Time Travel

VKALFIERI

VKALFIERI

From a land down under.
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Feb 2, 2016
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Is travel to the past to change something in the future fruitless?

Is travel to the future fruitless?

How does time travel work?

I've watched a lot of time travel shows and even tried to write a few stories including time travel.

I've recently been watching The 4400 and it seems kinda fruitless that whoever sends the 4400 people back has enemies that want to stop them from what they're sent back to achieve.

I mean, won't they just keep sending them back because otherwise if the future is changed the 4400 would never have been sent back in the first place.

Darn wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff!
 
I've been saying this since I arrived here years ago.

Someday, somebody will invent the first Time Machine. But it won't go anywhere, instead people will be able to travel back and forth within it during the time it remains operational (for comparison, think of a lift shaft or a railway line - people travel upon them but the things don't themselves move at all)

Suppose that first machine remains working for, let's say, fifty years before it finally ceases to work.
Because it'll be known when that end-date is, a new time machine can be built alongside the firs one in fifty years, or in forty nine years or whatever, for people to travel even further into the future (again, just like people changing lifts or trains to continue their journeys)

Now suppose that eventually there'll be an entire chain of time machines placed beside each other in this way, allowing time travel for many centuries into the future.
Now imagine the people from the future travelling back in those same machines, all the way back to the time of the very first machine.
They can travel only as far back as the moment when the very first machine is switched on. (Just like passengers in lifts and trains cannot travel in them beyond the lift shafts or railway lines)



Further discussions for your enjoyment:
Temporal Anomalies in Popular Time Travel Movies
an interesting look at time travel...
Time travel: Back in Time
time travel
problems of time travel being common and ordinary
 
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VKALFIERI said:
Is travel to the past to change something in the future fruitless?
Click to expand...
We don't know.

Is travel to the future fruitless?
Click to expand...
Well, we do it constantly, so in that sense no. But I think you mean to 'jump ahead'. For that...we don't know. Because...

How does time travel work?
Click to expand...
...despite some suggestions on how a time machine may have to manipulate spacetime are possible via General Relativity, any practical solution is fraught with paradoxes, almost impossible energy/mass requirements and the fact that even if GR is correct (it isn't in a strict sense, but works very well as an approximation) we are still far away from a true understanding of the nature of time...

So we don't know.


Feel free therefore to speculate any wondrous time nature in writing speculative stories! I have a particular favourite...but you'll have to wait till I write the novel that utilises it. ;)
 
I remember reading in some physics book the theory that if time travel did actually become available you would not be able to travel back before the time machine was invented. I seem to recall diagrams with cones etc.
 
There is still the issue of the Grandfather's paradox..
 
I went back and killed my grandfather, but he cheated.
He had 2 daughters, just in case.
 
Ah, you are supposed to go back to kill your grandfather...
 
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