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Time Travel possibilities

I

Icarus

Guest
Alright, so listen to my two theories - (well, one is mine one isn't)

First - Mine.

Time Travel is impossible. You made a time machine and went back to December 6th 1941 to warn the United States army about the imending bomibng on pearl harbor. You are now a national hero, and a pimp. So now in 1980-something you are born and now you come to 2004 and you are now however old you are. All through life you've never heard of pearl harbor because you went back in time when you are 16 to fix it. Except when you're 16 and invent the time machine, you don't go back to pearl harbor because it never happened and the date of December 6th, 1941 has no meaning to you because December 7th 1941 never happened. So because you never went back in time to stop it from happening, the Japanese bomb pearl harbor.
Did I lose anybody yet?

Alright - Theory two.

Stars are very far away. Light years away. (the distance light travels in a year) So that means when you're looking at a star in the sky, you're really looking into the past because it takes so long for the light to get to our little blue and green planet, correct?

So now, lets adapt this to time travel. Say I made a spaceship that could go two times the speed of light, as well as a crazy telescope and I put you inside of the spaceship and handed you the telescope, right before I shot you off to a near planet. So when you're there, you whip out your tool, (the Telescope, you perv) and you aim that there telescope at this planet we all love and see the past year happening again, since well, the light from present day has not caught up to you yet.
So making the following HUGE assuptions, you could see the past but not alter it in any way shape or form.
1. You can go faster than the speed of light
2. You can constuct a telescope that can see people on earth from many light years away.
3. You don't die before you get there. (because if you can go twice as fast as light, you will only get 1 year in the past so in order to see anything interested, (ak 1941) you would need to go time travelng for over 120 years each way.

So what do you think? does your brain hurt yet?
 
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nah not really, basic 1st year physics :) I remember that lesson and thought it was a trip and absolutely loved it :) Fun stuff.
 
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When u time travel ur going into a parallel unniverse (which, by theory, is hypothetical). So whatever happened will not happen in the parellel universe, but it will happen in the base universe.
 
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Don't forget that everything that happened in the past influenced the present. So if you go back in time and avoid the Pearl Harbor bombing, this would have a huge impact into the present which you cannot foresee...maybe you wouldn't even be born.
 
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If you went back in time to say 1955, the only way I can think of to do that is to space travel to where the solar system and earth was then, only it's not there any more Also, no matter how fast you go, if you travel to a star, you arrive there at that present time. :)
 
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I

Icarus

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witeshark, yes that's correct - there's no ACTUAL time travel involved - but since light takes time to get to that star, if you could 'outrun it' you could see the past...do you know what I'm saying?
 

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