Not sure if this is the right subforum. Feel free to move appropriately. Say that I was to build a time machine, and used it to travel 10 years into the future. Would I be able to find the future me, or would he/I have been missing for 10 years. I remember having this discussion with a whole group of friends when I was about 15. And we couldn't come to an agreement. I was, and still am, inclined to think that I would go there, and people would say that Scott had been missing for 10 years (and probably would believe I was me because I wouldn't have aged 10 years). Also, now that I am somewhat more educated in the matter, I feel that it may depend on the type of time machine. I think that if it was like the time machine in the book/film The Time machine. Which is a machine that simply speeds up time outside the capsule, then It would all be relative. I would look outside the capsule and see time moving very quickly, while outside observers would see me and everything inside the time machine moving very slowly. In which case, I certainly would not encounter a future me. But lets take a time machine like in Back to the future,or Bill and Teds excellent adventure where the vessel disappears and reappears 10 years in the future. No relativity involved. The machine is, in a sense magical in that it instantaneously warps me from one time to the next. Well what then? Would I encounter a future me? A friend of mine argued that I would encounter a future me, because I would at some point, travel back to the present and go on to live in normal time for ten years at which point a "past" me would appear out of nowhere and say hi. My argument is that while it is true that I would eventually travel back to the present, I had not yet done so in any time frame. I also made the argument that theres an inherent paradox in that argument because what if the machine broke after I traveled 10 years into the future, and had no way of ever getting back to the present. The powers that be would not know yet whether the machine breaks or not. So I am of the belief that I would travel 10 years into the future, and find a future where Scott has been missing for ten years. Whats are everyones thoughts? In the meantime, I'm gonna post this and directly go take a nap. I massively hurt my back today. Hope to find some good discussions in the future Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
It's really dependent on how you would navigate the universe (or multiverse) One way to look at it is having a deck of cards, if cause the cards to stagger, so none of the cards are fully aligned, and you were to punch a pin through the whole stack. You'd find that the holes made by the pin can potentially occur anywhere on each card. This can either be created by entropy or actually placed with a design in mind (Super-symmetry). In both cases it expresses "Relativity". Those cards can actually represent not just a spacial volume but also a time period. Hypothetically, if you had two exact instances of the same universe as parallels, they would be indistinguishable until an "Event" had occurred to generate a paradox. An event will consist of a infinitesimally small time period, where an act and it's consequence deviates in path. The problem of course is taking that event and entangling it with other events to generate larger events, those larger events you then entangle with events of the same size to generate even larger events. So hypothetically you could eventually stagger large time periods with each other through manipulation. ( I guess you could say it's "weaving/knitting" a time jumper.) Incidentally there are two completely unrelated facts that you might or might not see in the same light as myself. Firstly it's known that the Celt's had many unique "entangled" designs in artwork, sculptures etc, secondly Labyrinths were placed at stately homes to "Confuse the devil from the door". In both instances of design, there is only one path which you could suggest is a single string, the strings are over course interwoven or bend back and forth with the same intention, "To confuse the devil". However when you are dealing with the notion of manipulating time "The Devil" is merely someone trying to reverse engineer the design of your universe and likely trying to cheat the system to bump you from your goal and take it for themselves. In the case of the labyrinth if you were to race with someone that jumped over the hedge to "get to the finish line quicker", when they land on the path they won't know if they are heading towards the finish or heading back towards the start. (In fact if I would going to build a time machine, I would actually start by designing the universe, then working out how to move between points within it's framework, after all you'd cover all your bases by making sure that you are less likely to make mistakes since you can design the system to respond a particular way and obviously built labyrinth's.)
That depends on whether you subsequently return from the future to the present and then progress into the future the normal way from here, I guess. If you travel to the future and stay there, you would have suddenly disappeared from the present along with your time machine. So the only you in the future would be the you that suddenly materializes there. But if you travel to the future and then return here, you would presumably progress into the future the normal way from this point. So in that return-case, there would be an older you up there in the future who could greet the younger you when he arrives in the time machine. I'm not sure if traveling into the future creates the same kind of paradoxes that travel into the past seems to. In this case, the paradox would arise because of the return pastward leg of your roundtrip journey. If you do meet an older you in the future, then you know that you must have returned to the past and then survived until the date you visited. But if you fail to make it back to the past or die prematurely, then where did the you that you met up in the future come from? It looks like another version of the going back in time and killing your parents before you were born paradox. Science fiction writers often invoke an alternate-universe ontology to account for that. So a time traveler from future A who returns to the past and alters things finds him/herself on a new altered timeline and advances into a future B that's consistent with the change. People like Stephen Hawking have argued that the time travel pardoxes suggest that time travel is logically impossible. I'm less sure about that. The time-travel paradoxes aren't necessarily logical contradictions, exactly. The problematic situation might be better described as a causal anomaly. If you travel back into the past and kill your parents so that you never subsequently exist in the future, we could probably consistently describe that situation by saying that a person pops full-grown from out of nowhere in a time-machine, complete with false memories of a supposed future that experience will eventually show never happens. Described that way, the problem would be that 'pops out of nowhere' bit, the causal anomaly in other words. There are physical interpretations such as the alternate-universes scheme that seem to be logically consistent with that kind of thing happening.
My thoughts: The future that you go to isn't some guess that the machine made...it's not a photocopy of the present, just altered....it actually is the future. It is the same world, just with another ten years of history. Therefore, if you died before you could go back, it would affect the last ten years of history: in it's reality, you disappeared and didn't show up again until then. Just like if you went back and killed your parents; the first time you were born, if some entity attempted to come to that time to kill your parents, they obviously failed. By your existence, there is proof that it is physically impossible that they died before birthing you. When you travel back in time, just like the future, you're not going to an alternate universe, you're actually going to the past. I'm of the belief that the future is just as set as the past, in a deterministically fatalist sort of way. Do I hold fast to this? No. Just makes the most sense to me. Just like the belief that time travel will never happen. The wormhole theory of time travel (Hawking's gateway that is then put in a slower timeline via moving it at extreme speeds, then coming back to earth, having a doorway to another time) seems the most likely to me, and still cures all the paradoxes of time travel. As soon as the wormhole is created, the people of the future will start coming back through into the past. It wouldn't change the future, because the future accounts for the actions entities in the present do (even if they are from the future) if it is, in fact, the future timeline of the present. I'm rambling. The main reason I believe this is because I find it hard to believe that we can do something that creates an entire alternate universe purely because it makes sense to us. Then again, more and more, I think about the first law of thermodynamics, and how 1+(-1) = 0...how it's possible that the net total of the universe somehow equals zero, an anomaly, a distortion and variation of nothingness. Easier to believe this is all just a dream, and makes strange theories easier to believe.
Like I would point out, who's to say that there is only one universe. Okay you observe one, however was "The Big Bang" the creation point of one single universe, orl the composite of many being created at the same time?. (Since many different universes would converge their starts, any difference in placement or alignment with one another would generate the Big Bang's effect.) Any intelligence intending to utilise such universes via their manipulation would also likely assume their manipulation could be done in such a way to produce a symmetry system to make it less mathematically complex. Ideally every universe would attempt to be Identical, only when a system of bridging is applied would differences transcend their timeline and the reason for this again is to lessen the mathematical complexity. Especially if their are various goals attempting to be achieved that require linear timeline's. Don't even get me started on Laplace's Demon, or it's more modern sibling Daemon, involving an Artificial or Emulated Intelligence that can "Bridge" dimensions that we can not observe due to our "human conditioning". (It would require Transhumanism to be done)
um.."Do I hold fast to this? No. Just makes the most sense to me."Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!p) it makes sense to me that alternate realities would not exist UNTIL someone went back in time,then it would depend on which timeline you went forward on whether you would meet yourself ..(if you go back, you would have three timelines to choose from..) but then again..the correct answer is : How ever you decide it will be.
I understand your logic, and it does make sense. I used to think that that's what would happen. And who knows, right? But I just got to thinking about what "time travel" means. By definition, it's traveling to another time within my familiar space/time gig. Not to another universe entirely.
What if the time traveler visits the future, meets his older self and learns that he will return to the past and then survive until that future date. Being an obnoxious sort of individual, he returns to the past and then commits suicide, just to screw things up and create a paradox. I guess that we could say that the future that he visited 'no longer exists' (in some timeless way). If his memories of having visited it were the only evidence that it (and the older future him) 'ever' existed and his committing suicide eliminates those memories, then there might not be such a huge problem. But there may be ways to redefine that situation so that the paradox can't be swept under the rug so easily. That suggests a kind of cosmic censorship, where the only causal chains that can possibly exist in physical reality must always satisfy a condition of consistency with one another. Hawking, by ruling out the possibility of time travel a-priori because of the possibility of paradoxes, seems to suppose that such a cosmic censorship principle exists in reality. But your idea might another way to do it. We can imagine, contra-Hawking, that time travel is possible, but once in the past the time traveler finds it impossible to do anything there that damages the integrity of the single inviolate timeline, or causes any contradictons or paradoxes within it to exist. In other words, he can't perform any act that changes the way the future is inevitably destined to unfold. And that suggests the question of whether or not a time traveler could interact with the past at all. I've toyed speculatively with the sci-fi'ish idea that ufos, with their supposed big-headed "grey" occupants, might be visitors from the very distant future. That would explain their humanoid anatomy, their interest in us, and so on. But they might be prohibited by the laws of the universe from interacting with us in any way that changes how the future unfolds. So conceivably they can only observe, and maybe temporarily abduct a few people (to get DNA samples and stuff) who won't be believed or taken seriously when they subsequently report the experience. I don't really believe that's true, it probably isn't. But it's fun to speculate about the possibility. An alternative might be to deny that the future 'exists' at all, at least in any form that we would recognize as reality. Perhaps it's more like the quantum weirdness on the micro-scale expanded up to the cosmic scale, a superposition of alternative possibility states representing the various things that might happen in the future and their corresponding probabilities. In that kind of scheme, the present would be the point of collapse of a qm-style temporal wave-function, condensing reality out of a fluid and chaotic sea of possibility. In that case our existence in the present would be akin to surfing a wave of transition expanding outward from the big-bang, in which a chaotic future of superimposed possibility states becomes a fixed and crystalized past. I suspect that time travel might be impossible in this kind of scheme as well. The present moment would be physically unique and the only place that beings like us can possibly live. The future and the past wouldn't be places at all that we could travel to and exist in as we do 'now'. The future would just a collection of inconsistent possibilities, the past a frozen and rapidly fading record of events that already happened in the present. I don't necessarily believe that one either. Another speculation. It's just the familiar idea that things that happen today might have big effects in shaping the future. Imagine the possibility that a bio-hacker releases a genetically engineered plague that spreads as easily as the common cold and is designed to be 100% fatal. That would presumably have big-time implications for how future historical events unfold. The alternative universe idea just suggests that different things could conceivably happen in the present that would have similarly significant and determinative, but nevertheless inconsistent, effects on future events. We can imagine one possible future where 99.9% of humanity is wiped out by the plague, where industrial civilization collapses, and only a few small isolated agrarian communities ultimately survive. And we can imagine another possible future in which bourgeoning billions populate the earth in a huge globalized world civilization. That massive bifurcation might depend on what some pimply-faced angry and alienated adolescent does in his basement bio-hacking lab 20 years from now when recombinant DNA technology is as cheap and ubiquitous as computer technology is today. It's a familiar theme in science fiction time-travel stories to imagine time-agents traveling back from different possible futures to battle one another in trying to control events in their past that determine how the future unfolds. Each would be battling for the very existence of the world in which they grew up, in which all of their loved ones live, and so on. The only problem being, the worlds are inconsistent. If the agents fail, then their whole world and everything that they love and care about will never exist. Some very sad and poignant sci-fi novels have been written about that. Other science fiction writers (John Hogan in 'The Proteus Project', for example) adapt a many-worlds interpetation of quantum mechanics to time as well, imagining that all possible futures exist in kind of a multiverse. So changing the past once again becomes an impossibility, this time bacause everything that can happen does happen, and all that the time agents from alternate futures can ultimately do is shift themselves along different branches of an infinite tree.
I would say you have been missing for 10 years, and you would appear to your family and friends the same age the day you went missing.
