LONGECITY

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.

Everything hinges on whether Time travel to the past is possible.
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.

So I've constructed a poll to see what you think about 'time travel'/'Access to the past'.


Solve

1= don't know 2=no 3=yes 4=no

It looks like time travel in Present - Past direction is theoreticaly much more complicated to imagine than the Present - Future time travel.
But there is a small possibility if we consider the situation where a compact spacetime has closed time - like curves ( general relativity assume that spacetime is curved by the presence of matter/energy (represented by the Riemann tensor)). In this particular situation, future events could affect past ones.
Then, if we discover a method capable of produced the right spacetime conditions, time travel to the pass could be possible.
There are still other considerations to make, but for the moment this is probably enough.

I like stories/movies with time travel themes, but I think it won't be possible in the future.

I like stories/movies with time travel themes, but I think it won't be possible in the future.

What exactly do you think about time travel? Who or what travels and in what way? What happens to the past, since it cannot be modified.
You are not thinking of time machines are you?

I believe time travel to the past can't be because I believe time does not exist.

So for the question of what happens to the past is - nothing, the present changed. things moved. If you want to have it that way again you need to move them back, everything.

I believe time travel to the past can't be because I believe time does not exist.

So for the question of what happens to the past is - nothing, the present changed. things moved. If you want to have it that way again you need to move them back, everything.

Prof. Antoine Suarez (department of quantum philosofy of Zurich university, Switzerland), has demonstrated in a remarcable experiment that time does not exists in the quantum level. (the experiment of Aspect prove the non - locality of quantum correlation of photons, that is, the particles behave like if there was no distance between them).
And the next question is: if time does not exists at the quantum level ( the causal relations are destroyed, the dependence between events has nothing to do with time order), why does it exists at macroscopic level?
Edited by Teixeira, 11 December 2009 - 03:21 PM.

ir doesn't O_o we just think it does..

ir doesn't O_o we just think it does..

There is a tremendous hipothesis that consists in the possibility of reproduction at the macroscopic level, of the special conditions existing in the quantum level.
That would produce inexistence of time, with local strange phenomena. The problem is: what phenomena? ( a kind of "interference" phenomena between "two universes").

Wouldn't let me vote, got an error.

IMO, the concept of time travel is flawed -- it assumes that time exists. My bet is that time does NOT exist. Time is merely a human concept to represent change. Time is not a feature of nature. Instead, we've confused change/entropy with time.

Einstein himself was onto this within a year of his death, telling people around him that time may in fact be the ultimate illusion. There is only now, and thus, we cannot ever travel backward or forward, because we you realize there is only now, then you realize there's no other "time" (past or future) to visit.

Yes, this is a devilishly difficult concept for many people to grasp. And, we've been exposed to the concept of time since birth (reinforced by day/night cycles, etc.), so it's like a form of brainwashing that is extremely hard to break away from. But, there's a large group of physicist who also strongly suspect time is not fundamental to the universe, and in fact, it just doesn't exist, despite the watched on our wrists.

My stance is this: If I had to place a bet, I'd bet that in time, we'll figure out time is a construct of the human experience. When you chance your viewpoint of time to the viewpoint that it doesn't actually exist, time travel and a lot of physics (including special relativity) actually makes a LOT more sense.
Edited by DukeNukem, 12 December 2009 - 11:07 PM.

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....

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, but there is no evidence or way that points to it being a reality yet that Ive seen or heard. 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?

Wouldn't let me vote, got an error.

IMO, the concept of time travel is flawed -- it assumes that time exists. My bet is that time does NOT exist. Time is merely a human concept to represent change. Time is not a feature of nature. Instead, we've confused change/entropy with time.

Einstein himself was onto this within a year of his death, telling people around him that time may in fact be the ultimate illusion. There is only now, and thus, we cannot ever travel backward or forward, because we you realize there is only now, then you realize there's no other "time" (past or future) to visit.

Yes, this is a devilishly difficult concept for many people to grasp. And, we've been exposed to the concept of time since birth (reinforced by day/night cycles, etc.), so it's like a form of brainwashing that is extremely hard to break away from. But, there's a large group of physicist who also strongly suspect time is not fundamental to the universe, and in fact, it just doesn't exist, despite the watched on our wrists.

My stance is this: If I had to place a bet, I'd bet that in time, we'll figure out time is a construct of the human experience. When you chance your viewpoint of time to the viewpoint that it doesn't actually exist, time travel and a lot of physics (including special relativity) actually makes a LOT more sense.

Yay! someone finally agrees with me :D Einstein too.

I wouldn't say it's too difficult to grasp that time doesn't exist, actually, for me - it is even more difficult to be convinced that time exists since ever.
Time travel makes no since and when movies and people introduced before me the "time dilation fields" and "black holes" and that you need more energy to function because of gravity I was thinking "No, time isn't slower there, that's nonsense, they simply move slower. It's "like" time is slower but time doesn't exist :D

I should get a novel prize ^.^

Wouldn't let me vote, got an error.

IMO, the concept of time travel is flawed -- it assumes that time exists. My bet is that time does NOT exist. Time is merely a human concept to represent change. Time is not a feature of nature. Instead, we've confused change/entropy with time.

Einstein himself was onto this within a year of his death, telling people around him that time may in fact be the ultimate illusion. There is only now, and thus, we cannot ever travel backward or forward, because we you realize there is only now, then you realize there's no other "time" (past or future) to visit.

Yes, this is a devilishly difficult concept for many people to grasp. And, we've been exposed to the concept of time since birth (reinforced by day/night cycles, etc.), so it's like a form of brainwashing that is extremely hard to break away from. But, there's a large group of physicist who also strongly suspect time is not fundamental to the universe, and in fact, it just doesn't exist, despite the watched on our wrists.

My stance is this: If I had to place a bet, I'd bet that in time, we'll figure out time is a construct of the human experience. When you chance your viewpoint of time to the viewpoint that it doesn't actually exist, time travel and a lot of physics (including special relativity) actually makes a LOT more sense.

Yay! someone finally agrees with me :D Einstein too.

I wouldn't say it's too difficult to grasp that time doesn't exist, actually, for me - it is even more difficult to be convinced that time exists since ever.
Time travel makes no since and when movies and people introduced before me the "time dilation fields" and "black holes" and that you need more energy to function because of gravity I was thinking "No, time isn't slower there, that's nonsense, they simply move slower. It's "like" time is slower but time doesn't exist :D

I should get a novel prize ^.^

If time does not exists at macroscopic level why do people get old? Because the level of entropy increases. But that is what the thermodinamic arrow of time is all about. The thermodinamic arrow of time states that the time flows with the increase of entropy. So when the entropy of a system is increasing, the time arrow points from past to future. But I know processes where entropy decreases. Is time going back to the past? (time travel question)-
Edited by Teixeira, 13 December 2009 - 04:39 PM.

you are totally confusing between two different concepts and besides entropy can reverse in cases.

I don't think backwards time travel could work but I'm not 100% certain about this. It would be nice if it were possible but sometimes I think of the embarrassing things I did (and sometimes still do) and I fear that time travelers in the future might return to the past and see me, especially if I become a well-known figure.

It seems, in general, that most advanced technologies that we can imagine
eventually come to pass. So I suspect Time Travel will be possible, provided
that we exist long enough to figure it out. I do believe time exists in the
same way I believe length, width, mass, and color exist. Because it is a measurable
quantity that I can observe. We already observe the past when we look at
the stars. And if we could circumvent traditional travel and somehow teleport
there we would be 'in' that past. Make that travel in a loop and there you are.

So going to the past is a transportation issue : )

Going to the future, hmm. Just wait around I guess? And do it frozen?

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.

I agree that time exist, and to me it's actually a more difficult concept to grasp that if time was just a human perception.

The same way it's difficult to imagine that time did not exist before the big bang.

I think it does mainly because most of the great cosmologist Tell's us it does.
I don't have enough knowledge in this area to really say more.

Anyway what I wanted to answer is this:

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?

Yes actually I would love to do so if I had a time machine or found another way to do it and I think I would not be the only one.

For the same reason we are doing archeology research and we are so interested about how life start, how pre-human evolve or just history in general.

We are already making crude simulation of history in documentary, that a part of who we are to try to know where we come from.

If one day human descendant have the ability to make perfect simulation of their ancestor and their habitat to study them in order to increase their knowledge, I think they will and if it's a quantum precise simulation and you believe in the quantum theory of identity you know what it means.
Edited by ben951, 30 January 2010 - 02:41 PM.

Using all the data we have from different sources (mind, computers, books, everything) we can create a virtual reality of the present and the future. Maybe even past memories and records.

Then we could all live in this virtual reality of the new universe.

What if we already are?

Each day I use my car to time travel. Every morning I hit 88mph in my oldmobil, and i get to work 15 minutes ahead of time. No flux capacitor required.

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?

 

 

 

I undoubtedly would. That is saving lives. I think many people feel saving other people's lives is a highly important pursuit.

 

I don't think that Hawking's argument against time travel, that if it were possible to travel to an arbitrary moment in the past, we would be invaded by tourists from the future, applies in this case. Not if "somehow" the deed could be done without needing some machine to pop up into the time of the person's "consciousness" being retrieved.

 

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?

 

 

 

I undoubtedly would. That is saving lives.

 

 

The dead (as in *actually* dead, not just "clinically" dead) don't need to be saved anymore than your own non-existence before your birth needs to be pitied.

 

The dead (as in *actually* dead, not just "clinically" dead) don't need to be saved anymore than your own non-existence before your birth needs to be pitied.

There is even more. If some day the time travelling in the past becomes possible, then why not the people from the future pick up us right after death, revive us in the future, and make us immortal?

 

 

The dead (as in *actually* dead, not just "clinically" dead) don't need to be saved anymore than your own non-existence before your birth needs to be pitied.

 

It's not that easy to draw the line, are people in cryostasis actually dead if we find out in the future that we can revive them ?

Before clinically dead meant that the heart stopped now it's when brain activity stops.

Clinically dead just mean that present technology can't cure it.

 

 

See my posts here:

http://www.longecity...um/61-cryonics/

 

Whether or not a person in "cryostasis" is ever revived is a separate question from whether or not they were ever actually dead in the first place. I appreciate that these two questions are seen as inextricably intertwined, but I think they need to be disentangled from each other to acknowledge the difference between outcomes bounded by our technological capacities and *actual biological processes* that we can observe and describe. In other words, there are very clear and unambiguous distinctions between cardiac arrest, cessation of whole organism metabolic function, tissue necrosis, etc; organisms don't transform into cadavers by mere virtue of sustaining asystole and flat eeg...but they *do* eventually turn into cadavers. At some threshold, I think medical professionals (and society at large) can and should draw a line.

 

http://en.wikipedia....theoretic_death

IMHO, "death" is best understood as a descriptor of a strictly biological process (e.g. stars shouldn't be said to "evolve" or "die") following which consciousness *ceases to exist* as such (the way there is a temporal discontinuity in the existence of your consciousness when you go to sleep, but the ongoing presence of your functioning brain facilitates its re-existence during REM or when you wake).

Edited by Taurus Londoño, 31 July 2014 - 06:00 PM.

Ah, glanced up and noticed that this is the time-travel forum. I think the thread got moved (don't remember ever visiting this forum).

There is even more. If some day the time travelling in the past becomes possible, then why not the people from the future pick up us right after death, revive us in the future, and make us immortal?

 

 

Why wait until after death?

FWIW, time travel to the past will someday be possible but it will not be because of some especially exotic exploitation of the laws of physics;

the past will come to life as a virtual world increasingly as real as the one in which you're reading this message.

...I wonder how meaningful the distinction between the two will ultimately be?

Ah yes, the dark eyed goddess of quantum mechanics sit's at the bottom of my bed..

Ah, glanced up and noticed that this is the time-travel forum. I think the thread got moved (don't remember ever visiting this forum).

There is even more. If some day the time travelling in the past becomes possible, then why not the people from the future pick up us right after death, revive us in the future, and make us immortal?

 

 

Why wait until after death?

FWIW, time travel to the past will someday be possible but it will not be because of some especially exotic exploitation of the laws of physics;

the past will come to life as a virtual world increasingly as real as the one in which you're reading this message.

...I wonder how meaningful the distinction between the two will ultimately be?

 

If they take somebody before his/her death, the future will be changed, since he/she will not be able to do the things, that would do if he/she was in the time, when was taken.

 

If they take somebody closely after his/her death, and replace his body mass with a proportional bilogical mass to his/her weight, e.g. if they take the corpse, and bury a death pig with the same mass instead, there will not be changes in the furure.

FWIW, time travel to the past will someday be possible but it will not be because of some especially exotic exploitation of the laws of physics;

the past will come to life as a virtual world

 

Virtual time travelling is nothing. It will be only a copy of the real time travelling. An unrealistic view of what should it be if time tavelling was possible. It is the same for example if you play a tanks game and pretend, that you are driving a real tank. The virtual time travelling may become a perfect copy of the real time travelling, but it will be not real after all. The real time travelling, if happens some day, will be done by some science, most probbably the physics.

 

By the way what do you mean by "FWIW"? Do you mean "For Whoever Is Wondering" or you mean something else? The acronimes an abbreviations site

http://www.abbreviations.com/FWIW

gives:

"For What It's Worth", "Forgot Where I Was" and "For Whoever Is Wondering"

 

FWIW, time travel to the past will someday be possible but it will not be because of some especially exotic exploitation of the laws of physics;

the past will come to life as a virtual world

 

Virtual time travelling is nothing. It will be only a copy of the real time travelling. An unrealistic view of what should it be if time tavelling was possible. It is the same for example if you play a tanks game and pretend, that you are driving a real tank. The virtual time travelling may become a perfect copy of the real time travelling, but it will be not real after all. The real time travelling, if happens some day, will be done by some science, most probbably the physics.

 

By the way what do you mean by "FWIW"? Do you mean "For Whoever Is Wondering" or you mean something else? The acronimes an abbreviations site

http://www.abbreviations.com/FWIW

gives:

"For What It's Worth", "Forgot Where I Was" and "For Whoever Is Wondering"

 

 

What do you mean by "real"?

 

FWIW almost always means "For what it's worth."

http://www.urbandict...e.php?term=FWIW

...AFAIK.

Edited by Taurus Londoño, 02 August 2014 - 03:07 PM.