Time Travel/ Results

[marshallfever]

Re: Time Travel/ Results

This is pretty much how I feel when this problem comes up in stories.

The future that exists exists because the time traveler traveled from the future to the past and back to the future.

Confusing? Let's take the manga story the OP talked about with the barren wasteland. The characters could be returning to a barren wasteland even after changing events because it's not those events that cause the barren wasteland. They haven't gotten to the action that created the result.

And then when that's all said and done, they really didn't change a thing because the future already included someone traveling to it and changing the past so that the future would be different.

This is exactly the logic i had reading this manga as well as watching any movies with time travel in it. This has summed up exactly what i wanted to say perfectly. Good Job

Taken from another forum:

Fail because.

Time travel is possible.

We are traveling through time as we speak.

The only way to NOT time travel would be to be frozen in time. Even then, from the point of reference of somebody who was not frozen in time, you would still be traveling in time.

So you see, the truth is that the trouble with time travel is not that you can't do it. But rather than you can't stop it (yet) - and so by extension you can't control it. (yet)

To answer the OP's questions.
Here is how it works:

1) You can travel into the future in your own reality by changing your point of reference. You can accomplish this "easily" by moving very quickly.

When you do this you can affect the future of other points of reference in real time. Example, as you make changes to the future you have traveled to, those changes will affect others as they "catch up" to you. Of course they will never "catch up" with you because time is constant for both you and them. The result is you can continuously weave changes into their future in real time.

You can also travel into the past in your own reality, also by moving very quickly. (changing your point of reference)

As described above, you can move into the future and affect changes, then travel (quickly) back to a point of reference that will be affected by the changes you just made. However, in order to make this truly possible you need to break the speed of light. Folding space is the only way this is possible. There are some logical ways around this working within the confines of the speed of light.

For example, let us say you change your point of reference by traveling at or near the speed of light. You plant a bomb at a new location (point of reference) which will go off in 1,000 years. You then return to your original point of reference at or near the speed or light. You will then witness the explosion 1,000 years + the time it takes for the light of the explosion to travel to your original point of reference (location). This is different from traveling to the future and planting the bomb and staying there for 1,000 years to witness the explosion. Thus you have both affected the future and returned to the past to witness it.

But since you had to travel back at or near the speed of light, the variance you will create will be very slight. (Difference between your speed and the actual speed of light)

Thus, folding space is the only "real" way to accomplishing this.

2) All other forms you described are not actual time travel, but rather inter-dimensional time travel. This is the act of traveling to a different time in a different dimension, and is not the same as time travel in your own dimension.

Inter-dimensional time travel allows for everything you describe EXCEPT for Back to the Future which is all wrong.

Everything else is simply the act of jumping to another time in another dimension and making changes.

Back to the Future however is wrong on many levels. In the movie, what Marty is doing is called intra-dimensional time travel.

As apposed to inter-dimensional. Basically, instead of moving between dimensions, he is moving within his own.

Once Marty jumps in to the past of his own dimension he is then out of phase with his own dimension. This means he ceases to exist in his own time (he disappears along with the car, that part was correct) and then appears in he past of his own dimension.

Whether or not he bonks his own mother and causes himself not to be born will not cause him to disappear because he ceased to exist in his own dimension the moment he went back in time. Marty destroyed his future the moment he traveled to his own past. This mean none of his life will ever happen anyway (in the same way) since the result of intra-dimensional travel is that your dimension is retroactively destroyed up to the point where you appear in your past and a new future replaces it.

To visualize this think of a string that represents time in your dimension. One end is the beginning and the other end is current / real time. If you jump back to the middle of the string then what you are doing is taking a pair of scissors and cutting the string in half. You then need to take a new bit of string and attach them together because your future is now different.

You could then travel back to the future but as you might expect it would not be the same. So in essence the movie gets that start and end correct but everything in between is potted with mistakes.

This guy went deep

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[marshallfever]

Re: Time Travel/ Results

Talking to a insightful friend of mine, he explained a good amount on this:

is if you think of time and space as a fabric
if time and space are similar to a fabric
then it should be possible to fold that fabric over
to reach another point in time or space
however this would require moving at the speed of light, but
it is not actually possible to move at the speed of light
because in order to do so
you must have infinite mass
which is impossible

Sry for how i posted it, but i just tried to copy and paste a bit of what he said.