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Is Time Travel Possible?
I am fully aware that there is no possibility of time travel anytime in the near future and wondering whether it is actually possible given the right technology to travel through time and break barriers which previously have been thought unbreakable, as barriers have been broken before. I understand the stupidity of my question and highly doubt it is possible but part of me still really hopes it is because it would be a huge step for technology and us as people.
7 Answers
- Gary BLv 71 decade ago
"Time Travel" like in the Scienec Fiction movies is NOT possible -- period. There is no reason to discuss it, as this has been proven MANY times.
However, It WOULD be possible, under just the right conditions, for a person (or group of people) to go FORWARD in time, but NOT in an instantaneous manner, and they would NOT be able to return to their "normal" time.
This would happen >IF< people could move at a speed that was a significant portion of the Speed of Light -- like, say 75%. This is called Relativistic Speeds. At these speeds time seems to SLOW DOWN inside the vehicle. Therefore, if someone left earth for, say 10 years, trqaveling at 75% the speed of light, then turned around and came back (traveling another 10 years) they would be only 20 years older, but the Earth migh be say, 10,000 years older!
but traveling BACKWARDS is NOT possible. these people would find all of their friends long dead, and probably find out that they themselves had been forgotten. In fact, they might return to find that there is no civilization left on earth, or even that the sun had burned out and completely destroyed the earth.
AND -- all of this assume we could travel at 75% the speed of light. that would take a HUGE jump in technology, as current rocket power comes no where close to those speeds! The power needed would be almost unobtainable, like the total power output of a small sun just to make the ship travel.
Thus, even this kind of one-way time travel is NOT possible due to the unreasonable power requirements.
- FaessonLv 71 decade ago
It is the single most unlikely premise from science fiction to ever become real. That said... it just MIGHT work someday. Probably in your lifetime, some particle physicist will either find a new particle that exhibits suspicious "disappearances", which can best be explained by its passing <------ along the time-line which we usually go ----->
If the particle doesn't show up BEFORE the experiment, this could mean that the concept of parallel Universes are accessible to time-traveling particles. Could this mean some future HG Wells devotee might build a time machine? Not very likely... but the answer isn't 100% no anymore.
- PfoLv 71 decade ago
Yes, it is. You're doing it right now at a rate of 1 second per second.
As you travel faster, time slows down. There is a Russian Cosmonaut who has spent so much time in orbit that he has experienced 1 extra second of living compared to us on Earth. As you get to about 99% of the speed of light, time slows down for you significantly. If you spent years travelling at that speed, you would essentially travel to the future. According to science, if you can travel faster than the speed of light then time reversees, but the speed of light is a speed barrier that can't be crossed.
Time travel is NOT like pressing fast forward or rewind on a VCR tape. Time is not linear, there is not a future waiting for you and the past is not certain. It's hard to describe, but you can't go into the past, change events, and then come back to this time.
It would be neat, but I don't see a practical use for it.
- ?Lv 51 decade ago
Well there are certain ways.
For one, if we could invent a craft that could withstand the energy output of a black hole (which is impossible no matter how advanced we are) then theoretically, we could emerge through a white hole in another part of Space and Time.
Another is that if at the speed of light, time stops moving, then perhaps moving FASTER than the speed of light means that you move back in time because moving slower than the speed of light means moving forward in time. However, faster than light travel is impossible because humans and just about everything (except xrays and photon particles and such) have mass, and matter particles are always bradyons (slower than light). The large hadron collider actually tried to accelerate Hadrons (protons) to speed of light and remember that protons weigh something much closer to -1 than 0, and they only got to 99.9999% of the speed of light - we need to be able to move faster.
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- grayureLv 71 decade ago
There are several scenarios which seem to imply that backwards time travel is possible, though it appears to involve paradoxes.
- Anonymous1 decade ago
one thing which is probably 100% impossible it's so hard to imagine
i heard if you go in space and go so fast you can bend time or something?