Time Travel

[Little Hoover]

I would pick someone here and make some of the exact same posts as them just before they get a chance too.

[Pinball]

Haven't we seen this thread before? :-o

Woooooooooooooaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhh (Bill & Ted time).

[The Region Legion]

I'd go back in time to 1967 and record In The Court Of The Crimson King before the actual members of King Crimson had even got together. I would then just follow in Robert Fripp's footsteps, end the band every once in a while and eventually all that will have happened is that I've replaced his part in history but all the rest of the members stay the same, which means by about 1980 I wouldn't even have to rip off albums anymore, just gently guide the original members in the right direction - allows me to have a nice long career without the enormous fame or getting killed by nutcase fans or something.

Also, go meet Jesus.

[El Unicornio, mang]

Also, go meet Jesus.

I think that would be the ultimate "meeting someone famous and being a bit disappointed" scenario

[ziggy starbucks]

Also, go meet Jesus.

and try and seduce him.

it would make a lot of people's lives so much easier

[Santa's Boyfriend]

machine.  I'm about to try out my time

[Fry]

I would pick someone here and make some of the exact same posts as them just before they get a chance too.

Would anybody believe me If I said I was about to make that exact post?

[Huzzie]

Didn't Marty McFly prove that it's unsafe to go to the past though, as even a small thing can cause a massive influence on the future and you could end up turning into a "massive asshole" like he says in the film

I think of it like this...

OK... Say... erm... right! Say at some point in the future you are going to go back 200 years, so in actual fact you HAVE already gone back in time and done whatever you are going to do, so that is already part of the time line so it cannot make any difference. Like, for all you know, you may have gone back in time as your future self and whatever you did there is part of this time line, that is the fact.

God! It is clear in my head when I think about it but when I try to explain it....

Try again...

Your future self went back in time to the dinosaurs, if you did do anything to change the timeline then that is what lead us to what we know now. IN other words, you can't change the past to anything because what ever you change it to is what you will know all your life anyway, it won't appear to be any change.

That was really RUBBISH! Do you know what I mean or should I try again? Please don't say "I don't understand but Huzzie, PLEASE don't try again!" cause I want to get my idea out properly cause it's important! It could change the philosophy of time travel!!

Anyway, what would I do?...

I have talked about this on here before. I am something of a fantasist and there is nothing more that I enjoy than to lie in bed before I go to sleep drifting off and thinking of where I would go and what I would do with a time machine. It is quite an in depth dream now though. I don;t have just any time machine, I actually have an Alien spacecraft, y'see, I save the lives of some "Greys" who crash land in my garden. For my help they offer me something, I take a craft which can do all the top craft stuff but can also time travel. The craft gives me a couple of extra powers though cause things can get a bit dodgy in the places I travel to so the craft can shrink to fit me as a paper thin protective coverall that thanks to alien tech can also make me and it invisible.

So, with this handy accessory I travel to the last few months of 1888 in Whitechapel to follow the Ripper around, maybe have a chat with him or the girls, maybe help CI Abberline.

I go and study Neanderthal and Cro Magnon man and witness the first time they come face to face.

I go back further and see their ancestors and ours come down from the trees.

See if Jesus was as good as Paul Zenon.

Witness Neros madness.

Walk around the trenches in Flanders.

Take part in the charge at Balaclava (invisble and with my protective, shrinkfitted UFO of course)

Roswell July 1947

I'll also spend lots of time walking around Dark Age/Bronze Age/Roman/Medieval/etc Britain when nothing in particular is happening.

Watch us beat the Vikings off then run down to see the Normans cheat in 1066

Ohh I could go on all night now. These truly are things I keep myself up nearly every night with, just thinking about it all and picturing it. It would probably be my first wish out of the three.

I'm so childish, aren't I?:-)

Anyway, sorry about how badly I explained stuff here. Have drunk a bit too much tonight and should have left this till tommorow and I was going to too but I just couldn't keep my hands off in the end.

[LeboviciAB84]

I reckon what you're getting at is that one's ability to change the past is entirely dependent on whether or not we have free will. That is, if you believe that any decision you make in the future is predictable, then the timeline that has led up to the present day is dependent on you making those decisions once you travel back in time. It's a loop, reliant on your belief that you're altering the points of history to divert it onto another track, rather than onto the one that leads right up to a familiar present where our understanding of history must be distorted, in order for you somehow to right it. Your recurrent presence in an unnatural past is necessary for the maintenance of the present as we know it, otherwise the presupposition of your diverting-action will be entirely false and we'll be trapped in an alternative present. Amirite?

[Huzzie]

Yes, YES! Well said!

That's what I mean, I reckon. I'll try again to put it in my own words when I am straight headed tommorow but that is pretty much what I was trying to say.

[The Region Legion]

I was talking to a friend about time travel a few weeks ago and he said that there was a theory that even if a time machine could be invented, it wouldn't be a "punch in the day and year" machine (fairly obviously), but would in fact only work as far back as the machine had been invented. He went on to say that someone had come up with a potentially viable theory involving the cross-section of super-heated lasers but the actual space that you could time travel in would only be around the size of a penny.

The best part of this, of course, is that should that machine ever be invented, the second it turns on, anything the guy would put through it in the future would tumble out of it.

Which made me realise that it would put him in a paradox whereby he'd have to put all that stuff back into it for his past self to recieve. Quite a mindfuck.

[Huzzie]

Yes, that is pretty much the theory nowadays. It isn't a new theory though.

[El Unicornio, mang]

Wasn't there a theory going around that time travels backwards as well as forwards? I'm too tired to even attempt to figure it out but simply put it's based on the idea that everything that has ever or will ever happen has already happened...sort of. Like an enormously long piece of string with mega gajillion billions of knots on it, each knot being a different moment of time, all existing at the same time (for wont of a better word), and wherever you are on the piece of string is where you are. But the other knots are there too but you're on a different knot so you can't exist with them. So time is really just a measurement of us getting from one knot to the next, rather than the popular idea of time progressing us, and things "becoming" with each moment. I'm not really explaining this well am I?

[The Region Legion]

But the other knots are there too but you're on a different knot so you can't exist with them.

This is also a widely used explanation of ghosts - that you're just witnessing or sensing part of the past (or indeed the future) going on around you.

[Howj Begg]

multiple universes. you can change things in the past or future which wouldn't necessarily affect the present you came from cos its different timelines innit (linear time fallacy again?).
or perhaps, as the brain time-travels anyway, it's a matter of affecting consciousness.

two lovely cliched chestnuts, there.

[Eight Taiwanese Teenagers]

I agree with Howj Begg.

Interesting that this one has come round to free will. It seems to be a fundamental issue at the moment.

[Baxter]

The best part of this, of course, is that should that machine ever be invented, the second it turns on, anything the guy would put through it in the future would tumble out of it.

I recall a similar thing to this that required a stable wormhole that allowed information to pass through it to be formed first, it worked something like: a wormhole is created and both ends are stabilised so that information can be sent from one end to another, then the two ends are separated in space one is kept stationary and the other is put into a circular particle accelerator and accelerated up to as close to c for as long as possible, the time dilation effect is supposed to cause them to slip slightly out of temporal sync, so that information put into one pops out of the other a few milliseconds earlier, the longer that the end is kept spinning around close to the speed of light the more pronounced this effect becomes, now this has limited possibilities in terms of time travel as you've limited to travelling a fixed duration into the past but the interesting effect comes into play when you consider connecting it up to a computer, because computer calculations are inherently deconstructable, like all mathematical problems, you could in theory calculate at amazing speed by:

1. Deciding on the code to run.
2. Checking if the solution to the code has been sent back in time to you.
3. If not perform the code and send the result back in time.

Slightly paradoxical as to where the calculation is actually being done.

[Santa's Boyfriend]

If it was possible to time-travel, I would want to be able to time-travel in some kind of etherial form, so I could walk about and see stuff but not interfere (and ideally not be killed by a bomb).  I always fancied time-travelling back to world war 2 and seeing Nazi Germany and stuff, but imagine the danger you would pose to the timeline if you got caught?  After all, you would have operational knowledge that even Churchill wouldn't have.  You'd know about the breaking of Enigma, the date and location of D-Day, all sorts of things.

I wrote a short story about it once.

I'd also like to go back to the Kennedy assassination, and set up pinhole cameras in the book depository and behind the grassy knoll.

I suppose if I really wanted to create a paradox, I'd send a killer cyborg back in time to kill James Cameron's mother.

[John Self]

EDIT: probably best I keep it to myself, don't want any of you cunts muscling in on the action


_{« Last Edit: Selftember 10, 2017, 05:22:43 AM by King John II»}

[glitch]

Stuff about wormholes

Have you been reading Greg Egan's Diaspora? ;)

[Russ]

In the excellent film Primer, the person travelling back in time must stay in the time machine for the amount of time that they wish to travel back in time.

It does not transport you to a previous point, but reverses time when you are in it, so that you emerge at an earlier point in time. Even then, you cannot go back to before the machine was switched on.

So your sequence of events to travel back 10 hours would be:

1: Turn on machine. Leave it alone for 10 hours.*
2: After ten hours, get in the machine.
3: Sit in the machine for ten hours.
4: Emerge ten hours later for your body clock/internal timeline, but in reality at a point ten hours earlier in the day when you switched the machine on.

*At this point you must make yourself scare for those ten hours so that when you emerge from the box you do not bump into yourself.

[SetToStun]

*At this point you must make yourself scare for those ten hours so that when you emerge from the box you do not bump into yourself.

As I understand it, this is one of the bigger stumbling blocks for physical-presence time-travel. E=MC² means matter and energy are equivalent; thermodynamics means energy cannot be created or destroyed, just change its forms; this means the same applies to matter: there is a finite, unchanging amount in the universe. If you could go back in time so that there were two of you at once, you'd be violating this rule unless an equivalent amount of matter swapped places with you. That would be fine if it was a couple of hundred pounds of dirt or something, but not so good if it was a couple of hundred pounds of an adult elephant, for example. It would take days to mop up.

[Bilko]

I've seen that old newsreel footage taken from when people were queuing up outside a bookshop to buy a copy of Lawrence's "Lady Chatterley's Lover" The reporter goes down the line in turn asking people why they want to buy a copy. Some answer "to see what all the fuss is about", some turn away and say "no comment".[/quote[
Ive seen that too.  One woman when asked replies with "Im buying it with a friend". yeah right.

On a smiliar thread on here years ago, someone gave the best answer Ive ever seen - Go back in time to when Dodos were alive and see what they tasted like

[duckorange]

I'd go back in time with the lottery results so I can afford to build myself a time machine so I can go back in time to give myself the lottery results. I think.

[Baxter]

As I understand it, this is one of the bigger stumbling blocks for physical-presence time-travel. E=MC² means matter and energy are equivalent; thermodynamics means energy cannot be created or destroyed, just change its forms; this means the same applies to matter: there is a finite, unchanging amount in the universe. If you could go back in time so that there were two of you at once, you'd be violating this rule unless an equivalent amount of matter swapped places with you. That would be fine if it was a couple of hundred pounds of dirt or something, but not so good if it was a couple of hundred pounds of an adult elephant, for example. It would take days to mop up.

Even more of a mess if it was an equivalent amount of energy, a fat man steps into a time machine disappears to be replaced with a blast of hard radiation with an energy equal to his mass.

[Craig Torso]

:
1: Turn on machine. Leave it alone for 10 hours.*
2: After ten hours, get in the machine.
3: Sit in the machine for ten hours.
4: Emerge ten hours later for your body clock/internal timeline, but in reality at a point ten hours earlier in the day when you switched the machine on.

*At this point you must make yourself scare for those ten hours so that when you emerge from the box you do not bump into yourself.

What's the point in going through stages 2, 3 and 4 simply to get back to 1?  Why can't I just not do 1 in the first place and achieve the same result?

[katzenjammer]

wormhole

Why is it called a wormhole anyway?  Why worm?

I'd freak out Derren Brown.  Start with something simple like what he got for his 10th birthday or the name of the publication he had his first wank over, then move onto some really freaky impossible to know stuff, like handing him some sealed envelopes containing details of future world events or something.  Then I'd tell him that it's nothing to do with time travel, it's all written in the subtle nuances of his body language etc.  That'd teach the smarmy cunt.

Alternatively I'd go and find a rich, mean bloke from the nineteenth century on Christmas eve and show him loads of possible events from his past and future until he buys a nice big fat turkey for the family next door.

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

Wouldn't going back in time mean rewinding your own life, and the life of the time machine, in effect? So when you'd go back you'd actually not exist, and the time machine wouldn't exist either?

I'm not being clever, I don't know anything about it.

[Uncle TechTip]

I'd travel back in time to a ladies' changing room, eh lads??? Think of the fun you could have! Woof woof!! Hubba hubba!

Oh wait

[Santa's Boyfriend]

I'd take photographs of the Prophet Mohammed.  I'd also film Jesus making his big speeches, so we could see just how concise what he says actually is.