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This story is Rated: EVERYONE
There has always been an allure to Time Travel, hasn't there ?
And who wouldn't be ? With the ability to travel back in time to correct the mistakes that we made, or to leave our world, in all of the pain and misery we have now, with the ability to travel into the future, and the hope of a brighter tomorrow.
Yet, in all of this, there are scientific and theoretical concerns involving time travel.
The classic conundrum being of course, if you travel to the past and shoot your grandfather, will you cease to exist ?
While I am no scientist and I believe my Dad was in his field of employ and interest, we may not solve precisely how it is possible to time travel. But I did want to cover elements on how him and I discussed the possibilities and what CANNOT and WILL NOT take place in time travel.
Almost every single theory of time travel holds the belief that if you travel to the past or the future, you can meet yourself. This is seen in Robert and Bob's, "Back To The Future" series, and in the TV episodes of Doctor Who.
While in one episode Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart,
a military friend of the Doctor's, did in fact meet himself through a
time paradox and they touched hands in marvel and confusion, and there
was a singularity that created an almighty explosion, I still don't
think it's possible to meet oneself.
There
are really only 3 stories I have read and seen I can think of that seem to
address time travel differently and likely correctly from the standard, "it is possible to meet yourself."
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The first of which is a novel, one I am very fond of highly recommend for reading called, "Thrice Upon A Time."
The premise is an interesting and simple one. You have a computer that can send 6-character messages into the past, say 2-3 minutes, and no more than this. This being conducted by sending messages through what is called TAU waves, which are microscopic particles that travel through time.
Murdock and company are invited to see a demonstration of this. Suddenly a message appears in the machine and outputs with no input from the computer or user !
Printed out is, "CAREFL" and "JAR" and a moment later, "BROKEN"
What a strange message to receive. One of the guests watching this suddenly realizes that his arm is perched directly near a jar in the laboratory. He very carefully moves his arm away and - the jar does not break.
Now, here is the paradox. If 2-minutes into the future a message was sent into the past that, "Careful - Jar broken." then =IF= that jar is somehow saved from being broken NOW, what happens to the people who sent the message from the future ?
Here it gets a little tricky and scary. They cannot possibly exist. You have changed the past thereby altering the future. Their future said the jar is broken, but clearly it is not NOW. The people who sent the message can now not possibly be there.
They cease to exist.
Later in the novel the computer is improved upon and longer messages can be sent years into the past. There is a disaster occurring on the Earth so Murdock sends a lengthy warning, several years into the past, with the full understanding that once this message is sent, he can no longer exist as it will directly and immediately affect him - and everyone - for the future.
These are some of curiosities one faces when confronting time travel.
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The 2nd story I want to mention was made into a full-length movie called, "The Langoliers." A plane full of people travels into a dimensional warp and, suddenly radio contact from landing base is cut off. Several people who were on the plane vanish without a trace. While the people are panicked eventually they land at the airport.
They start to investigate when they all sense something. The air is stale. The colors of everything seem kind of drab and gray. And more unusual still, there is no-one at the airport to meet them. They toss back and forth ideas on why this would be the case.
Eventually they get some food and drink and find it is flat and tasteless. Eventually through a series of experiments and hypotheses, they finally determine, they are locked, back in time, perhaps several minutes behind real time.
And then they are set upon by these strange mouthed creatures called Langoliers, and they are EATING this time, like custodians cleaning the halls. The past is to be removed to make room for the present. They escape in the plane they landed in.
Eventually they make their way back to the present, by traveling back through the dimensional gate and -waiting- for the present to catch up to them, which it does, and the story ends.
So it's important to realize that even if the mechanics of time-travel are somehow worked out, there is the very real possibility of annihilating the universe or forever altering the present by doing so.
To reflect on this 2nd story, this was seen in an especially insightful episode of Star Trek, the original series, with William Shatner as Kirk in an episode called, "The City On The Edge Of Forever." where they come across this large dimension gate which addresses itself verbally as, "The Guardian Of Forever."
Dr. McCoy was accidentally injected with a full dose of Cordrazine and he becomes maniacal and paranoid. He beams down to the surface and before the crew can catch him, he runs through the gate.
Suddenly the Enterprise with whom they were in contact earlier, vanishes. Dr. McCoy did SOMETHING in the past to forever alter their current time. Later they find out that back in the early 19th century, Edith Keeler, a beautiful young woman started an important pacifist movement for world peace.
They travel back in time to find her, and while Kirk knows that Edith is pivotal to
somehow changing their past, he doesn't know how.
When he later finds out she
must die in order to set things right with the timelines, he stops Dr.
McCoy insaving her from a tragic and fatal auto accident where she is hit in the street crossing it.
Which is especially difficult for Kirk as he was falling in love with her.
She had to die because, according to Spock's research using his tricorder, her pacifist movement delayed the U.S. from
entering World War 2. Therefore, Germany did not lose the war, they won it, and
thereafter shortly conquered the world. And Kirk's Starship Enterprise was never made.
Edith Keeler HAD to die in order to return time to it's regular flow.
A beautiful and bittersweet story to be sure, but once again pointing out the consequences of altering the past with the very real possibility of destroying your future.
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The third example of consequence was made into a movie and was called, "The Sound Of Thunder."
In this story, time travel was not only possible, it was used entirely for recreation to high-paying citizens. The premise, to travel a million years into the past where you cannot alter anything. Walk on a particular path generated by energy so as not to disrupt the past and seconds before a dinosaur sinks into a tar pit, you get to shoot at it and kill it only moments before.
Much like a futuristic version of paintball, yet lethal. What is not known later, however, is someone accidentally brings back a butterfly stuck on his boot into the future. The repercussions are serious indeed.
Time waves rippled across the Earth. Normally spelled words now seem garbled. As more time passes, people start to turn violent and primitive, bringing what is once a peaceful futuristic society into chaos. Eventually giant insects and other items from Earth's distant past start to roam, and in the final wave, all humans are converted to sub-human types.
The woman scientist who sends a soldier back in time to return the butterfly turns herself into a strange form, unable to even work the controls for his return. He is, however, ultimately successful, and all of time is returned back to normal, with a warning never to tamper with the past again.
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Now we come back to what me and my Dad have talked in length about.
While it's a fanciful notion to be able to meet oneself by traveling to the past or future, it doesn't seem entirely likely, there are too many logical elements that seem to implode the probability on this. It's one me
and my Dad dismissed a long time ago. In fact, the more we explored the
possibility of real time travel, the more frightening the answers
became for us.
For
instance, working out on paper for several hours, and many good cups of coffee later into the evening, we determined one
possibility is that if you do travel into the past, there will be an
infinite number of yourselves at that point, bleeding and drowning out
the Earth's population, the universe. The universe would be you.
This
determined by in traveling to the past from the future, for you to
exist in the past must mean that you have already and successfully
traveled into the past from the future. so it is like two mirrors facing
each other as they span endlessly into infinity.
The
other, traveling to the future has an alternative yet equally scary prospect. You would
cease to exist. This determined by in order for you to exist in the
future would be an impossibility since you are removed from the past and
thereby cannot meet your own existence in the future.
A further theory is that when you travel to the past or future, there is no universe explosion or implosion as reality shapes itself to fit the change. Meaning of course if you travel to the past, you can never return to a known present, or if you travel to the future, once again, you can never travel back to your own present.
This seen by so much as altering a single molecule in the air through time travel has repercussions echoed all across reality. While you could travel to the past, it would not be your past and you and none of your influence or relatives would even be in it. And if you traveled to the future, it would definitely not be your future, and anything you did in the world then would also not be in it.
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Even if you go with the simple notion that if you travel into the past or the future, and the 'you' is removed to be replaced with a new 'you' who arrives, while this is certainly a safer premise for the traveler and the time zone entered, it is altogether unlikely as it would require a belief that there must be an intelligence to the universe to handle the reshaping of reality.
A kind of eternal gatekeeper that would never sleep and always be aware of time travelers throughout the universe and prevent their existence from blowing up reality. And of course this is even less likely than some of the theories before this.
So where does this leave time travel today
? Still being theorized, thought about, conjectured, and conversed.
It's likely just as well we haven't solved the riddle of time travel as
should we ever be able to get it correctly, we may find our entire existence wiped out, like the snap of a finger, from something so simple and miniscule it is unavoidable.
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Another condition that is not easily considered is the rotation of the Earth. The Earth as we know rotates around the sun. If you are to have a machine that can travel into the past or into the future, is it not possible that when you 'arrive' you would appear out in empty space ?
So even with the complexities involved in time travel, the machine would also have to take into account the exact location of where the Earth would be at that time in the galaxy, and it's not a pixel-perfect elliptical orbit either.
Time travel now seems more and more improbable when you take into account the cold hard facts surrounding even the premise of it.
But, time travel can be done successfully, if in theory. If you take an object and have it start to approach the speed of light, time will slow down for it. But - at the same token, the mass of it increases exponentially. E = mc�™. So more and more energy is needed to have that same object approach the speed of light.
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So, where does this leave time travel ?
I
think a backseat is needed on any ideas of this for now and
we should focus even on the 'simple' concept of teleportation. When we can
successfully accomplish this, I think the
equation to time travel will be revealed in part in what
we have discovered with transporting matter between two points.
And even teleportation alone has scientific anomolies not covered in this text, including dichotomy matter occupying the same space at the same time.
And EVEN =IF= these problems are somehow overcome, then - just then, it just might be possible to consider time travel.
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So what can you do to alter your timeline now ? As for the past, it is the past, and if only to maintain sanity in an insane world we should at least entertain the notion that it cannot be changed. The future, however, can be whatever you want it to be, and this will require some work on your part.
If you want to have a positive future for you and your family, then you need to start building good paths in the present NOW. This will ensure by the time you or they arrive, great steps and strides would have already been made to guarantee a safe landing and happy future existence for you and your own.
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