How to make sense of Time Travel?

[jgh7]

Time travelling forward makes perfect sense to me. One disappears for a certain amount of time, then reappears in the future.

Time travelling backwards makes no sense if it causes drastic changes to the future that would affect the time traveler's own existence or change events that would lead him to time travel to begin with. Are there any ways to reconcile this?

I guess the first thing to ask is is time travel possible (at least from a mathematical/physics based standpoint)?

If this has to be related to Religion in some way, then people can chime in on whether God can time travel or not and whether he could change the events of the past if He wanted to.

[Neatras]

Jury's still out. We'll need more information about what kind of physical events occur when objects near the speed of light. Warping space won't send you back in time, but it will cause information to reach a point faster than it otherwise physically could.

But the notion that moving really fast could cause someone to actually rewind time is... lacking in evidence. Better not to worry about it.

Seeing as the Abrahamic god is a fabrication, it has no real world effect, but I'm sure people will have no trouble attributing time travel as one of the many powers of their favorite comic book superhero. After all, it doesn't have to make sense if they believe hard enough.

[benchwarmer]

[Replying to post 1 by jgh7]

Travelling forward in time (relative to others) is certainly possible. Read up on special relativity and the time dilation effect due to gravity and relative velocity. GPS systems must take these into account in order to be accurate.

Of course the time differences are measured in micro seconds so you won't be visiting 100 years into the future by riding a satellite

Rewinding time or going into the past is not possible or has at least not been observed in any way that I'm aware of. I'm happy to be corrected. I'd love to go back and say sorry to my wife 5 seconds before every stupid thing I do

[imhereforyou]

[Replying to post 1 by jgh7]

Maybe what is called time travel isn't really about time, but where. Maybe if someone travels in time, they travel to a different universe that has its own reality.
Maybe that's why people see things that others don't think are real (ghosts, cryptids, future events, etc).

[DeMotts]

[Replying to post 4 by imhereforyou]

The idea of a god that has to rewind time is a funny one for me. I imagine it like - he gets distracted by the pizza guy and comes back to check on his game a few hundred years later and he's like ohhh man I let it get way out of control and then he has to load a quicksave.

If we're making up godly powers I nominate this one.

[Tired of the Nonsense]

Time travelling forward makes perfect sense to me. One disappears for a certain amount of time, then reappears in the future.

Time travelling backwards makes no sense if it causes drastic changes to the future that would affect the time traveler's own existence or change events that would lead him to time travel to begin with. Are there any ways to reconcile this?

I guess the first thing to ask is is time travel possible (at least from a mathematical/physics based standpoint)?

If this has to be related to Religion in some way, then people can chime in on whether God can time travel or not and whether he could change the events of the past if He wanted to.

This is perfectly accurate. Leaving the Earth's gravity and moving out into interstellar space at a rate of 90% of the speed of light or so would cause time to speed up for you, relative to everyone on earth. A very quick round trip would mean that everyone you left back on Earth would have noticeably aged. You would return in the future. A longer round trip and everyone you knew would be dead.

So there are two problems with time travel. The first problem is how to go about it. Currently our fastest space vessels have achieved speeds of about 50,000 miles an hour or so. Considerably less than the 186,000 miles a second (669,600,000 miles per hour) that is the speed of light.

The second problem is, there is absolutely no way currently known of returning to your original time if you could overcome the first problem.

[bluethread]

The second problem is, there is absolutely no way currently known of returning to your original time if you could overcome the first problem.

Presuming this is an unsolvable problem, there may be a multitude of ways to travel the other way, and it may have occurred. The only way of knowing would be for someone who disappeared in the past were to show up today and be verified to have not aged.

[Tired of the Nonsense]

The second problem is, there is absolutely no way currently known of returning to your original time if you could overcome the first problem.

Presuming this is an unsolvable problem, there may be a multitude of ways to travel the other way, and it may have occurred. The only way of knowing would be for someone who disappeared in the past were to show up today and be verified to have not aged.

Skeptic that I am, I do not hold any credence for the possibility of traveling into the past. The best theories require trying to slip through a temporary black hole. Well, good luck with that.

[Kenisaw]

The second problem is, there is absolutely no way currently known of returning to your original time if you could overcome the first problem.

Presuming this is an unsolvable problem, there may be a multitude of ways to travel the other way, and it may have occurred. The only way of knowing would be for someone who disappeared in the past were to show up today and be verified to have not aged.

Entropy makes time travel into the past impossible, at least as we currently understand things.

[bluethread]

Entropy makes time travel into the past impossible, at least as we currently understand things.

Emphasis Mine

There is the rub. Hypothetical speculation is the mother's milk of scientific discovery.