I don't ever envision myself time traveling as an object but sometimes in essence. By that I mean, what if I were to able to re-live my life from birth (scary thought) with the knowledge I've acquired in this lifetime? Or what if I was reincarnated as another being in the future with the same mind? It's absurdly pointless but I find myself doing it.

 

I've thought about that as well.
What if I could relive my life knowing all the things I know now. Would I do everything relatively the same, or would I make some dramatic changes? There are things I would definitely do differently. How would those changes affect my life?

And then my head starts hurting and I have to stop thinking about time travel.

 

Time travel has always been one of my favorite topics. Few things stimulate my mind more than causality, and time travel adds loops to it. :laughing:

 

I'm a bit drunk right now, and typing without typos is a real pain in the arse all of a sudden.

Yes, I do. As a child, I used to spend hours daydreaming about going back in time "to see what it was like", or visit the future me, and I still do now. Kind of nice to know I'm not the only one daydreaming about these things.

 

The concept of time travel absolutely throws me off. it reminds me of a theory of infinite universes (possibilites). if you were to go into a time machine and travel back, how would the people around you continue on with their lives? would they never have existed? but you just saw them exist moments ago in your own era. what does that make them? and are you in the same universe as the one you just "left?" or a different universe where u might be able to change things?

 

I'd love to be able to travel to the distant future. I find it unsettling that I'll die and have no knowledge of all of what could have happened to humanity years from now.

 

Yes, I've daydreamed countless times of time travel and the possible consequences of it. It's said that it's impossible to travel backwards in time, but I have a theory on how this may be possible, but only to observe the past. To make this short:

Find a wormhole, fly into it, pop out somewhere across the universe, then use an UBER powerful satellite or telescope to look back at the Earth, observing the light that travelled all that way, (meaning it's millions, or even billions of years old) to see the dinosaurs *.*

Stephen Hawking's A Briefer History Of Time explains a method of traveling forwards in time using an extremely fast train running on superconductive magnets. It basically runs around the world (literally), accelerating slowly until it reaches the speed that allows it to go around the Earth 7 times a second (could have been once every 7 seconds, I forget). Because of the centrifegal forces acting on the train, time goes by much faster for the people on the inside of the train than the outside. It's essentially the same theory on black holes and using their immense gravitational pull to slow down/speed up time flow. Some of the above might be wrong, I'd have to read the book again to know for sure.

Anyway, I always wondered...if time is flowing at different speeds for the people on the outside of the train, how would the power supply for the train work? The people on the train would experience 10 minutes worth of lighting from the onboard electrics, but the people on the outside would view it as years worth of power. Also, if a person onboard looks out a window, they would see everyone rushing past super fast. It makes sense to imagine the rest of the world moving extremely (relative to time) fast since the people onboard aren't ageing, yet the outsiders are. However, wouldn't that mean that the people on the outside would see the train eventually slowing down? As they live out the rest of their lives on the Earth, surely they would witness the train moving at a very slow speed?
Maybe I'm just confusing myself now

Come to think of it, it may have been a documentary I saw this on, but I think the concept was outlined in the book.

But yeah, I think about what would happen if someone were to travel back in time and change something. I remember in DragonBall Z when Trunks travelled back in time, he realised that his reality split off into another and he ended up changing a different possible universe instead, rendering the whole "go back in time and kill yourself/grandfather" paradox pretty much moot.

 

I always dreamed about time travel and what era I would go to.

Perhaps I would battle for supremacy and the principles of bushido among fierce Samurai warriors, duel with pistols in the Wild West, debate with Socrates in ancient Greece, or watch my birth and hold my mother’s hand.

I enjoy the time dilation theory based on General Relativity.

According to Wiki, the most accurate of sources, this may occur because of:

1.) The relative velocity of motion between two observers, or
2.) The difference in their distance from a gravitational mass.

A spaceship that has the capacity to travel close to the speed of light, which is roughly 300,000,000 km/s, could travel away from Earth at a slower rate of time relative to the person inside the ship, and the observer and mass and gravitation outside the ship.

The relativity of space-time from the reference point of the observer has been verified through a variety of experiments. One experiment involves a clock inside a plane and a clock on Earth. The clock inside the plane ticks at a slower rate in proportion with the speed of the vehicle, when compared to the ticking of the clock on the ground.

A spaceship that travels away from Earth at almost the speed of light could slow time down relative to the position in space-time, while those on Earth progress at the normal rate.

When a ship that flies away from Earth at a slower rate of time, supposedly returns to Earth, the person inside the ship would not have aged as much as people that lived on Earth. Your kids may be aged and gray, while you still walk around with vigor and pep.

According to Bertrand Russell, in the book, Mysticism and Logic, humans view the past and the future differently. We see the past as something we cannot change and the future as something we can change. However, the past was once a potential future and the future will soon be the past. We view the past as unchangeable but we previously viewed it as the future, but the future will soon be the unchangeable, even though it is now the changeable. We perceive time and make distinctions within it even though it is relative to the observer and the observed, based on the present and the past. It's interesting that we develop an approximation of the future that we have not experienced until it becomes a present and past.

According to Siddhartha Gautama Buddha, time seems to be a continuous present that reflects the consciousness. Linear time, a beginning or end, does not truly exist. Buddha once said: " The river is everywhere at the same time, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the current, in the ocean and in the mountains, everywhere, and that the present only exists for it, not the shadow of the past, nor the shadow of the future?"

"I reviewed my life and it was also a river, and Siddhartha the boy, Siddhartha the mature man and Siddhartha the old man were only separated by shadows, not through reality. Siddhartha's previous lives were also not in the past, and his death and his return to Brahma are not in the future. Nothing was, nothing will be, everything has reality and presence."

 

A spaceship that travels away from Earth at almost the speed of light could slow time down relative to the position in space-time, while those on Earth progress at the normal rate.

When a ship that flies away from Earth at a slower rate of time, supposedly returns to Earth, the person inside the ship would not have aged as much as people that lived on Earth. Your kids may be aged and gray, while you still walk around with vigor and pep.

I realize that this is widely accepted, but I've always thought that there was a little... "hole", so to speak, in this kind of statement. It's really rather hard for me to explain and it probably won't make any sense unless I could create an animation (might not even make sense then), but here goes nothing.

First off, a key (I'm going to try to make some sort of picture to help explain):

O = Earth
| = Light
: = Light from when you originally left Earth
/ \ = 1 day on Earth marker (alternates between / and \)
- = You
(Days on Earth will be counted as 3 lines of light, the third line being the marker)

Now, when you originally travel away from Earth at a speed close to light, let's say that you look out of a window in the back of your ship. It will seem as if time has slowed down, but really, you can't trust your eyes. Your eyes work by taking in light, but if you're travelling close to the speed of light, you'll just be moving alongside beams of light slowly passing you. This would cause you to see very little to no difference when you look at Earth.

[Day on Earth: 1 Day on Earth from your perspective: 1 ] O-
[Day on Earth: 2 Day on Earth from your perspective: 1 ] O||:-
[Day on Earth: 3 Day on Earth from your perspective: 1 ] O||\||:-
[Day on Earth: 4 Day on Earth from your perspective: 1 ] O||/||\||:-

What I'm trying to depict in that picture is simply that you're moving alongside the light.

Now, once you turn around and start heading back towards Earth near the speed of light, though, you'll see the light that was originally travelling behind you speed by you as you speed back towards Earth. I believe that time would almost appear to "fast-forward" as you travelled back to Earth until you finally make it back. This would be because instead of travelling alongside the light like before, you would now be travelling in the exact opposite direction of it causing it to speed by you as you speed by the light yourself, thus catching you up to Earth's time.

[Day on Earth: 5 Day on Earth from your perspective: 2 ] O||\||/||\-||:
[Day on Earth: 6 Day on Earth from your perspective: 4 ] O||/||\-||/||\||:
[Day on Earth: 7 Day on Earth from your perspective: 6 ] O||\-||/||\||/||\||:
[Day on Earth: 8 Day on Earth from your perspective: 8 ] O-||/||\||/||\||/||\||:

So I hope I didn't fail too much trying to explain that, though looking back at the "pictures" I made, it looks rather confusing. Regardless, the point I'm trying to make is that I believe that time is all about perspective. Take distant supernovas, for example. We know that they happened a very long time ago, but the light is just now reaching us. That doesn't mean that we're in the future or that supernova is in the past, does it? Light is our only means of deciphering time and with such a vast universe, it just isn't possible to create a single "here and now".

I'm going to stop before I begin to ramble, but I'd also like to say that I believe that time is completely set in stone, you aren't going to the future or to the past. I mean, really, it was thought up as a convenience. The idea that it's possible to manipulate something created in our minds is pretty absurd, in my opinion.

Also, one last thing. Sorry for any run-on sentences if there's any left in there, I'm horrible about those lol.

 

I tried imagining alternate pasts once or twice. But then I realized how much different everything would be. Like, seriously. I mean, there are infinite variables in one person's life that could change the entire course of history, really.
Take Beethoven. His influence created the Romantic Era, which the early Modern movement. And the Modern movement alienated a whole bunch of aspiring musicians, who turned to Blues music. And voila, Popular music was born.
Now what would happen if Beethoven hadn't heard that once piece of music which subtly defined his music? He becomes another Mozart clone, fades into the background. Just like that, history had changed dramatically. And that's just one person. What would happen if we chose a major event? My head hurts to think about it.

EDIT: I know there's a lot of generalizations in there. And the actual situation is a crapload more complex. I just chose Beethoven because it's easy for me to do a cause and effect of someone so influential.

 

It depends on how far back in time you go to make the change. Mathematically, there are more deviations possible if you went back a thousand years than if you went back just one year. The infamous "Butterfly Effect". Of course it depends on what you change, too. Personally, I think even if we had the technology to go back in time, it should never be done, it's just too dangerous. Lol, this reminds me of Blackadder when he went back in time with his time machine :crazy:

 

^ Logically sound, but there is no reason to suppose that the other timelines have to "exist". Think Schroedinger's Cat.

 

Unless you believe the Many Worlds theory (which would explain a lot of quantum stuff). While there's no proof for it, it explains a bit.
And Schrodinger's Cat was more aimed as a thought experiment to explain the weirder quantum stuff. It wouldn't work with a cat because the cat is observing itself.
/nerd

 

You think it's really possible? Interesting.:dry:

I think I might have done it, travel in time in dreams. Some quite overwhelming. Guessing if it's possible to do such a thing, maybe that's why I haven't been able to remember hardly any dreams for eons.

 

. By that i mean, what if i were to able to re-live my life from birth (scary thought) with the knowledge i've acquired in this lifetime?

get out of my head lol

 

I don't do time travel, but I put one of my characters through parallel universe travel and postulate how she would affect that parallel universe given that each one is unique. For example, she herself lived in a universe where she was a war orphan and was dumped into an alternate universe after getting caught in a funky blast from a lab (doesn't matter how she got there). She then has to travel the parallel worlds looking for her own, switching bodies with the her from that particular parallel universe, while the replaced consciousness ends up in her original body in her original world.

It's great fun, imagining her with parents, with friends, rich, poor, etc etc.

 

All the time - ever watched Heroes? Watch it!

 

Heroes was so disappointing. It spent it's whole time almost getting good. It would reach that almost peak and then start to suck once more.

 

I've always been like that. My mind is constantly in the future imagining what life will be like or I'm in the past wondering if I'd do something a different way if I could go back in time or even if I was another person what would I be like . Or even going back in time changing something or even in a different decades if I was born in the 80s would I be the same. I also think about the whole science theory of time travel
I'm never in the present now. I love travelling I've only been to a few places. But I'm constantly thinking wondering what other places of the world are like . I have list in my head of where I want to go. I think too far ahead .

 

I was curious, do any of you daydream about traveling to the past, or to the future?

I just did this tomorrow! And in all probability I probably will yesterday too.

 

Yeah, all the time.