About Time Travel.

[Ravenloft]

"I finally tried to define what Time Travel means to us, as a species obsessed with Time Travel. The definition at which I arrived was peculiar, to say the least: That Time Travel is a process of human thinking which defeats human intellectual growth and, ultimately, is an evolutionary dead-end for the human race."

 

[MorgaineLaFay]

I Have a great article on this theory ...

 

[Laci]

Sounds like this movie I saw a few weeks ago called Donnie Darko. Very bizarre movie that is unexplainable. Has somewhat to do with time travel and the life of a psychotic. Its really dark but such a good movie.

 

[Ravenloft]

First question I have, is how the fuck does time travel have anything to do with evolution?

I don't think it would defeat intellectual growth either, no matter which way we travel, if it is into the past, we can learn from old mistakes, if it is into the future, we can learn of things to come, and prepare ourselves for them... How is that, in any way, stunting our intellectual growth?

 

[Valdimer]

Charles Miller, I do believe.



The entire article is a rather good read, having the viewpoint of a rather intelligent skeptic.

 

[MorgaineLaFay]

My article is by Tom Folger...it is out of Discover, Sept 2001 issue...

 

[Valdimer]

Here is the entire article.




My first encounter with time travel took place in 1960. I was a reluctant, cynical child back then (how things change), and I didn't appreciate being carried by my parents into a darkened movie theatre to view "The Time Machine," starring Rod Taylor. The pseudo-scientific banter on screen didn't especially impress me, nor did the primitive stop-motion special effects. Only one scene in the film really interested me, as a matter of fact: It was that contrived moment (which H.G. Wells never penned) when Rod Taylor is buried in a lava floe, and the Time Machine's time-bubble-effect prevents him from being incinerated. Taylor waits for ages as natural processes erode the igneous material away from his time bubble, until daylight eventually falls upon him 800,000 years later. It was then, enamored with the Minoan murals of the walls and ceilings of the "El Capitan" theatre, that I experienced a childish revelation: "Space moves around a time traveler."

That was some 40 years ago, and I've been thinking about time travel in much the same way ever since--not that matter morphs around a human observer, but that the human perspective observes the universe moving past us. The inseparability of space and time is reinforced by Einsteinian theory--that what we call Space and Time are only perceptual facets of a continuum. When we traverse space, we also traverse time, within the limits of a light-speed-maximum universe. Relativistic space/time theory usually bounces off modern physics students as a "given." But the inverse must be true, as well: When we traverse time, we also traverse space. The Earth of 100 years ago is far removed spatially from our Earth of today. This revelation has colored my view to such an extent that I have to scoff at most popular representations of time travel, in both entertainment and science.

Let's put this into perspective. The typical human time travel scenario follows: A.) Human builds a Time Machine. B.) Human briefly deliberates on the possible consequences of time travel. C.) Against all logic, human hops into the Time Machine and takes a spin. D.) Human emerges in the future or past on Earth to find a radically different society, and so attempts to alter human outcome. Ho-hum. This is the basic outline for virtually every human time travel fantasy yet concocted.

The problem is, it can't happen that way. Here's why: Should we physically defy Time, we necessarily create a new miniature universe outside of this space/time continuum (an alternate-time-effect). This is essential if we are to retain any sense of continuity; otherwise, we would never know if our time traveling efforts were successful. However, in defying Time, we have also defied the rest of spatial physics--including gravity.

So, what force is causing our Time Machine to adhere to Earth's surface as we move forward or backward in time? How do we step into a Time Machine in 20th Century Topeka, Kansas, and emerge in Topeka, Kansas, 100 years in the past or future?

The answer is, we don't. Instead, the moment we activate our fiendishly complex Time Machine, we sidestep physical law, becoming a stationary non-entity relative to the rest of the cosmos. We are unaffected by macro-gravitation. When and if we finally re-enter normal space/time, the Earth is nowhere to be found, nor is the rest of our solar system. Depending on the intensity and duration of our "time warp," we may find ourselves deep in interstellar space--with no recognizable constellations to guide us home--or even outside of the Milky Way altogether, lost in the intergalactic void.

At this point, we come to fully appreciate the expanding universe theory, and we realize that time travel is not all it's cracked up to be. Whatever reasons we had for attempting this experiment in the first place are forgotten--We have pulled over to the shoulder on the superhighway of existence, and our entire universe has moved past us while we were parked. How is it that this dreadful pitfall is never addressed in the popular consideration of time travel?

Come to think of it, the only way a time traveler might emerge from the alternate-time-effect and find himself back on Earth, at some past or future date, would be if the Earth was indeed stationary, at the virtual center of the universe. Charles Fort would have fun with this concept, I can imagine.

In fact, Fort addressed a vaguely similar topic when considering repeated skyfalls on specific points of the Earth's surface. Likening the Earth to an apple tossed skyward, Fort envisioned a chaotic flock of birds zooming in and selectively pecking only one small spot on the apple's spinning skin. This seemed such an unlikelihood to Fort that he theorized the Earth is not spinning nor moving through the universe at all--it must be stationary, at the center of a shell-like universe, and that specific locations on Earth's surface were "targeted" for repeated skyfalls over long intervals. Fort may have rendered his notions tongue-in-cheek; however, many respected scientists today--and certainly all of our science fantasy authors--subscribe to the stationary earth theory (whether or not they realize it) when pondering time travel.

I've heard several notable mouthpieces of the scientific establishment, including Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawkings, comment on the plausibility of time travel--breaking it down so far as quantum gravity paradox and exploding time machines and so forth--yet they always seem to return to the high school drama of some hypothetical time traveler killing his hypothetical great-great-grandfather, thus altering linear time/space. Many of the greatest minds apparently make this leap of reasoning, without explaining how or why a time traveler would arrive back on Earth at all, but presupposing that that time-travelers always arrive back on Earth--which is an Earth-centric theory.

Just from a common sense perspective, a time traveler would never meet his distant ancestors or descendents, unless the time traveler was also exceptionally gifted in interstellar navigation and was in possession of the precise spatial coordinates of Earth, relative to the rest of the expanding universe, for a precise Earth date and time (in addition to possessing an interstellar propulsion system). That's one tall order. The much more difficult aspect of time travel is finding your way home.

According to more than a few theorists in the Quantum Gravity vision of Time, "particle" is our perceptual high-speed "snapshot" of where we are at any given point in Time. Being that apparent sub-atoms exist from the beginning of the universe to the end in one long, coiled, synchronously-conscious entity, they must pass through a diversity of incarnations, from slime-to-leaf-to-animate. So the molecules and atoms and sub-atoms that make up our bodies and brains, and which we perceive as "in existence at this point in time," are actually recycled through many different animates and inanimates over many ages.

In fact, the human body is cellularly recycled entirely every 7 years, meaning that our past and future atomic and subatomic components are out there in a compost heap beyond 7 years somewhere in the past or the future.

In short, and in defiance of the pop-logic of "Quantum Leap" (a television series in rerun), we cannot link back to our quantum past, because our quantum links were scattered around in elephant dung and cosmic dust about 7 years ago or 7 years in the future. If we are going to trace our quantum links back into the past, we must accept that our Time Traveler's atomic and subatomic components might end up scattered around in a pig farmer's field somewhere, or at the bottom of an ocean, or floating around in the halo of a comet.

I've read the Time Paradox theories wherein we can't go back before the creation of the Time Machine itself; but it's worse than that. Until such time as we accept that humans are molecularly and atomically and sub-atomically recycled on a regular basis, about every 7 years, the mechanical aspect of time travel is a moot point.

I recognize that I am, of course, as guilty of three-dimensional thinking in my approach to Time Travel as anyone in Entertainment and popular Science. This realization came home when I finally tried to define what Time Travel means to us, as a species obsessed with Time Travel. The definition at which I arrived was peculiar, to say the least: That Time Travel is a process of human thinking which defeats human intellectual growth and, ultimately, is an evolutionary dead-end for the human race.

To understand how I arrived at that definition, we need to step back momentarily, in time, as it were. Time Travel is Mankind's oldest fantasy (perhaps older than lechery, for we humans have a tendency to envision the consequences of our indiscretions before we act). For example, I can picture an injured Neanderthal male of 35,000 years ago, thinking in his own way: "If only I hadn't body-blocked that giant sloth..." Regret is, without a doubt, the source of our collective obsession with Time Travel. We dream of time travel in terms of bettering our present condition: "If I could turn back time.." or "If I had that to do over..." and "If only I'd known in advance..."

Indeed, regret is one reason for our survival as a species, as we consistently strive to correct our past blunders through systems of education and recording our blunders, as we will, for posterity. By and large, our dreams of traveling in time are necessarily focused dreams of regret, of altering the past, and sometimes of retrieving "inside information" of the future, thus bettering our present condition.

Except that instantaneous "bettering"--provided through forays into the past or future--could be the worst of mistakes. In everyday life, we can easily imagine better societies, better lives, and we regularly work towards the better goals; but to pursue an instantaneous Renaissance through Time Travel is a fatal endeavor. When we circumvent the human learning process, we short-circuit human nature and light the fuse of culture shock. Alvin Toffler commented on such "Future Shock" in a way, but he was commenting on a vertical technology curve far outpacing the human learning curve... As far as I can see, there's no such thing as human technology outpacing human learning. These concepts are mutually-balancing. When I speak of "culture shock," I refer to the collision of cultures, such as when Rockefellers smash into the Amazon, for instance, destroying whole unprepared aboriginal cultures in the pursuit of Rockefeller goals.

Fracturing and demolishing whole cultures through our physical and conceptual intrusion is no work of fiction. If anything, our fictional ventures into Time Travel are dangerous, in that modern audiences take this rather seriously and so model their behavior and popular understanding of physics aft er it. I shudder to think that, IF we humans ever manage a way to defy time, our representatives will have grown up on a diet of "Back to the Future," "The Terminator," "Sliders," "7 Days" and such fictional like. Somehow, it causes me to hold more dearly the simple premise of "The Time Machine," with Rod Taylor, wherein we only had to ponder "Which three books would you take with you?"

 

[MorgaineLaFay]

Grrrrrr..I did a search on Discover Mag. I can't locate the article. I would gladly send it to anyone that is interested...I though it was exceptional.


Morgy

 

[Valdimer]

I'll be more than happy to take a look at that.

 

[MorgaineLaFay]

Pm me...I will send it to you soon.

 

[Ravenloft]

didn't read the whole article but it was pretty harsh.

 

[scylis]

funny how the lack of interest in a movie from 1960 can shape a man's view of Space Time and interstellar physics.

i think the guy's just pissed about having to sit through that movie and came up with a plausible sounding theory to make the thing look like a silly fantasy.

but that's just me. 'cuz i know something Mr. Fancy Pants doesn't.

 

[Valdimer]

And what's that Scylis?

 

[Joe Adcock]

If one Uses H.G. Wells...

...as one's primary model for temporal travel, I think the arguments advanced by Charles Miller above are quite apt; both Wells and Pal envisioned the Machine remaining outside the physical effects of space while manipulating the effects of time -- logically, this ought indeed to have left the time traveler marooned in deep space when his long jaunt came to an end. Wells does not answer how this phenomenon appears to the people who live out their lives wondering what has become of their friend and colleague that apparently stepped away into the past or future. If the machine possesses some mechanism that allows it to match the relative inertia of its surroundings, i.e. hurtling through space at thousands of miles per hour on the surface of this particular planet, does the machine not present some sort of aspect to the observers whose lives flicker by before the traveler's dispassionate gaze?

I'm happy to see the skeptical argument pass beyond the issues of paradoxical causality that have dogged the genre for a hundred years. Time Travel for the purpose of changing the present or future, presumably for good, is a staple of science fiction, but it requires a presumption of altrusim even if travel is possible in both directions. If the Terminator came back in time and kept the computer conciousness that created it from coming into existence, the movie would have us believe that he should spontaneously cease to exist. But if you actually travel outside of your original course in the time continuum, your personal definition of the "present" changes, and the causality behind your existence is broken. No matter how many butterflies you step on or ancestors you kill, you remain alive and in your personal definition of the present -- and if you return to your original definition of "present" in the continuum, you are still going to exist even if you have rendered your entire family, or your entire species, non-existant, during your causal sojourn to the past.

Many latter-day time travel systems seem to feature considerable movement through space as well as a passage through time -- many stories and novels feature "time ships" rather than mere "time machines." Dr. Who's travel system, the TARDIS, was titled "Time and Relative Dimensons in Space," and seemed to function by using an extraordinarily complex artificial brain to calculate the temporal and spatial destinations desired and then sifted through the entire time-space continuum until it recognized the time and place desired. Once again, the device exits the spatial continuum, recognzes where it wants to go, and re-invents itself in the proper time/place couplet. The creator of that series, Terry Nation, asked the next question, which is, if we can stay in a single place despite the whirling progress of space/time around us, ala Wells, could we not also go where we want to in space/time?

I'm abou to begin a book by Kage Baker, titled "Mendoza in Hollywood," which postulates one-way travel from the future to the past -- so to take advantage of this, the technocrats of tomorrow create functionally immortal cyborgs, and send them into the past to create assets and husband their interests until they come into existence at some point in the future. How they remain concealed from reality until the moment they are conceived of by their future creators is not clear from the jacket blurb, but I'll let you know what I find out. I think it is a genuine challenge to write an entertaining and plausible time travel story, even if the reader is willing to suspend their command of several physical principles in the interest of amusement.

We might complain about the Sagan/Asimov obsession with murdering their own grandfathers, but I think it might be slightly more socially acceptable than Heinlein's obsession with fucking his own mother.

 

[freescorfr]

The brainless head painting in this link mentions time travel.

If you could travel in time who would you bonk with?

 

[chumley]

Should we physically defy Time, we necessarily create a new miniature universe outside of this space/time continuum (an alternate-time-effect). ....However, in defying Time, we have also defied the rest of spatial physics--including gravity.

I disagree. To travel into the future all you need is a spaceship capable of traveling at nearly the speed of light. The faster you travel, the more that time slows down for you. Meanwhile back on earth, your friends continue to age at the same rate. When you return from your trip, the earth has aged hundreds of years while you have only aged a few years. Viola! You have traveled into the future. You didn't need to leave this universe or create a new one to do it.

When and if we finally re-enter normal space/time, the Earth is nowhere to be found, nor is the rest of our solar system. Depending on the intensity and duration of our "time warp," we may find ourselves deep in interstellar space--with no recognizable constellations to guide us home--or even outside of the Milky Way altogether, lost in the intergalactic void.

Again I disagree. Just as we would be capable of navigating our way to a nearby star, we could just as easily find our way back to our own star.


Fort theorized the Earth is not spinning nor moving through the universe at all--it must be stationary, at the center of a shell-like universe, and that specific locations on Earth's surface were "targeted" for repeated skyfalls over long intervals. many respected scientists today subscribe to the stationary earth theory.

This is just total bunk. Are we still living in the dark ages?

Chumley

 

[Ravenloft]

Chumy:
I disagree. To travel into the future all you need is a spaceship capable of traveling at nearly the speed of light. The faster you travel, the more that time slows down for you. Meanwhile back on earth, your friends continue to age at the same rate. When you return from your trip, the earth has aged hundreds of years while you have only aged a few years. Viola! You have traveled into the future. You didn't need to leave this universe or create a new one to do it.

Me:
That just sounds to me more like a form of cryogenics rather than time travel.

 

[Dillinger]

Everything that ever was always will be, and everything that ever will be always was.
-- A Chrono-Synclastic Infundibulated Thought of Winston Niles Rumfoord in Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s "The Sirens of Titan"

(and)

In the grand, in the timeless, in the chrono-synclastic infundibulated way of looking at things, I shall always be here, I shall always be wherever I've been.
-- Winston Niles Rumfoord (Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.)

 

[MunchinMark]

Yes, time travel is impossible. Is there anyone who really believes otherwise? Even if a machine could be produced that could go backwards in time (forwards is easy , we all do it) what would be the point? The killing grandfather thing isn't a problem becasue this paradox heals itself- if you exist then all of the events that led to your existence happened. You cannot change anything, because it already happened and you can't observe anything because that is a form of interaction, which would change things.

And that's if you find yourself on Earth.

Time travel, like the Starship Enterprise, is a vehicle for the imagination. With this story telling device we can try out ideas. Strong ideas survive in the retelling and this is part of social evolution.

No form of evolution has any direction, so I can't tell you wherethe time machines will take us.