at all. The future that led to it doesn't exist anymore, but that doesn't mean it never did exist.
Using velocity-based time dilation or using gravitational time dilation would allow you to travel forward in time but not back. Also someone has already time traveled, Sergei Krikalev, a cosmonaut who spent more than 803 days in low-Earth orbit, traveling at high speed, and thus has aged 1/48th of a second less than he would have if he had stayed home. When he returned to Earth, he found the Earth to be 1/48th of a second to the future of where he expected it to be, so he has time-traveled 1/48th of a second into the future.
