The Energon Pub

Alright, I came up with this in my match class today while we where going over som crap about how the stars that we see in the sky arnt the stars out there now, but there just stars from like 1000 years ago, that were just now seeing. Its amazing what boredom will do to you, so,I started thinking that if you could travel faster than light, you could probobly go foward in time, but even then, we'd still need to know how to teleport things (from what I understand, someone actually teleported a partacle a few months ago. ZOMG! A partacle! ) In order to transport ourselves into the actual future, you need to be moving faster than light but at the same time be teleported. But going back in time is probobly impossible, because ever since then, I couldnt think of a way that we could actually travel back in time unless we revered somthing. So, what do you think? This sounded really good to me in my head, but when I read it,it looks stupid!

Traveling faster than light would just make you end up at another galaxy, wouldn't it? Not sure about the teleporting thing. If it is unstable, there could be a chance of it going back in time? Not really sure. The particle that was teleported, there is no proof, of course, of where in time it went.

Isn't that what lightspeed is called?

Blurrz wrote:Lightspeed is the speed of Light. Nothing can travel past it.

Makes sense.

If you could travel back in time, you'd either have to use alternate realities (or parallel universes) to avoid paradox or you'd create alternate realities by your actions. But if you created alternate realities branching from the past, when you go back to the future, which branch would you return to?

If alternate realities don't exist, that is, if there is only one universe, then backwards time travel is impossible because you couldn't change the past without imploding the universe by paradox. That's my reasoning for the existence of parallel universes. Of course, it hinges on time travel being possible.

Dragonoth wrote:If you could travel back in time, you'd either have to use alternate realities (or parallel universes) to avoid paradox or you'd create alternate realities by your actions. But if you created alternate realities branching from the past, when you go back to the future, which branch would you return to?

If alternate realities don't exist, that is, if there is only one universe, then backwards time travel is impossible because you couldn't change the past without imploding the universe by paradox. That's my reasoning for the existence of parallel universes. Of course, it hinges on time travel being possible.

unless the whole "predetermined destiny thing" exists, where things are the way they are because in the future you already altered the past. like when they find the keys in bill and ted's excellent adventure.

SlyTF1 wrote:Alright, I came up with this in my match class today while we where going over som crap about how the stars that we see in the sky arnt the stars out there now, but there just stars from like 1000 years ago, that were just now seeing. Its amazing what boredom will do to you, so,I started thinking that if you could travel faster than light, you could probobly go foward in time

I see where you're coming from, but no. The reason we're seeing stars that may have moved or died thousands of years ago is because that light is just now reaching us. The speed of light is still the fastest any object can possibly move, but on a cosmic scale, it's a snail's pace. To get to Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to ours, it would still take you around 4 years to get there traveling at light speed. Hence, the light from stars, traveling at it's normal pace but thousands of light years away, would take...thousands of years.

Also, according to special relativity, traveling faster than the speed of light would (theoretically) send you backwards in time.

DecepticonKing86 wrote:Traveling faster than light would just make you end up at another galaxy, wouldn't it?

It depends on how much faster you go. The Andromeda Galaxy (The closest galaxy to ours) is 2.5 million light years away. If you were to travel at 2.5 million times the speed of light, you'd be there in one year.

Blurrz wrote:You can't move faster than the speed of light. End of story.

This is astrophysics, the story never ends. I recall hearing "The Earth is the center of the universe, end of story." I also call hearing about someone who proved that no, it really isn't.

That said, it's actually accepted that faster-than-light travel is possible, just extremely difficult to accomplish.

Blurrz wrote:Sure, as humans evolve, our theories will as well. But as of now, it's not physically conceivable to go past the speed of light. I'd actually like to see where it 'states' that going faster the speed of light is possible.

Time itself is faster than the speed of light. If there was no time, then light wouldnt travel at any speed.

Blurrz wrote:Sure, as humans evolve, our theories will as well. But as of now, it's not physically conceivable to go past the speed of light.

Are you kidding? Of course it's conceivable. It's not possible with our current level of technology, sure, but it's conceivable.

Blurrz wrote:I'd actually like to see where it 'states' that going faster the speed of light is possible.

I don't have any references on me at the moment, of course you can always Google "is faster than light travel possible" and see what happens.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light

While we currently can't travel faster than light it is possible and one day we will have that technology, we might never see it in our life but one day we as a species will be able to make stuff go faster than light.
I mean not long ago people thought the fastest we could go was 40 mph, now we have things that go so fast just to warm up their engine.

The thing I never understood about the probability of time travel is: where exactly does time come from, or go to, that we can have access to it and go forwards and backwards through it? Time isn't composed of matter. Time is just time; it's not made up of anything we can manipulate.

Blurrz wrote:You can't move faster than the speed of light. End of story.

Professor Hubert Farnsworth: "These are the dark matter engines I invented. They allow my starship to travel between galaxies in mere hours."
Cubert J. Farnsworth: "That's impossible. You can't go faster than the speed of light."
Professor Hubert Farnsworth: "Of course not. That's why scientists increased the speed of light in 2208."

The way things stand now, if you have mass, you can't go at light speed. E = mc2 dictates that you need a certain amount of Energy (E) for something of mass (m) to go the speed of light (c2). The problem is that mass dilation dicatetes that the faster you go, the more mass you gain. So m goes up exponentially, meaning E goes up more than exponentially and, no matter how much energy you have, you're always trying to catch up to the amount of energy you need because of your increased mass.

The reason why a photon (which is the building block of light and the carrier of electromagnetism) goes at the speed of light is because a photon has no rest mass. Its mass is 0, so the energy required to make it go the speed of light is also 0.

There are theoretical particles that go faster than light. The most well known is the tachyon and scientists theorize that it can go faster than light because it has a negative mass. Nobody knows for sure, though: we see because light bounces off things, but if something is going faster than light, than light can't bounce off it in any predictable fashion, so chances of seeing a photon that happens to bounce off it while we're watching are almost nill. If we can't see something, we can't test it. And, in science, if we can't test it, it doesn't exist. Therefore tachyons, for now, are nonexistent/theoretical particles. And scientists say, no, they probably don't exist.

Incidentally, light isn't the only thing that goes at lightspeed. Radiowaves, gamma radiation (which are both photons of different frequencies than light), and gravitons (another theoretical particle) travel at lightspeed. And, according to the Tick, lint travels faster than light.

But people do go forward in time all the time, just not how you think of it. What people think of when they mean time travel is that you skip over a period of time. But originally, in Time Machine (which, I think, is the first story involving time travel), what the Time Traveller did was fast forward time, not skip it. Look up soemthing called time dilation. The bottom line here is that, the faster you go, the faster time accelerates for everyone else. Technically if you drive at any speed, you've accelerated everyone else's time by fractions of a second. Some astronauts have actually "travelled" a few seconds into the future. The problem is that, going something like 40 mph is a minuscule fraction of the speed of light (186,000 miles per second), so the effects aren't even measurable by our computers. But one day, maybe. The bottom line here is, the faster you go through space, the slower you go through time. Check out time dilation. It's incredibly wonky. When people say "truth is stranger than fiction," they must be talking about this.

What you really want to do if you want to travel through time is get yourself a gravity well. Gravity warps the fabric of time (which is, yes, an actual measurable concept, just like any of the three spatial dimensions, but perhaps not a "thing"). Problem is you need an incredible amount of gravity. But time can be manipulated, and everything that has mass technically manipulates it since everything that has mass has a gravity field.

SlyTF1 wrote:Time itself is faster than the speed of light. If there was no time, then light wouldnt travel at any speed.

If you can equate it this way, time technically goes AT the speed of light. But that's probably a discussion for another message, since this one is probably getting into the TLDNR category.

Me, Grimlock! wrote:What you really want to do if you want to travel through time is get yourself a gravity well. Gravity warps the fabric of time (which is, yes, an actual measurable concept, just like any of the three spatial dimensions, but perhaps not a "thing"). Problem is you need an incredible amount of gravity. But time can be manipulated, and everything that has mass technically manipulates it since everything that has mass has a gravity field.

So...like a black hole? I know those have a pretty dense gravitational pull. I've also heard of time as a "fabric", but I never knew it was actually something that was measurable like mass. Anyway, good post!

Here's how I see it:
Why travel through time if you can't go back in time (to 1984 and buy all the original TFs).

We don't know how time works. Is it literally a 4th dimension? Are there hypercubes in the realm of time? Can we see inside our own bellies? (Just read Flatland, a bit of a mind trip there.) Hawking's light cones are about as close as I can get to thinking 4th-dimensionally. Looks like we're 4-dimensional beings trapped with a 3-dimensional viewpoint.

For a unique view of time travel without alternate dimensions, check out Gerrold's The Man Who Folded Himself.

Forward in time? No problem: you're doing it now. Fast-forward in time? Approach the speed of light and follow the rules of relativity. Backward in time? Have yourself a memory.

Want to be Marty McFly or Doctor Who? Use your imagination. Write a story. Get your PhD's and prove me wrong.

Lorekeeper wrote:We don't know how time works. Is it literally a 4th dimension? Are there hypercubes in the realm of time? Can we see inside our own bellies? (Just read Flatland, a bit of a mind trip there.) Hawking's light cones are about as close as I can get to thinking 4th-dimensionally. Looks like we're 4-dimensional beings trapped with a 3-dimensional viewpoint.

For a unique view of time travel without alternate dimensions, check out Gerrold's The Man Who Folded Himself.

Forward in time? No problem: you're doing it now. Fast-forward in time? Approach the speed of light and follow the rules of relativity. Backward in time? Have yourself a memory.

Want to be Marty McFly or Doctor Who? Use your imagination. Write a story. Get your PhD's and prove me wrong.

life is stupid... I thought of somthing else today, what if what we think of time travel is wrong? What if time travel is just beating time. Like at 7:00 I have to leave my house. And at 7:11 Im at a certain point, and the next day I do the same, but at 7:10 Im at the same place I was yesterday at 7:11. I just beat time by 1 minute by beating it to 1 point in the time set to get there.

Lorekeeper wrote:We don't know how time works. Is it literally a 4th dimension? Are there hypercubes in the realm of time?

It's true we don't know everything about time, but we do know some things. We're not totally in the dark about it. Thinking of time as the 4th dimension is sort of a perception thing: since we don't see time, we can't perceive it in the same way we do spatial dimension. However, there's an incredible case for it, and if someone claims it isn't, they're pretty much making a semantic argument at this point in our knowledge. Time as a dimension was put forth by Einstein when he wrote the Theory of Relativity, and equations that see it as a fourth dimension have been verified by experimentation. They're also both manipulated by the same thing: gravity/acceleration.

Think of it in terms of events and motion. The three spatial dimensions are all about position since, to specify a position, you only need three coordinates: one for x, one for y, and one for z. Your apartment is on the corner of 115th Street (point x) and 9th Avenue (point y) on the 7th floor (point z). Or you can specify it in terms of longitude, latitude, and altitude, but it's all the same. This is very simplistic, obviously, because this type of positioning only specifies a one-dimensional dot and an apartment takes up three-dimensional space, but you get the picture.

But to talk about events or motion, you need a fourth coordinate. You're no longer talking about a single point, but now movement: you have to specify t (speed, which is a division of space and time), so you're moving from the above X-Y-Z location at 98 miles per hour northwest. If you want to specify an event, you have to tell people when. A party can happen at the above location at 5:00 p.m. on January 10th, 2020 (point t).

Physics is the study of matter and its motion. Since space and time are constructs of physics (the study of motion) and physicists are pretty much unanimous in calling time the fourth dimension, we're stuck with that concept. Space and time aren't part of the same continuum for nothing. You can't quantify events or motion without time.

Take this into account (I hope I explain this right): we're all always traveling at the speed of light, but through four dimensions, not just three. As I said in my previous post, we have a movement through time that slows as we move through space (I was a little misleading saying that time speeds up for everyone else; it's the same thing, but different ways of viewing it).

So, say you mark a starting line in a desert where your motion starts. You get into a highly impractical race car that instantly accelerates to 100 mph when you apply the gas and instantly decelerates to 0 when you hit the brakes (never mind that this would kill you). If you travel due north, it would take you one hour to travel 100 miles. You stop at one hour, draw a line in the sand as your finish line, and start the test over at your starting line. This time, however, you'll veer westward. You're suddenly traveling in a northwest direction; your movement isn't dedicated to going due north anymore. So in one hour, you'll have traveled 100 miles, but not 100 miles north since some of your movement is westward. You won't reach your finish line. The Pythagorean Theorem can tell you how far north you've traveled given the degrees you veered off, but it will certainly be less than 100 miles. The same with time: we travel at the speed of light through time, but once we start moving through space, we're not dedicating our movement 100% through time anymore, but now some of it is through space. So we do move at the speed of light, but we distribute this movement through four dimensions. To travel at the speed of light through space, our movement through the dimension of time would come to a halt and time would cease to tick along for us.

And hypercubes are in the realm of time. They're four-dimensional cubes.

8 bit wrote:Anyway, good post!

Thanks!

Read The Man Who Folded Himself or All You Zombies and time travel will be both unappealing and seem entirely improbable.

SentinelA wrote:Here's how I see it:
Why travel through time if you can't go back in time (to 1984 and buy all the original TFs).

Because there's plenty of art and documents that need saving, not just hoarding up toys. (Which, by hoarding up, you'd be denying to both your younger self an the younger selves of everyone on here) Or getting conclusive answers on Atlantis, or Creation vs. Evolution, or what killed the Dinosaurs.

Shadowman wrote:what killed the Dinosaurs.

Meteorite, it's been confirmed not too long ago.

Counterpunch wrote:Read The Man Who Folded Himself or All You Zombies and time travel will be both unappealing and seem entirely improbable.

those are hella good