Yes, that is a flaw. But the flaw is in the stories themselves. From personal experience, I can tell you that there are actually TWO methods of time travel.
As you said. You go back in time, but not in space. So if you go back 200 years, you appear where the earth will be in 200 years, but hasn’t gotten there yet. You die. Horribly.
There is the L1D (Less-1-Dimension) method of time travel, which is used today. (Well, OK, MY today, a few hundred years upstream to you here. [Unless you’re reading this in the archives, of course]) Instead of going for a 4-dimensional rotation backtime, you leave the space coefficient out of it and do a 3-dimensional travel-back along your original timeline(space/time is “sticky” as S. Hawking XXII says). You pop out in the exact same location, but have followed the spacelike path whilst going back instead of divorcing yourself from it. And thusly, you arrive at the same location, where it WAS 200 years ago. The calculations are much simpler, too, and this is what has made it affordable to even average folk such as myself.
P.S. I know this is GQ, and could be regarded as opinion or maybe a joke in 2006, but I did clear it with C. Dexter’s great-great-great-etc. grandson and she said it was OK to post, just don’t make a habit of it.
What do you mean, “if” ? Since teleportation is no longer fantasy, how far behind can time travel be? In fact, I believe in the aforementioned teleporting action, they did rewind the clock a fraction of a nano, but I could be wrong.
I’ve been wrong, and I will be again.
While “predestination paradoxes” are not impossilbe in the sense that they don’t require a contradiction, I doubt they happen for the simple reason that the universe is lazy. Given a choice between something happening and nothing happening, it will always do nothing.
time travel is invented in your lifetime, AND it works as described above. But what you, intrepid future time traveller, forgot was that *you * are an illusion. You are merely a clever arrangement of atoms - and different atoms in the far future than you will be on 2006-02-09.
So the time travel works, but the “you” that’s waiting on February 9th never knows it. You can’t see that seemingly-random molecules around the world were suddenly joined by duplicate atoms - duplicates of the atoms that would eventually come together to form the future you.
Somebody once pointed out that time travel is inherently unstable and self-cancelling. Imagine the entire continuum of history. Now imagine that time travel is easy. Every time anyone travels in time, they alter history in some manner, great or small. So history would constantly be changing. At some point, through the random shifting through millions of possible histories, the continuum would land on a history where time travel never happened. And once it landed there, it would stop because there would never be any further time travel or any further changes to history.
I’ve always wondered about this. What’s the problem with giving our past selves the winning numbers? We’d only split the jackpot with anyone who won by chance, plus the time-travelers who chose that day to win the Lotto.
It seems to me that once time travel was invented you’d have time travellers popping up all over history, killing Hitler, saving Lincoln, and witnessing the crucifixion of Christ, among other things. Whenever you saw a huge crowd of time tourists show up, you should watch out, because something important is about to happen.
This assumes that there’s an absolute framework to the universe, an idea that modern science pooh-poohs.
Somewhere I remember reading about something similar to the OP, except it was a party somewhere (Boston?) that time travellers were encouraged to attend. I imagine it got lots of pretenders, but I doubt any genuine time travellers showed up.
I was listening to the SETI “Are We Alone?” podcast a while back, and someone suggested a way around the Fermi paradox - a form of time travel where we set up wormholes to travel from point A to B. For example, if we set up a hole in Seoul and a hole in Atlanta, we could step into the hole and travel through space in a second. Same with time - we’d set up a hole in 2006 and a hole in 2010 and travel freely between the two. Obviously, in such a case we’d be unable to travel into the past before the invention of said wormholes. (It’s a pretty old podcast, but definitely worth listening to - you can find it on iTunes and it’s free. The episode about time was titled “Out of Time,” I think.)
The OP hints at the “proof” of why time travel is impossible - if it were possible, someone would have come back and pointed this out to us by now. Since no-one has, time travel will never be invented. Others have already pointed out some of the ways round this “argument”.
Isn’t that a paradox of the “invention from nowhere”? You go into the future to steal an invention, bring it back to the past (er, present), and it turns out the person in the future you stole it from stole it from you in the first place. So nobody ever actually thought it up. This was done with a necklace (rather than an idea) in some movie that Mickey Dolenz (no kidding) directed called Time Rider or something like that.
How about the possibility of not traveling to the past, but viewing the past?
Have a type of video camera that does not need to be there originally when an event takes place. Set it up on a tripod and hit rewind and it will scan all the molecules in an area and trace their movement backwards and show images of what has happened there.
Great for solving crimes. Murder? Set up the camera and hit rewind till you see what happened. See if O.J. did it. See who shot JFK. Hit super rewind to view events through history.
