Time travel - just some thoughts...

[Andrea Hays]

Ok, here it goes....

 

I am a big fan of time travel movies. Except planet of the apes. That just confused me.

 

So, I spent a lot of time in my youth (like, two years, every day... almost all the time) contemplating the plausibility of time travel. I was (and still am) a strange child. Anyway, one of my favorite things was the grandfather paradox. I'm sure you've heard of it, but just in case, here it is: Grandfather Paradox

 

And I was thinking about stars, how the light takes a really long time to reach us, because they are so far away. So I was thinking, if you were able to go back in time, you would be seeing the light, and maybe the mass, of things that had happened in the past, not making them happen again with you there. That would involve bringing back the dead, or at least somehow bringing back their conscience. And so there would be no conscience behind the light, you would merely be seeing a 'movie' of your grandfather in the past.

 

This 'movie' would not be alive, so you couldn't kill it. shooting it would most likely have no affect other than to muddy up that exact moment in the past for the next guy who wanted to visit, by scattering some light particle/rays.

 

So Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets seems to be a more acurate time travel film than Back to the Future, at least to me.

 

And would you really want to kill your granddad?

 

Sorry if this is a bit incoherent, I think I may have a fever....

 

anyway, I hope you found this interesting, any thoughts?

 

-Andrea

 

 

[JustinW]

Think of the speed of light as the bullet from a gun. If you traveled faster than the bullet could you move past the point at which it was fired. Or past the position it was when you started. It makes more sense to me to move forward instead of backward when going faster than the speed of light. But when you get there could you see it since the light hasn't yet met the oblect to cause the reflection for you to see.

[pantheory]

This kind of time traveling concerning viewing but not interacting, is essentially what we are now doing when we are looking through a telescope. Maybe someday we will figure out how to view the ancient earth or even the beginning solar system -- a cool far-fetched idea that I think this is not completely beyond the realm of possibility star-trek style --- such as looking at our galaxy, solar system, from a galaxy 4.5 billion light years away.

Edited October 17, 2011 by pantheory