h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I've a theory at the moment very rough. The theory is about time travel and travelling back in time and killing one's grandparent, the name of this theory is, SPENT TIME THOERY. My theory suggests that once you have entered into time travel you have essentially cut any ties with your past and are free to travel back in time and killing as much of your family as you want with no repurcussions, to end this timeline would be like a fuse and will eventually disappear, you will not have been born.

Travelling into to the future and meeting oneself is impossible, this is because you have removed yourself from your timeline and have not SPENT ANY TIME on that timeline to meet yourself as you have removed yourself into a time travel timeline.

As for time travel as far as I'm concerned, is nothing more than an optical illusion, basically, when a wagon wheel is seen turning whilst on TV, the effect is so that the wheel appears to turn in the opposite direction, same applies to the blades on a fan......

Better still time travel could be seen as the scene from the film The Matrix and Morpheus is seen escaping after being held by agent smith.To do this several camers were used and tracked along a line taking one or several shots, these were then patched together giving the VIEWER the impression everything was STILL and yet the VIEWER was able to move through this environment - NEAT TRICK!

I think time travel would be much the same as this, travel fast enough and find the right trajectory and everything in the universe will appear still, travel faster and it will appear to reverse.

Light speed! 186000 mps. on or about this speed time stops. Relative to the the individual. If you were that person, space time, would in effect collapse, thus all of space - time become instantly available to the traveler. As such you become omnipresent !

If that happened, spacetime being necessary for life, then you would no doubt destroy the universe, or at least end up in a freakish parallel reality. My method of time travel is better: I log onto h2g2, read books, watch TV, or play games for 10 minutes, and as if by magic, hours have passed!

Hello....i have tried this time travel malarky and....it doesnt work, backwards or forwards or even sidewards... perhaps i should have paid more attention to what great uncle Albert was grunting.
e=mc² or energy is equal to mass, multiplied by the speed of light squarred. Exponential increases in an objects mass due to acceleration require more and more energy to speed them up, so much so that the energy involved to propell a single electron up to 90+% of C requires its own sub station per atomic particle. Although light travels as both a particle and a wave, a single particle or photon ( which has mass) has never been pushed near 300,000000 mps, a light wave (which has no mass) on the other hand, has, through using ' Anomalous refractive indexing' to essentially give the light wave a shorter jurney through the medium through which it travels. It still holds true that nothing with any mass can travel faster then the speed of light..........yet

No, I think that if you go back and try to kill someone, it'll end up playing history as it was, and you won't be able to in some way or another.

It seems to me that the argument about if time travel is possible, then why haven't people visted us yet from the future, is in fact a paradox in itself, because the future hasn't yet happened, at least from our perspective...

Ah, now I'm confused. Have you ever heard of the Aurorae Rift?

The Aurorae Rift? No I have never heard of this. Can you enlighten me? This sounds interesting indeed.

I'm not that sure about it, but it's related to the Aurorae Field, which is meant to be collapsing in about a week, unless my calculator's broken.

Thanks... Great help!...

Really?

i was interested in your theory that by travelling forward in time you remove yourself from your own timeline and so could never meat your future self.
what if you were to return to your timeline having travelled forward in time and then continued your life. when you reach the time that you travelled to surely you would be able to meet your 'past time traveller self' in that time, in which case you would have effectively met your future self.
another thought i had on it was that prehaps you cannot leave your timeline, but by travelling in time you forge a different timeline in which case you could effectively visit yourself at any point in your past or future by accident as you have altered your timeline in an unpredicable and prehaps uncontrollable way.

If you create some event that is theoretically not able to happen, mayhaps all events from there are transfered to a parralel universe?

Yeah, my calculator's broken, big mistake.

Yeah, yeah but that's it isn't it - The time traveller as he/she moves through time and space what space does he occupy are we assuming the time traveller is like the HG Wells Time Machine traveller "static" or is our time traveller, "moving through space and time"

e.g.

If a timeportal of sorts is opened then all future timetravelers will have to travel to this point, therefore if time travel was invented in the year 8.15am september 24, 2016 then any time traveller from the future could only access that time.

This also suggests that travelling back in time to our past and killing our grandparents is an impossibility as there are no time machines and thus no free space in time for another timemachine to occupy.

This also suggests that if time travel is to work then as above there must be a free space e.g someone must be travelling through space and time to allow future travellers a free space or point of access......

Problems are

What if the past time travellers machine breaks down in transit will this affect the future travellers ability to travel ???

That's a good point, but if they got it fixed again, it would still be fixed in the future, wouldn't it?

I suppose this all depends how our time machine works.

Quote:

what if you were to return to your timeline having travelled forward in time and then continued your life. when you reach the time that you travelled to surely you would be able to meet your 'past time traveller self' in that time, in which case you would have effectively met your future self.


You do have a point but what I'm saying is if you were to meet your future self would you be able to interact. Lets say while you were in the future and you sat on a seat for an hour and waited for yourself to visit after that hour you traveled back in time to a random point and continued your life and went to this seat. You approach this seat and what could you do?

Q. Could you talk to your future self or are his actions already set.
A. You could talk but the actions are set your future self will only be able to follow the same action from your previous visit. So if you sat silently for an hour your past self would see you sitting quietly for an hour.......

Q. What if I was to prevent my future self from returning
A. This should not matter as you exist in the past as well as the future, theoretically you could also kill your future self and carry on as you already exist on a new timeline.

This also suggests that no matter what you do in the future there are an infinite amount of variables but our future actions are fixed to only one.

I think if I was given the right to travel in time, I wouldnt ask so many questions as our brains can only handle so much, and see where it takes me, then make an assessment of the facts once it is put in play so to speak.
If you were born 200 years ago, and another you from our present time told you that that colour tv, aeroplanes, and cyberspace was possible, do you think that the you from 200 years ago, would be able to fathom half the ideas you put into its head. nope. didnt think so...