This could fall into a couple of areas, but I’m hoping that there’s something that could be considered a definite (or as near definite as possible considering the subject matter) answer. If it were possible for us to go back in time and make a major change in history (for example: giving horses to the Native Americans a thousand or so years before Columbus arrived) would this effect be merely local (i.e. confined to the Earth) or would it be possible for aliens on another planet to detect that we’d done this?
There are no definite answers to this, just springboards for alternate world stories.
The Time Travel Defense Force would show up seconds before you go back in time and eliminate you. They are based at the beginning of time, so they cannot be erased.
Now thats a big “IF”.
I guess the best evidence that time traval is not possible is that my great-great-great-great grand son hasen’t paid me a visit yet, and that we are still don’t have a dinosaur zoo.
“IF” it is possible then we would be talking abt relativistic reality(which i don’t even know what i’m talking abt) where what affects us won’t affect our big head buds in the friendly skys.
yes.
Cite?
The aliens would only know that we had tampered with the time stream if they, too, had time travel, and had taken some sort of benchmark reading of Planet Earth 2002, so when their data suddenly started showing that Planet Earth 2002 was radically different than it oughta be, they would go back in time until they got to the point where their data started being different, and then they would know that somebody had changed something at that point, and they would check their data and they would see what was different, and there wouldn’t be anybody else to blame for bringing horses to the Americas 1,000 years earlier than they had originally been supposed to arrive, except us.
I doubt whether the aliens would buy any “they swam the Bering Strait!” explanations.
So that’s a good reason right there not to tamper with the time stream–'cause the aliens’ll find out. And they would probably be plenty P.O’ed, especially if our changing the timeflow had resulted in Kelly Clarkson not winning on American Idol.
Maybe. Isaac Asimov’s novel The End of Eternity dealt with issues like this. The “Eternals” lived outside of time and changed time in ways they thought were good. Once changes were made, every physical record in time, including people’s memories, indicated that that was the way things had always been. Only the Eternals knew that the changes had occurred.
Mild spoiler:
That is, until a non-Eternal in a far distant future developed rudimentary time theory and calculated the probability of their reality. They found it was too small to be natural. This was because of the changes the Eternals had made.
[/tongue out of cheek]
It’s so funny that you should ask, because last night an alien got very drunk and told me…
the definite truth.
Atlantis will exist in the future. It will be an artificial continent, constructed in the equatorial atlantic. According to official Atlantean dogma, it will be humanity’s finest hour.
But some will decide that Atlantis is (will be?) a monster state. They will choose exile into the past. And it will not corrupt the space time continuum, because the Atlantean records will already show that the exiles - like Aldous Huxley, like Quetzalcoatl, like Donovan had indeed lived in the past, all at the time when they could do the greatest good for the world. Indeed, children will know by the time they are 8 if they will eventually choose to live in a different era. And they will face no prejudice, for they will be seen as heros.
Then the alien went on to say that he was stopping by this era on the way to visit some pre-Columbian celts who were living in Massachussetts.
[tongue out of cheek]
I mean no disrespect to the OP; I think this question does deserve a good answer. This is the best I can do fer ya…
If the OP is asking whether or not time travel would give off some detectable signal to an alien sensor…like Temporal Flux Radiation or Phased Chroniton Particles or somesuch…we don’t know yet. We can’t build a theory without an observation.
You mean Native Americans didn’t have horses 1000 years before Columbus arrived? The horror! They must have changed it back!
Or the OP might be asking “Does a purely local change in the timelines effect the entire universe?”
My Wild-Assed Guess is that it would effect space for a distance exactly equal to how far back in time you went. For example, if you changed history 1000 years ago, it would effect all space within a 1000 light-year radius of Earth.
Actually, Lumpy you and Enola are both right as to what I’m asking. I know that there’s some question in the world of physics as to what would happen if a large gravitational body, such as a planet or star, suddenly winked out of existence. How fast would the absence of gravity from that disappearing body make itself known? (One would think that Relativity would provide a solid answer to it, but apparently, it doesn’t.) So I’m just curious as to whether theoretical physicists have looked into this and what they might have come up with. (Not that I’d understand a lot of it, I’m sure, but I could at least get the gist of it.)
But what about this:
Assuming that A: You could travel faster than the speed of light and B: live forever, and that C: you possessed a telescope with no limit to its viewing powers, could you then travel away from the earth faster than light to the point where you have passed the light that left the earth in the 15th century and actually see those horses being introduced to the New World?
Man, chew on that.
L. Ron Hubbard had something similar in his Battlefield Earth novel.
Regarding the OP, though…wouldn’t the discovery of time travel eventually destroy the concept of time altogether? In the same way that cultures clash and mix until eventually (maybe) they achieve some kind of equilibrium where all cultures become more or less the sam, wouldn’t the clash between different times produce this same effect, to the point that all times become the same eternal moment?
If we’re talking about unlimited time travel into an unlimited past and an unlimited future, I would say that at some point our time travel activities would indeed have an effect on your theoretical aliens. The first effects of a local change would not be felt, however, until there had been contact between our two worlds. The dynamics of that first contact will depend on the type worlds that our respective planets have become at that point in time, and so any changes to Earth’s past would alter how we stand at that first meeting, and thus shape the effect we have on the alien race.
But perhaps the first question you have to ask is, would anyone be aware of the change, even us? If one man travels back in time and changes one thing that forever alters the course of history, will he then return to his own time “knowing” what he had done? Everyone else around him would have been born knowing no different reality than the one that he had had a hand in creating, and I assume that would go for the aliens too.
On the other hand, if our aliens already possess the technology for time travel, perhaps they have already confined their corner of the galaxy to the eternal moment I described in my first paragraph. If you’re used to every moment being exactly the same, then perhaps any change in the fabric of time, even if normally it would not affect you until years in the future when you finally come into contact with the race that exated the change (i.e. Earthlings), would immediately cause a noticeable change.
???
Sorry, Tuckerfan, looks like I killed your thread.
:o :o :o
[sub]I was just tryin to help…honest![/sub]
It appears you have two questions: 1.) would the change affect everything and 2.) could the aliens tell?
I have no idea about the aliens detecting your altering history, but if you like the Beijing Butterfly of Chaos Theory (wherein the flapping of said butterfly’s wings could, just possibly, ultimately be the genesis of a typhoon that takes out Fiji), then yes, it could affect almost everything (but won’t necessarily), eventually. Probably by the timetable of Lumpy’s WAG.
caveat: pure WAG above.
I saw the shitty movie…is it radically different, or did you just whoosh over my head with this comment?