by breebug
Traveling to the Future… Impossible? Yes.
4:12 pm in Physical Supernatural by breebug
A lot of scientist are dedicated to time traveling; finding the wormhole, figuring out if it’s stable enough for human travel, and actually succeeding at time travel.
But what they don’t think about, is that it’s impossible to travel to the future, simply because it hasn’t happened yet.
Think about it this way, there’s an empty field where a house is ABOUT to be built, but isn’t there yet. You cannot travel through time to the future and there be a house there.
When you travel to the future, you only take you with you, you don’t take the world and the entire population with you, just you. So you would end up in a vast abyss of nothing if you attempted to travel to the future.
The only way to get to the future is to sit here and wait until we get there, and that is still impossible because by the time you reach the future, it instantly becomes the present.
You can, however, travel to the past, because things have been there, people have been there, and things have happened.
If you traveled to the past, there would be people there, and buildings, everything. If you traveled to ancient Rome, you would see ancient Rome, but you yourself and the ancient Romans wouldn’t be in the past, you would be in the present because you would be there experiencing things as they happened.
So time travel could be possible, but only to the past, and by the time you got there it would be the present for you and the people at the time you traveled to. But traveling to the future cannot happen, it’s not there, it hasn’t happened yet.
There is no future until we make it, and by the time we get there it’s already the present.
It’s a good point you make, but I’d like to interject about your concept of travelling to the past.
Just as the concept that the future hasn’t happened yet is valid, so too is the following point: the past has already happened. If time travel to the past were possible, wouldn’t one expect that the people of the future would have visited some point in the past already?
One would assume that if they have this nifty method of travelling to the past, they’d have used it. But nowhere in the past is there any record of people arriving from the future in a big shiny machine.
Therefore, there are only a couple possible explanations (as I see it):
1) The people who came from the future have avoided detection so well that no one in history has ever detected them (after all, if you saw a person time travel from the future, you’d probably write it down or publicize it or something..)
2) These people travelling from the future have made contact with, say, the government, or a select few, and there’s some sort or mutual agreement to keep it hushed up.
3) People in the past HAVE witnessed time travel, but simply deemed insane or liars; or four, time travel simply isn’t possible.
Oh man, now we’re getting complicated..
If the future hasn’t happened yet, then how could “people of the future” have visited “the past”?
If you believe that traveling to the future is impossible because the future hasn’t happened yet, then you cannot, by definition, believe that traveling to the past is possible, YET.
But then again, what do I know? HAHA — Is anything possible? I don’t know.. my dreamer friends think there are monks who can teleport and aliens have already visited.. I’m a man of science, so until it can be tested and repeated several times, I don’t believe anything!
Well you have to look at it this way… we are the present & the future of the past. So to the people of the past, the future does exist, but to us it doesn't, because we haven't gotten that far in time yet. we could travel to the past, but not to the future, because it simply isn't there… yet. But the past, is, it has happened so it's there in the space time continuum somewhere & it's virtually reachable, unlike the future. You can't go to a place that doesn't exist.
& Arsham i agree with your explanation of not being able to travel to our own past because we never existed to the people of that time, my theory is that the past we visit is one of an alternate dimension, but good point.
All of these points also refer to a similar question: in pop culture, when a prediction about the future is made, is it possible to change that future? Is that prediction simply one possible path, or is it written in stone?
I personally like to think of it as the latter- that the future is absolute, it can’t be altered by your actions.
If it were predicted for someone to be hit by a bus, it should not change just by staying away from busy streets- the only question is, HOW will he be hit by it? We don’t know, but it should happen either way.
Imagine that there was a friendly planet just a bunch of kilometers away from us, enough to take 1 hour since the light coming from our sun reflects on us and arrives at their planet.
My clock says 1h30 and i'm in Portugal, and i'm sitting on my sofa writting this! At 2h30 of my clock, i will probably be sleeping and i turned off the lights. However, our friens in the farway planet will see that the lights are on. But it's not, because i turned it off. They just did't see it yet because the "information" did't have enough time to get there. They would actually watching to my past, just 1 hour delay…
Still confused?
Imagine another friendly planet, but 10 "hours light" away from us.
It's dark right now, they can only see Portugal because it's illuminated by street and building lights. Right now they are seeing Portugal fully illuminated by our precious Sun. Why? Because the light emmited by the sun and reflected on Portugal took 10 hours to travel there. So, they see our past 10 hours after we "did" it, witch is actually their present. If you look at them now, you can see what happened there 10 hours ago.
As the post says, travel to the future is impossible, just because it hasn't happened yet.
What about watching our own past?
Well, i assume yes too. But only if you can travel faster enough to overcome your reflected light, witch travels really fast (something 1.079.252.849 kilometers per hour – don't mind to immagine that speed).
If i wanted to see my self at the backyard 10 hours ago, i would have to travel to the space for 10 hours at twice the speed of light. Luckly i would find some rays of my "past" light and see my self… or maybe not because i'd be too far away.
It’s relative. When you travel to the future, you’re not “in the future,” you’re in the present. If you travel close to the speed of light, you’ll return to earth and notice that all of your friends are much older, while you have barely aged at all. Your clock may have moved a few days, but their clocks have moved several years. From where you began initially, can you not say that you traveled to the future on earth while simultaneously remaining in the present within your own frame of reference?