>Yes, it is precisely zero. No human can live that long. There is zero chance that you’ll live to be a thousand or a million, or a zillion. 
You’re just saying it’s impossible because nobody lived that long.
Well, if a universe is spawned with every last possibility, you’d only be killing those instances of you which split off at the point of making that decision, which is probably 2^-(Billion Billion) percent of the total instances of yourself, right? The billion instances that broke off 8 years ago when you decided to scratch your nose or not scratch it would be unaffected.
we’ll have to agree to disagree on the whole subject.
I imagine you’re a purple unicorn!! 
I DID IT ! I DID IT ! IT WORKED !
I won the Norweigian national lotto worth 11.4 million dollars !
I’m gonna first spend this money before I try it out again ( It COULD have been just luck )
:))
(just kiddin)
Heh. Time travel’s easy. We can do it now.
Get yourself a supersonic jet and fly around the world a few times. When you land you will have transported yourself into the future because time will have passed more slowly for you than for people on the ground.
Admittedly you’ll only be a few minutes into the future but if you want to go further into the future then just wait a few years til we have better rockets. Blast yourself off into space a few thousand miles then turn round and come back. When you land, hundreds of years will have passed on earth but to you it only seemed like a couple of weeks.
The drawback to this is it’s a one-way trip. You can’t go back to the past. But still, the fact is I’ve just proved to you that time travel (to the future) is not only possible, it’s easy.
Time travel to the past is a bit more tricky but still, there’s no theoretical reason in physics why it can’t happen. The only problem with time travel to the past is that if you did it you would end up in a different universe than the one you’re in now.
The universe you’re in now only has Drabble-from-the-present in it, there’s no Drabble -from-the-future in it. If you went back in time to say hello to yourself then you would be in a universe that has both Drabbles in it, present and future. By definition this must be a different universe to the one you’re in now since the one you’re in now only has one Drabble in it.
So you can go back in time, just not to the same universe as you’re in now. You could however go to a very similar universe armed with a Sports Almanac (a la Back to the Future), walk up to yourself, pull a gun and shoot yourself. Then you would replace the old you with the new you and continue living in that other universe. No one would be any the wiser that it was a different you.
Although your new found luck in gambling may raise a few eyebrows.
See, that’s the thing. You won’t “land” anywhere. It’s not as if you try the experiment, you will be transported to another place.
I guess another way of looking at it is that in this universe I am still alive. Maybe in those other universes, the “me” there stepped off the curb a second later and was hit by a cab or fell off a fishing boat or drank himself to death. Since I missed all those pitfalls, I am here to contemplate it.
Of course, since I am unaware of the experiences of those other "me"s, what happens to them is largely irrelevant.
As for the whole “time travel” thing, well that’s another story. I am inclined to believe that going back in time and changing history isn’t possible.
Whether or not this is really “time travel” is subject to debate. When most people refer to “time travel”, they really mean a discontinuous jump from time0 to time1, whereas this is just a subjective speeding up of time for the observer in the plane.
As to time travel into the past, I won’t go into it now, but I once formulated a theory in which it was possible to go back into time, provided it was into a space-time location whose light cone, when stretched forwards, didn’t intersect with either the forward- or backwards-stretching light cone of the origin. Basically, it was a way to preserve causality, and avoid temporal paradox. Really, the idea of two-way time travel through wormholes is at least theoretically sound. I always meant to get a PhD in physics, figure out the math, and win a Nobel Prize, but I never got around to it.
Jeff
ElJeffe said:
Hey, I’ve just explained to you how you can travel hundreds of years into the future simply by means of a moderate improvement in our rocket technology and you’re nitpicking because you don’t like the method!
Jeez some people are never happy.
Perhaps My Lord would like to be conveyed into the future on a golden throne carried by a thousand virgins whilst drinking nectar and conversing with Aristotle?
I’m sorry I can’t arrange that for you just at the moment, I’ll work on it. But perhaps, in the meantime, My Lord would deign to travel to the future by the method I describe above? It may not be fancy but it gets you there.
I just tested the photon in a box experiment, but instead of a pattern of lines, I got the following message:
“You may have won…”
Personally, as a physicist, I think the Many Worlds interpretation of QM is bunk. Do I have any evidence? Nope. Is there any evidence against me? Nope. Once we get to the point of having to actually interpret QM, we’re talking metaphysics, not physics, and we run into the little issue that so long as the various interpretations all give the same results (and they do, or we’d discard the ones which disagree with experiment), there’s no way of knowing which is right.
Thus, I’d be surprised if most physicsts accept the Many Worlds interpretation as inarguable. I’d say that anyone who does accept it as inarguable has all the intellectual integrity of a goldfish. We have to accept is as a possibility, and we are equally obligated to accept it as only a possibility.
And this is why you’d never get me trying this bizarre experiment.
LOL g8rguy!!! Goldfish, yeah, I agree!!
And if you jump on a rocket ship and speed around the world in either direction you’ll just find yourself in different time zones, not ‘times’ as in time going into the future hundreds of years. You’ll just zoom through time zones in a way that will make your head spin. When you land wherever, you’ll still be in the same year, month, and possibly even day depending how long you went up for. You’ll have covered a tremendous distance, but if you go up and zoom for an hour and then land in the exact same spot you started from, you’ll find only an hour has passed by for everyone else there too.
If quantum immortality is correct, couldn’t I make a lot of money by betting people I would outlive them? Say I bet you $1000 that I will outlive you. You leave me the money in your will, so I get it if you die before me, and I do likewise. Being dead, you won’t miss the money, plus if quantum immortality is right, you should perceive the universe where you outlive me and get the money. So basically, I either get rich, or lose nothing if QI is false, and if it is true we both perceive ourselves as getting the money.
I never heard about this “quantum immortality” thing before, but as it is described in this thread, it seems a nightmare to me. If an individual only perceives the universe where he’s alive (or more exactly, if everybody perceives an universe where he’s alive…what I just wrote probably doesn’t make sense in english…just forget it…)…Anyway, it seems to me that in the overwhelming majority of these universes, you’d end up as a crippled, half-vegetative, barely alive, probably paralyzed, deaf and blind 150 + years old individual…and doomed to live forever. It doesn’t look like a very pleasant fate to me…Rather like a physicist’s hell.
Drabble, the relativity of time has been proven by loading cesium-beam clocks on two seperate aircrafts and leaving one on the ground. Then they flew them around the world in opposite directions and they all showed different times. And the time differences were the same as that predicted by physics.
Now I have a question about time travel. Since we are made up of matter, if we traveled backwards in time, wouldn’t we become anti-matter and annhilate ourselves with the surrounding matter unless the process took place in a complete vacuum?
Well, one could argue that the most PROBABLE scenario of being inmortal, isn’t that you’re an old decrepit geezer that somehow, miraculously lives to 1000 years old, always one second away from death. Rather, you would probably benefit from some future medical breakthrough that permits you to live longer, manipulating your DNA or something, and in reasonable health.
Well, there is no argument then.
Is it a possibility ? yes
Is it the only one ? no
You don’t like it. Fair enough.
Stephen Hawking likes it.
How about this:
I’ll call it the Riduculously Deluded Anthropic Principle
Quantum Immortality only works for those that believe in it.
If you don’t, then the universe doesn’t need to uphold your conscious continuity. Only those that embrace it as fact will observe their own inmortality.
Again, someone mentioned already the difference between time and actual time travel into the actual ‘future’ so to speak. One of my favorite sayings is that Motion affecting a time piece does not result in proof of time travel, only the fact that the time piece was affected and could not accurately keep time.
So in 999,999 other universes, Richard Hatch is lying dead on some South Pacific island and we’re stuck in the one universe where he’s a millionaire.
It’s times like this when I reflect on the immortal words of Edna Schrodinger: “Erwin, what have you done to my cat? He looks half-dead!”