I was watching this movie the other day. It was about this guy who discovered that people from the future, were traveling around in Time to watch great disasters that have happened throughout history. Thinking about it later, it hit me like a ton of bricks…
Isn’t it true that we can safely conclude that there will NEVER be the possibility of Time Travel by using this logic; Where are the Time Travelers now? If in the future, someone should figure out how to travel through the dimensions of time, wouldn’t we have met some Time Travelers who have traveled back to THIS Time or some other time in the past?
That would be a slight problem but if humans don’t drastically evolve then they look like us. They could be us. They could just do their homework and act as if they’re just part of the scenery, wearing the right clothes and talking “normal” so that you may have met a time traveler and not known it.
Aaahh but they might be very good at blending in, and if they do get found out they could just kill you. There are a lot of unsolved murders.
Also they might have invented something like the gizmo in Michael Crichton’s book Timeline. They go to alternative dimensions that are like ours but at a different time.
Perhaps this scenario has occured countless times throughout the history of the space-time continuum:
Time travel is invented, probably in some cool government project. We use it to do cool stuff, like preventing plane crashes and little kids from dying.
Inevitably, the bad guys get ahold of time travel and start using it for profit and for negating the existence of key political figures, etc. Let’s assume we have some way of actually realizing these things have happened.
Everyone else gets pissed and we get caught in an inevitable game of the good guys negating the actions of the bad guys and vice versa.
Finally, someone gets really pissed and says “Screw it!”, goes back in time and does something so that time travel itself, along with the method of realizing there’s been a change in the timeline, is never invented.
I think if it was possible for someone to go back in time and change things, IN THEIR OWN REALITY (not alternate realities) eventually someone would do something that would prevent man from coming to exist. Since we are here, we must be in a reality in which time travel is never discovered.
Just because we don’t see people from the future, does not mean they aren’t here.
They could be here and we just don’t know it cause they blend in, or the government could be helping to keep it quiet.
Also, if people had travelled back in time to alter events, wouldn’t that just create an alternate reality where said even just did not happen. This would not affect us, however.
I watched a film recently which used this is a kind of plot (although it was slightly different to just travelling back in time. The only thing was, the person in the past who was altering things, did not affect the person in the future, they could still remember the old “reality” as well as the new one, but surely, if it was altered in the past, it would never have even existed. Hmm, this kind of thing could seriously mess up your mind if you think about it too hard.
You’re not the first to figure the same way. I first encountered this argument in a Russian short story about twenty years ago.
yojimbo, are you sure that’s how it was? It was an alternate dimension to which those guys were sent? Remember at the end of the book, they found the tomb of what’s-his-face, the Dutchman who stayed on in the 13th-century Dordogne – doesn’t that imply that it was the same world as ours?
This discussion reminds me of Piers Anthony’s Bearing And Hourglass, about the literal Incarnation of Time. Great book, IMHO.
Anyway, in that book, Chronos (Time) could not be perceived by most people. He could perceive times without actually being in them. Of course, his personal time also ran backwards, so he could help make changes in events before they happened. He is also, like other Incarnations, immune to paradox, luckily for him.
I know I’m explaining the fundamentals of very poorly, and simplifying it waaaay too much. Just thought I’d bring it up, as it deals with many of these concepts. I’m not saying they’re right (as many things are supernatural in the book, and not explained) but it is an interesting read.
It also dealt with what I think is a fundamental problem with time travel: the Earth moves over the course of a year, as does the solar system, as does the Milky Way. How could you travel through time and still be on earth? The book covers this, and I’m sure other theorists already have. Just an interesting conundrum.
The way I think it would have to work, if backwards time travel is possible at all, is that as soon as you show up in the past a new alternate universe splits off from the original, and any changes you make in this new universe would have no effect on the one you came from. I don’t know if you would be able to return to your original reality or not, though.
Yes. Also, this same argument has been used regarding the existence of intelligent E.T. life (i.e., if they existed, odds are that they would be here by now). Aw crud…what’s it called? The Fermi Paradox? my memory must be going (maybe I left it in the past)
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