# Time Travel



## Celebthôl (Oct 14, 2004)

I've been fascinated by this topic for aaaaaaaaages now, so lets discuss!

What would be effects, would things you did in the past whilst time traveling change? etc...


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## Astaldo (Oct 14, 2004)

I would like to travel in the past. Definetely I would go In Middle-earth and stay there forever. I would chose the beggining of the Third Age I think.


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## e.Blackstar (Oct 14, 2004)

How delightful, pipin...  however, please don't ever kill yourself, we like you! 

Anyway...I would want to...er, lessee...well, go several places. Such as medieval Europe, THE FUTURE!!!!  , and Queen Elizabeth I's reign.


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## Gothmog (Oct 15, 2004)

This thread seems to be wandering very quickly from the question posed by Celebthôl. The question has to do with the effects traveling through time can have.

The answers would depend on which theory you think is the more likely to be true.

1. That by traveling into the past you can alter what has happened and therefore cause a change in what will be in the future.

2. That by traveling into the past you were already there anyway and your actions are part of what has already happened and therefore you cannot change anything.


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## Walter (Oct 15, 2004)

> The answers would depend on which theory you think is the more likely to be true.
> 
> 1. That by traveling into the past you can alter what has happened and therefore cause a change in what will be in the future.
> 
> 2. That by traveling into the past you were already there anyway and your actions are part of what has already happened and therefore you cannot change anything.


And as soon as this issue is settled we could even move on to the examination how some great authors like H.G. Wells or a certain J.R.R. Tolkein (who?) dealt with that issue...


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## Arvedui (Oct 15, 2004)

Walter said:


> And as soon as this issue is settled we could even move on to the examination how some great authors like H.G. Wells or a certain J.R.R. Tolkein (who?) dealt with that issue...


Tolkein?  

To the topic:
An interesting book that deals with the effects of time-travel as Gothmog described in his theory no 1, is Stephen Fry's _"Making History"_ (Yes, the same Stephen Fry that played General Melchett in the "Blackadder goes forth"-series.)
This is a story about how a man travels back in time to get rid of Hitler, just to realize that another and more competent (military-wise) person came forth as Der Führer. I think this stands to show that altering the course of one person has little effect on the development of the 'larger picture.'

Would it be possible to change the course of action? (I.e. which of theory 1 and 2 is probably most right) I tend to lean more towards the first option.


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## Walter (Oct 15, 2004)

Arvedui said:


> Tolkein?
> 
> To the topic:...



But dear Sir, we've never strayed from the topic... 



> My name is TOLKIEN (not -kein). It is a German name (from Saxony), an anglicization of Tollkiehn, i.e. tollkühn.



Well, now we did... 

Back to the topic: 

Tolkien gave some serious thought to the issue of time-travelling, as can be gathered from the fragments of his two time travel stories. Moreover, in her book _A Question of Time: J.R.R. Tolkien's Road to Faërie_ Prof. Verlyn Flieger makes the case that J.W. Dunne's book _An Experiment with Time_ had not only been discussed among the Inklings, but also claims that some of Tolkien's drawings on the manuscripts, when he was working on the Lorien chapter, were influenced by Dunne's considerations.


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## Celebthôl (Oct 15, 2004)

Gothmog said:


> This thread seems to be wandering very quickly from the question posed by Celebthôl. The question has to do with the effects traveling through time can have.
> 
> The answers would depend on which theory you think is the more likely to be true.
> 
> ...



Thats exactly where I wanted this to head  Thanx!

Anyway, to the point, as I see it, 2 is more likely, heres why:

Say you travel back in time to stop something from happening - Hitler for example - the fact that you DID go back in time changes the course of the future, in that, if you removed Hitler, then in the future, nothing prompts you to go back in time to remove him, as he was never there. At this point however, i'm not quite sure what happens...
Also, if you were to go back in time to remove him, then during his time, you would be there and would have succeeded (sp), therefore, we wouldn't be using him as an example he wouldnt have done what he did in our past.

Confusing stuff!


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## Walter (Oct 15, 2004)

Next, Thol, ponder about the effects of you killing your grandfather before your father was born....


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## Celebthôl (Oct 15, 2004)

LOL! Exactly! Because would i really have done it? As if he didnt exist, how do I to do that? , oooh such a mind-splitter!


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## Gothmog (Oct 15, 2004)

This reminds me of a SF story I read some time ago. Going from memory:

A girl is raised in an orphanage, at about sixteen years old she meets a man who she becomes friendly with. She then gets pregnant and the man is not seen again. When she is due to give birth it is found out that she has both male and female reproductive organs but the female ones are not mature enough to survive the birth therefore they are removed and the male ones allowed to mature. Meanwhile the baby is taken by a man claiming to be the father. Some years later, this man who was once a woman is given the chance to travel back in time to find the man who got her pregnant. When he gets to the time, he finds the girl he once was and befriends her and gets her pregnant and then disappears! He then takes the baby from the hospital and places it in an orphanage where it grows up into the Sixteen year old girl we started with.

So we end up with a man travelling back in time to get himself pregnant to give birth to himself.

I wonder how that would fit into either of the theories?

And just where s/he came from?


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## Celebthôl (Oct 15, 2004)

Appart from being slightly morbid, thats very interesting!
How did the baby grow into the 16 year old girl we started with though? I mean, wasn't she alive already and so we have a whole new baby, not the same one?
However, I think that that sort of time travel would work, as the motive never changes, as you aren't removing anything from the past, so the incentive is still there.


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## Gothmog (Oct 15, 2004)

Sorry. I was writing that out from memory and forgot to mention that the baby was taken on a time-trip of sixteen years into the past to the orphanage.

But the question is. Since this person is The Mother, The Father, And the Child. Where exactly did S/He come from Who was the Grandfather/Grandmother?


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## Celebthôl (Oct 16, 2004)

Oooh! I get it!

Its the chicken and the egg scenario!
Its a constant loop of the same time frame.
As I see it, it's an impossible scenario, there HAS to be other people involved. It's a confusing scenario to work out, because of the loop, but people do not just spring out of the ground and start a loop. Although I may be wrong.


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## Saucy (Oct 22, 2004)

you see future time travel is actually possibly possible if humans could figure out away to go faster then time itself. that is if the theory that time is already set, and we just go through the motions of life.


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## Astaldo (Oct 22, 2004)

I think I read somewhere that if there is a person who lives in the Earth and 
you have another one that is of the same age, his twin brother for example, in outer space the guys who is not on the Earth lives more. Maybe this have something to do with time travel but I'm not sure. Maybe it's very stoopid.


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## Celebthôl (Oct 22, 2004)

I heard that too, saw it on telly recently, it has something to do with time not actually existing I think, and that if you travel at light-speed, say to a star, you get there in a year (a light-year as you are travelling at the speed of light) then you would have only ages a year, yet, it could have been 10 years on earth or something...
But actual time travel into the future, i.e. getting into a time machine and just moving through time without ageing a day is impossible i believe, as the actual future has not happened yet. Don't quote me on this though as im not concrete on it.


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## Aiwendil2 (Oct 22, 2004)

What you two are thinking of is special relativistic time dilation.

One of the claims made by special relativity is that the relative rates of events occurring in two different systems depends on the relative velocity of the two systems. Essentially, if person A remains stationary and person B is moving relative to person A, then from person A's point of view, time will appear to be passing more slowly for person B. This effect is negligible unless the relative velocity is extremely fast - it must be a significant fraction of "c", the speed of light.

For example, if a person goes into space and spends (from his perspective) a year travelling at 99 percent the speed of light, on returning to Earth he or she will find that a little over seven years have passed there. If the person were, say, 30 at the outset and had a twin that stayed on Earth, then when the trip was over the traveller would be 31 but the twin would be 37.

This effect, it can be easily seen, could be used for one way "time travel" into the future, provided you had tremendous amounts of energy at your disposal so that you could get very close to the speed of light. The same one year trip would take you, by my calculation, about 22 years into the future at 99.9 percent of c, 70 years at 99.99 percent, 224 years at 99.999 percent, 707 years at 99.9999 percent . . . 

If you want to do the calculation yourself, the ratio (often called gamma) is simply 1/(square root[1-(v/c)^2]) where v is the velocity and c is the speed of light.

You may wonder what happens if v actually equals c. Then the denominator goes to zero and the ratio becomes infinite - i.e. in the time it takes for _any miniscule amount of time at all_ to pass for the traveller, an _infinite_ amount of time will pass for the rest of the universe. This somewhat bizarre result is actually true for photons (i.e. light), which travel (by definition) at c. But it can never happen to any object with mass. The energy of an object in special relativity is E = (gamma)mc^2 where m is the mass - so to get to v = c (i.e. gamma = infinity) would require infinite energy.

Some clever people once realized, though, that for an object with speed v _greater_ than c, the formula does _not_ require an infinite amount of energy. Now, no ordinary object could ever get to such a speed, since it would have to accelerate to that speed, passing v=c at some point, which it cannot do. But there's nothing to forbid an object simply _starting_ at a speed greater than c, just as we all "start" at speed less than c. Such objects would in fact travel backwards through time. Particles like this have been named "tachyons", but unfortunately decades of searching for such entities have turned up nothing.


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## e.Blackstar (Oct 22, 2004)

wow...that was confusing. 

My sister got four episodes from different Star Trek serieses that were all about time travel...including one where some people's rescue attempt was what caused the catastrophe that made a rescue needed in the first place.


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## Astaldo (Oct 23, 2004)

Actually time travel, especially in the past, can be really disastrous. Imagine what would happen if someone changed something in the past. It's a little hard to understand it but just imagine...


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## Celebthôl (Oct 24, 2004)

Hehe, i remember a spacific Simpsons episode where Homer did something back in time and ended up without doughnuts!!!  but what he didnt realise is that it rained them!  hehe!


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