Time Travel
This is a subject that I have put a lot of thought into. Sometimes I believe time travel is possible and others I don’t. I love to come up with theories on the matter and then disprove them. I love to read about it, and I love to watch shows and movies depicting some aspect of the possibilities of time travel.
There are many theories on time travel to the past. Some will argue that there are multiple timelines and that you can change the future or present by traveling to the past and altering something and thus creating a new timeline from the moment that you change something, as seen in the movie Back to the future 2.
Others will say that there is only one timeline and traveling to the past would not affect anything because it happened the first time around also. This time travel theory is seen in movies such as 12 Monkeys. Let me explain: Ray lives in the year 2050. He wants to travel back in time to one of the highjacked planes that was going to crash into the World Trade Centers and stop it from happening. So he travels back in time to one of the planes originally destined for San Francisco. He struggles with the highjackers to try and gain control of the aircraft and in the struggle, the plane crashes far from its intended target… in
You see, in reality one plane really did crash prematurely in Pennsylvania, and therefore the time traveler changed nothing, but instead caused an event that happened the first time around. In the single-timeline theory (as I like to call it) you cannot change the past because no matter what you go back and try to change, actually happened the first time around anyway.
Now the question still remains if time travel to the past is possible or not. If it is possible, I believe that it either will never be achieved, you can only travel back as far as the day time travel was discovered. Either that or time travelers have very strict codes on how to behave when in the past. I say this because we have no real evidence that time travelers have come to our time. Have you ever seen or met one?
If time travel eventually becomes possible, you’d think we’d know about it. Since we don’t know about it, then there must be a reason. Maybe they can’t travel back in time farther than the date that time travel was discovered, and since that date hasn’t come yet, we’ve seen no effects of time travel yet. Or maybe time travelers operate on strict military laws such as the Temporal Prime Directive as seen on Star Trek. An example of this would be that time t
ravelers only come in the form of homeless-looking bums so they are not cared about or noticed, but they can still observe the past. Or, they spend years studying the time period to which they will travel, so they can fit in, and they also bring fake credentials that would even fool the highest authorities, such as Driver’s License, credit cards, and birth certificates. Since it is their own past that they are traveling to, they would know how to break that kind of security. Our computers would be primitive to their knowledge.Time travel to the future—if it is possible then it is bound to the same rules as time travel to the past. For example, if you could change the past and therefore create an alternate timeline (the multiple timeline theory), then anything you might see in the future is only one of many timelines that are possible.
If
one were able to see the future and then change it, than the future that they saw must have been an alternate timeline. For example, if you saw that your murder was going to take place in two days in your own house while you were sleeping, you would probably pick up and fly out to Hawaii to make sure that you weren’t in your house to be murdered on that night, thereby changing the future and forcing the original future you saw over to a different timeline.Now take the single-timeline theory and apply the same scenario. This would be the theory that states that you cannot change the future just as you cannot change the past. If you somehow looked into the future and saw that your murder was going to take place in two days in your own house while you were sleeping, you would probably pick up and fly out to
So what ends up happening is that you’re on your way out the door with all your luggage and you slip on the icy porch and hit your head. You arise with mild amnesia and can no longer remember where you were going or why, so you return to your house and go to sleep in your bed, where you are murdered.You see? Even though you saw the future, you were not able to change it. In this example it was only because you saw your future that you saw the future you saw.
So which makes the most sense to you? The single or multiple-timeline theory? Are there infinite alternate realities being created every millisecond with every decision that people make, or is the past and future set in stone without a way to change it?
Some Time Travel Movie Worth Checking Out:
12 Monkeys
Back to the Future
Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure
Frequency
Millennium
Minority Report
Planet of the Apes (both the 1968 and 2001 versions)
Somewhere in Time
Terminator
The Time Machine (both the 1960 and 2002 versions)
3 comments:
A few things to consider as well, demonstrating why time travel to the past could still be possible.
1) Most modern theories in quantum mechanics suggest the existence of parallel dimensions
2) Einstein showed how time travel to the past is theoretically possible to do, but in reality impossible to achieve, as it required faster than light travel.
3) With multiple time lines (Back to the Future style), we would never have seen time travelers, as in our time line, there is no time travel yet. Any time someone would travel back to our time they would have spun off a new dimension, and once again ours would not see the time traveler.
That's not to say that there couldn't be time travelers, rather in our particular dimension, there may not have been any yet.
Aaron, on point #2, I believe that Einstein proved that time travel to the future is theoretically possible by traveleling at the speed of light, but not to the past. I believe that as science currently understands it, traveling to the past is neither practically nor theoretically possible.
Check out this page on wikipedia for more info.:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_travel
Hey Yani, good to hear from you :)
I think I seriously messed up a few fact, and the wikipedia article showed me the error of my ways, so allow me to clarify.
I was silly in not even remembering traveling forward in time according to Einstein. That part is not only possible, we have proven, and done it. I remember a study about 13 year ago (man am I getting old!) where we synced up two atomic clocks. Left one stationary on earth, and put the other on a space shuttle orbiting earth (obviously at some pretty fast speeds). The clock that was aboard the space shuttle experience Einstein's time dilation, and was behind than the one that was on earth.
The travel in the past, like you said, science understands how to do it, but it is not yet possible, as it requires faster than light travel.
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