Time Travel: How Do You Think It Works?

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Permalink Reply by Mike on June 1, 2009 at 9:22pm

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Permalink Reply by Brock on June 22, 2009 at 2:25pm

I agree with that time line....

That's why if you went back in time and killed your dad, you'd still exist in that time period.

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Permalink Reply by Mike on July 13, 2009 at 1:35am

Well I'm not sure about that. This model shows that the past is dependent on the future because once your double steps out of the box it becomes your destiny to step into it 6 hours later. Having him step out means that you necessarily will enter so I can't say I agree with your idea. I think some natural force would prevent you from killing your dad.

Actually though, the way I see it, you don't have to kill your dad even. Basically any alteration in his life before he impregnates your mom would prevent you from existing. His nuts have like a billion sperm in them at any given time. And they're constantly dying or being passed and new ones being created... The odds that you are the sperm that makes it to the egg depend on so many things. Whatever he ate that day, the exact temperature, and a million other factors from the time he was born until your conception all contribute and must be met exactly in order for your sperm to have been created at all.

And then there are factors like, the exact angle and exact second, minute, hour and day at which he nails your mom. If anything in his life changes by a hair you are toast. He can still be perfectly healthy, and still bang your mom at the same exact night but if everything doesn't go exactly as it has to, a different sperm will make it to the egg instead and you will never be born. So movies like BTTF, though great movies, are total bullshit. I prefer Terminator because what it shows is that Kyle Reese was John's father in the original timeline, which signifies that there is an infinite loop of him coming back in time and conceiving John. It's not like that was his goal, that's just the natural order.

So basically what I'm saying is that, in order for time travel to work, you need a deterministic universe. You need fate and destiny. You can only travel back in time to somewhere in which during that time you appeared from the future. There is no original timeline and altered timeline. It's just one timeline and one universe that has always included time travel as a part of it. This way, when you go back in time, anything that you affect is something that you affected when it first happened so you aren't actually altering anything. Just like Kyle Reese and Sarah Connor.

So basically there is no paradox of killing your father. Because an adult version of you never killed your father in the past, you can not then go to the past and kill him. The fact that it didn't happen in the past means that you're never gonna go back in time and make it happen. Your gun would jam, or you'd find out you were adopted or your father would survive or it'd turn out that your mom cheated on the guy who you thought was your dad. Someway, somehow you'd fail.

Your existence is proof that you didn't kill your father before you were born, and that is just as true in a universe with time travel as it is in our universe. And I'm gonna stop talking out of my ass now.

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Permalink Reply by Guy Behind The Guy (Age 86) on May 31, 2009 at 1:47am

Hi Ok, so taking time travel in it's linear form would make us go back and foward in time. But what if diffrent directions takes you into an alternate reality of "what if's" We always wonder what it would be like to back and foward in time. But in life itself we always wonder "What if I made this choice and not that choice" These other directions would let see what life would have been like if you had made made choice B over choice A, and so forth.

An attempt to answer that killing your dad question. Wouldn't you you're self just drop dead there and then or vannish into thin air. Which in turn would wipe out the great feet you just accomplished by making time travel possible to begin with?

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Permalink Reply by Jon, Chicago's Mindfreak on May 31, 2009 at 2:43am

I like to think that it works something like it does in the new Star Trek film, that way it is much less confusing.

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Permalink Reply by supermanx1 on May 31, 2009 at 5:05am

it´s painful like pooping out a whole banana

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Permalink Reply by Lab Rat on May 31, 2009 at 6:23am

sideways

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Permalink Reply by supermanx1 on May 31, 2009 at 7:24am

and unpeeled

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Permalink Reply by SketchedLilly on June 1, 2009 at 1:42am

Time Travel doesn't work.

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Permalink Reply by superkavi on June 1, 2009 at 1:56am

technically we are traveling through time right now

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Permalink Reply by SketchedLilly on June 1, 2009 at 2:09am

Ah good point.


I don't know why I wrote that. Apparently I don't want people to use their imaginations today and feel the need to piss on the party.

I'm going back to my grumpy corner now. Don't mind me.

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Permalink Reply by Carlyle on June 1, 2009 at 2:43am

Traveling back in time appears to be a complete impossibility. While it is a FANTASTIC (and one of my favorite, truth be told) storytelling convention, the mechanics of it seem to be infeasible. Time doesn't actually exist in a "stream" which one can flow backwards through to another point in history. It is simply, as Bergson describes, the psychological explanation for duration. It's a complicated concept of perception of change at a rate our mind can understand and separate - that we humans then measure and parse out into blocks we can use to communicate with.

If there is any type of time travel ever, it will no doubt be future travel - the act of putting things in molecular stasis to transport someone or something to a time and bypassing the cellular degeneration of the time in between. But the notion of going back and killing your own father? Something we'll never have to wrestle with, I'm afraid.

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