Time Travel

[The Grim Reaper's Friend]

Well, I read DrAwsm's thread about the time traveling cell phone, and decided to go ahead and make a time travel thread. Who here thinks it's possible? Who thinks it will ever happen? Who doesn't?
EDIT: As for me, as soon as we know a bit more, I think we could 'get going'. If we can get out of time (good luck) it would be easy. But that will never happen.

[jschild]

Time travel to the future is easy. To the past would be much more difficult and even it was possible would be cost-prohibitive because it would most likely require the ability to create wormholes (using massive amounts of exotic matter) and moving the wormhole endpoint backward in time instead of space. Since there is almost no known way to create a wormhole anchor in space, the furtherest any time machine could go back most likely would be its own creation, greatly limiting its use.

[The Grim Reaper's Friend]

Time travel to the future is easy.

Really? Done it recently? You know, no one seems to realize, even if we could travle in time, there would be about a billion restrictions on it. I mean, history is there you can't go back and change it, because you wouldn't be changing anything.

[Jim]

Originally Posted by The Grim Reaper's Friend

Really? Done it recently?

We are all traveling forward in time every moment of our lives.

[The Grim Reaper's Friend]

We are all traveling forward in time every moment of our lives.

Duh. I think we're speaking of 'moving faster than others' here.

[Chardris1287]

my take on time travel...the world is not a place that can be re-wound or fast foreward. Time in and of itself is not natural. Time is only a label that humans have invented only to better manage their productions on a day to day basis, of course time can and has been used for long term management. corperations do it all the time. My point being, because time is not a tangible thing, only a label we have used for a system of management, it is impossible to re-wind it. I guess to summarrize my statement, Life is not DVR.

[jschild]

Originally Posted by Chardris1287

my take on time travel...the world is not a place that can be re-wound or fast foreward. Time in and of itself is not natural. Time is only a label that humans have invented only to better manage their productions on a day to day basis, of course time can and has been used for long term management. corperations do it all the time. My point being, because time is not a tangible thing, only a label we have used for a system of management, it is impossible to re-wind it. I guess to summarrize my statement, Life is not DVR.

Actually, fast forwarding is easy and completely proven, the the rate of fast-forwarding is barely faster than "normal" time - speaking in a completely relative sense.

[Rich10]

While time dilation occurs due to relativistic speed differentials and/or gravity, the effects are very small at anything but very high speeds or very large gravitational fields.

I hate to say that almost anything is impossible since only 100 years ago, space travel, computers, cell phones, cloning, nuclear weapons, ... might have been considered impossible. Still, I wouldn't wait around for it in the near future.

[jschild]

Originally Posted by Rich10

While time dilation occurs due to relativistic speed differentials and/or gravity, the effects are very small at anything but very high speeds or very large gravitational fields.

I hate to say that almost anything is impossible since only 100 years ago, space travel, computers, cell phones, cloning, nuclear weapons, ... might have been considered impossible. Still, I wouldn't wait around for it in the near future.

Relativistic travel won't happen until we can harness anti-matter and that won't be happening anytime soon.

[DrAwsm]

Anybody read the book A Wrinkle in Time? Well, in the movie rendition, they explain time travel by folding a piece of fabric so that the space in between two points sags, or is at least taken out of the picture, even if only temporarily. It's quite interesting, and I think that's probably going to be our first step into time travel.

On antimatter, how does one store it in the first place? The way you explain it, jschild, is that it could blow up at any time. If that is the case, then why are there no news stories of labs blowing up?

Disclaimer: This really does fascinate me, and if my statement potentially comes off as being sort of "jerk-ish," I apologize.

[jschild]

Originally Posted by DrAwsm

Anybody read the book A Wrinkle in Time? Well, in the movie rendition, they explain time travel by folding a piece of fabric so that the space in between two points sags, or is at least taken out of the picture, even if only temporarily. It's quite interesting, and I think that's probably going to be our first step into time travel.

On antimatter, how does one store it in the first place? The way you explain it, jschild, is that it could blow up at any time. If that is the case, then why are there no news stories of labs blowing up?

Disclaimer: This really does fascinate me, and if my statement potentially comes off as being sort of "jerk-ish," I apologize.

First we've only been able to create miniscule amounts of AM - when I say miniscule I am referring to atoms and particles, that gram I mentioned - yeah, we've never even made that much.

Second, containment for very small amounts is fairly easy using a magnetic bubble. But, IF we could develop a cost effective method of creating AM (something that is almost certainly a century away, minimum), we would still have to develop magnetic bubbles that were 100% reliable to contain them. AM as a traditional fuel source is won't happen anytime soon, it's just too volitile and dangerous to have around. However, imagine Project Orion except using AM. The biggest trouble with space travel is you have to carry all the fuel with you, which adds mass, which slows you down and takes up space. AM would allow you to drastically reduce the weight needed to carry, while increasing speed.

As to A Wrinkle in Time, that is essentially referencing wormholes, but to generate them, you need massive amounts of exotic matter (matter with negative mass), something that is centuries if not millennium away from us technologically.

http://www.aleph.se/Trans/Tech/Space...wormholes.html

is an interesting read - note this passage

The amount of negative energy required for a traversable wormhole scales with the linear dimensions of the wormhole mouth. A one meter cube entrance requires a negative mass of roughly 10^27 kg.

Yeah, that's something that masses 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kg

For reference, Earth masses at 5.97x10^24 kg, so like I said, even IF it is feasible, we won't be doing it for a very, very, very, long time.

[Chardris1287]

question about your folding theory. How do you fold time, an intangible idea.