It seems to me that if time travel to the past were possible then we may become immortal :-
Everyone that every lived would have access to highly advanced science, science perhaps billions of years ahead of us now.
Future scientists could transfer our consciousness' before we die, to 'immortal bodies' in an 'eternal man-made reality' using science.
Glaring flaw I see:
It would have already happened, no? There's no evidence that I'm aware of that travelers from the future are taking away the consciousnesses of dying humans... And besides,
why would they bother? Why would they care?Would YOU invent a time machine to travel back to medieval Europe for the sole purpose of stealing the consciousnesses of feudal serfs so that you can give them immortality in your era, an era filled with billions of people already no doubt?
Strictly speaking all that is required is 'Access to the past'.
The past doesn't have to be altered in any way.
One just needs 'access' to peoples' consciousness' perhaps nanoseconds before they die.
Your scenario requires the past to be altered; information of any kind, even a person's consciousness, cannot be retrieved without altering the universe at some level (see Quantum Physics).
Thats what I try to tell people. Time is just a measurement in the movement of an object. In order to go back in time, you would have to get every object to go move its molecules and peices backward all at the same time and rate as they moved forward. We cant just, give time properties that it cant have. I mean, why cant we, "go back in gravity"? It just doesnt make sense. Now, maybe we are missing something here, but from what we know, time is not something you can go back in. It would be nice, but....
Yep, you're missing something.
Time is not "just a measurement in the movement of an object", time is essentially a physical, tangible dimension akin to the three spatial dimensions you interact with on a daily basis. Roughly a century of consistent scientific observation and experimentation has confirmed this; in fact it's been around for so long it's now seen as "Classical", and some physicists believe it's outdated. Guess it has yet to catch up with everyone.
If you can back along a stretch of road, you can go back in time; believe it or not, the *possibility* of time travel to the past is perfectly consistent with physics. The problems arise from the paradoxes which would seem to result or the means by which one would travel to the past in the first place.
Anything is possible, there may be aliens on Venus studying Hegal, if you jump into a volcano holding a fig branch you might be transported to a magical land in another dimension, there might be a god, there might be a committee of gods, we might be able to go back in time
Problem is, none of those things have any scientific support whatsoever in modern physics...except time travel to the past.
but there is no evidence or way that points to it being a reality yet that Ive seen or heard.
Not a reality yet, no. But apparently allowed by the laws of nature.
Until we find some, then the utility of humoring the idea is just as useful as humoring any of these other kinds of things isnt it?
Tell that to Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, or Michio Kaku.
Edited by Xanthus, 30 January 2010 - 05:10 AM.