Time travel has always been a fun subject to ponder. The concept of time travel is that a person can ignore the boundaries of time as we know them and either go into the past or into the future. The idea of time travel has and always will be popular in science fiction. Even physicists have toyed with the idea and tried to figure out the possibility of this concept. In this article I am going to discuss the facts and theories behind travelling through time. I am going to discuss it as a serious scientific topic rather than a sci-fi topic. Let’s start with travelling backwards in time into the past. There are many questions and many paradoxes, I will address a few. If you were to travel into the past (some point earlier in your own life span) you could theoretically talk to yourself from the past. Your present self could stand next to your past self when you were younger. In this scenario there would be two of you. I guess you could call it “time cloning”. With this “time cloning” paradox comes many questions and complications. If you confronted your younger self you would instantly alter the past. Your past self would be shocked and probably would make different actions in life due to knowing yourself in the future. So just by meeting your past self you would alter the past and therefore alter the present and future. Say you did meet your past self after travelling to the past; would that instantly create a memory in your head from when you experienced this when you were younger? What if you never left the past after you went back in time? Then there would be two of you. This means that two of you will end up back in the present where you initially started your time jump. There’s another theory that has been speculated about travelling into the past. What if when you make the time jump into the past, your past self disappears in order for your time travelling present self to exist in that era (basically, you can’t be two places at once [even in space-time]). This is a logical assumption but it presents another paradox. If your past self drops from existence to make space for your present self to see the past, then that alone would alter the past and present. A logical question for that would be; would your present self then drop out of existence too? It would make sense because if your past self ceased to exist that means you wouldn’t exist at the time you made the time jump. Therefore, you would have canceled your existence. Let’s say your past self does stop existing so that your present self can see the past but it didn’t cancel your present self’s existence. When and if you returned to the present; would your past self pop back into existence in the past? I don’t see why it would. Your past self has already dropped out of existence and by you going into the past and causing that to happen you have altered the past. So since your past self no longer exists, there’s no way it can be “re-created”. So in this case you have altered the present from which you travelled from. Therefore when you return to the present, there would be no records of your birth, life, death, anything because your past self “never” existed. You would exist in the physical sense of the word but there would be no records of you being alive before the time that you came back from the past. It would be as if you simply spawned out of nothing. This same situation would probably be the case if you went back in time and killed your past self. Only then there would be records of your birth, jobs, education, health, life, and death. This time when you return to the present, it would be more like coming back from the dead. However, there would be no proof of your life from the time you were murdered by yourself to the time you get back to the present. That proposes another kind of comical question… If you went back in time and killed your past self, would that be murder or suicide? What if you went back in time and your past self killed your present self? In that case you would seem to simply drop out of existence to other people that you left in the present. If your past self DID kill your present self, he/she would probably remember it when he got to the point of time jumping. In that case he might not time jump and then finish out your life (thus, in a sense, replacing you in the present). In this event, no one would know that you’re dead. This presents many other questions that are almost impossible to answer (What if the body was discovered? What are the moral issues? Can you be prosecuted?) . This scenario presents the possibility of multiple other dimensions. So as far as travelling into the past, it seems to be impossible for the most part. Science, physics, logic, and even mathematics all say that there’s no way it could happen. But in all fairness, at one point in time, the greatest scientists in the world said that the Earth was the center of the universe. Look how that panned out. What about travelling into the future? Some scientists speculate that if time travelling was ever to be a reality, travelling into the future would be much more possible then travelling into the past. But this means that once you travel into the future you wouldn’t be able to come back (because traveling into the past is impossible). So by time jumping into the future you are forever saying goodbye to everything you now know. Hypothetically, if you could return to the present from the future, there wouldn’t be the same paradoxes that there is for jumping into the past. This is because when you jump into the future, you are skipping a designated period of time where you would normally exist. So no matter how far into the future you go, when you travel to the past (the present from which you initially time jumped from) you wouldn’t end up “time cloning” yourself or canceling your existence because there is still that “space” open for your existence in this time period. Although, for the people that know you, you would suddenly have disappeared. There’s a theory about travelling into the future that says you can do whatever you want in the future. Since the future hasn’t “happened” yet, you could do whatever you want. When you get to the future, say you blow up a still standing monument like The White House. Then after you do this, in order to escape the authorities, you time jump back to the present. Since this destruction hasn’t happened yet and the world is just as you left it, then it would seem as if no harm was done… it never happened, the explosion never existed. The world would still go on and it would never happen? What if that day in the future comes and you pop out of the past and blow up The White House and pop back into the past? This would mean that it’s possible to alter the future. If this were the case, it would also mean that such things like “fate” are a reality. In other words, you cannot change certain things that are set in life’s plan. So, actually, in a sense, you can’t alter the future. This scenario, and similar scenarios, propose moral and ethical problems (but that is not the topic of this article). What if time travelling was a reality? What happens to the present time when you time jump? Does it pause or does it go on without you? If it does pause, no one would know. If it does continue without you, then how do you know what time is the correct present time to return to? Since it kept going without you, there would be a period where you didn’t exist. It would be the same as leaving a crowded room to go to the empty bathroom; no one can see you but you still are alive. To ensure you returned to the exact spot where time should/would be (assuming that time continues on in your absence), you would need to bring a clock that would be unaffected by time travel. This clock would be used to gauge the length of your absence. With a few basic calculations, you would be able to return to exactly where you belong. So as of now, time travel is nothing more than science fiction. There are millions of questions that can be presented about time travel. With the knowledge mankind has, it seems to be an impossible feat. After all, if time travel were possible, why don’t we have visitors from the past or future? It could be because the technology doesn’t exist yet, therefore no one from the past could have travelled to our time. And if it’s impossible to travel into the past then no one could travel from the future to tell us about it. Although another theory states that time travel has boundaries if it’s possible. Boundaries that limit how far forward and backward we can go through time. Maybe we aren’t close enough to the era when time travel is invented. Then if time travel ever does become a reality, that would unleash a new kind of life. I mean with crime, history, everything would change. History would constantly be re-written. Criminals would no longer flea to other countries but instead to other time periods. People could cheat at life. They could rob people from the past or future to bring money to the present. These problems could be the very reasons that time travel is impossible (a philosophical reason). Maybe it’s for our own good that it doesn’t exist. Maybe it has been invented but the inventor kept it a secret for these reasons.
Posted on: Fri, 22 Nov 2013 06:36:28 +0000
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