Sort of similar to the Great Filter theory, but applied to time travel technology.
There was an interesting physics paper recently that suggested that time travel was possible, but you wouldn’t be able to travel to before when the machine was built. Of course, it also would require an impossibly huge amount on energy, but that’s a problem for the engineers.
Or the timeline they are from is not our timeline
Incorrect. The child support liability on multiple timelines could no longer be insured.
nah, the reason is: when you travel back in time, our galaxy, solar system and planet are in different absolute universal positions. so you end up alone in deep space and by the time the planet reaches your position the time you traveled back has passed, making it absolutely useless and life threatening.
Have you noticed the flashing light in the sky? It started last year. It gets a little brighter every night. I only used to notice it when I was out of town, but now I can see it in the city. It blinks pretty quickly, probably twice a second. Some blinks are longer than others. If you watch long enough, it repeats. Short. Short. Short. Long. Long. Long. Short. Short. Short.
Pretty sure there is no absolute universal position, everything in the universe being in motion relative to everything else as the universe expands, but that does not disprove your point anyways.
The reason it doesn’t disprove it is because the assumption “time travel works” is really just saying, if we ignore some basic rules of physics, what happens to what’s left? It’s a nonesense premise to debate what is basically nothing more than science fiction.
Could the rules we know about the universe be wrong? Absolutely! But discovering those new rules is what will answer that question. Till then, we might as well try and say Harry Potter is just quantum mechanics.
Look up Dr. Ronald L Mallett. This astrophysicist has some interesting takes on practical time travel. There’s a great interview with him by Fraser Cain of Universe Today.
You can use the cosmic microwave background as a universal reference frame. Relative to that we move at about 370 km/s, depending on the time of the year.
Now I’m hurting my head by thinking about traveling faster than 370 km/s in the opposite direction to Earth…
For reference: Voyager 1 is traveling at 17 km/s away from the sun. The Parker Solar Probe should reach 191 km/s but will be flying towards the sun.
This is a basic fact overlooked by almost every time travel sci-fi. We wouldn’t just jump into a machine and poof be in the exact same location 1,000 years ago.
It would be more like trying to land a spaceship on a planet light years away, there would have to be calculations for position and gravity. All sorts of crap before you even solve the impossible problem of turning back the clock.
Also we’d first have to figure out how to travel faster than light to even hope to break the riddle of time travel.
As fun as it is to theorize time travel would be impossibly complex and probably devastating to try.
Imagine what an object would do with all those forces behind it suddenly slamming into a object moving much slower, it would be like a time bullet that would tear apart the planet and punch a hole in space. We would likely achieve a black hole and destroy all of earth before we could see what earth looked like 1,000 years ago.
This is a basic fact overlooked by almost every time travel sci-fi. We wouldn’t just jump into a machine and poof be in the exact same location 1,000 years ago.
It would be more like trying to land a spaceship on a planet light years away, there would have to be calculations for position and gravity. All sorts of crap before you even solve the impossible problem of turning back the clock.
If the “only” reason you find the premise of traveling through time preposterous is that they didn’t do the basic research to make it work, why not just assume they did? It’s a fictional world. Just go with it.
For many I assume the device provides some kind of space-time anchor relative to itself, so when you go through the magic door it’s already attached to itself on the other end. The “itself” on the other end doesn’t need to be the whole machine, just enough molecules or whatever to lock on to. I like this idea because 1, it still leaves room for error so it isn’t perfect and 2, I can stop thinking about it and enjoy the stupid movie.
The only theory I’ve seen that really holds any water is time travel going forward by using a ftl loop.
If the Multiverse is a thing, then that timeline has happened somewhere and our future selves visited us. Ahahaha. That would be trippy.
In this Multiverse though, it looks like we become the Borg, so they would have already collected all the info they needed and thus have no need to go back in time.
maybe they don’t visit us because we never call or text
It takes more energy to go further back in time.
Everyone just assumes time travel is frictionless, but that doesn’t make sense. You want to go back ten seconds? Couple AA batteries. Want to go back an hour? Nuclear fission required. Seven days into the past? Microwave electronic resonance craft. A year? Forget about it.
Seven days into the past? Microwave electronic resonance craft
I feel like that’s a reference to a supremely underrated and long forgotten television show…
also because it is genuinely impossible to move faster than light as matter, let alone survive it
All those random scraps of metal you find lying are just the end result of someone trying to travel back in time and the time machine not surviving
That’s why you make the space move around you instead.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive
That’s not related to time travel though, but that’s a link to an actual irl concept of a warp engine.
that’s so cool
Or they’re the things 99% of people are calling ‘aliens.’
Why an interstellar species would travel light years to come to this pale blue dot in ships that don’t really interfere and look like our own just a few hundred to thousand years more advanced is kind of hand waved away.
But if those sightings are in fact accurate, it sure seems like our narcissistic species would be pretty interested in our past selves once the tech existed.
If invincible has taught me anything, it’s that the aliens are here because they want to fuck
Time travel within the same universe is not possible, it is a fun fiction which is always contradictory in some way. The only time travel possible would be the one that William Gibson uses in The Peripheral. His idea is that every time you go back in time a new parallel universe is created, and it doesn’t impact your current universe because of that.
My theory is that we’re one of the most advanced species in our galaxy, and yet we still can’t reach another solar system. The probability of intelligent life forming from unintelligent life is extremely unlikely, and we had life on Earth for a LONG time before humans evolved. Intelligent life is very difficult to form, you need the perfect conditions and perfect stressors over millions of years. Then on top of that intelligent life which can reach another solar system is even less likely.
There’s life out there thinking the same thing right now:
Time travel within the same universe is not possible
Not exactly true. Technically, paradox free time travel would theoretically be possible.
As long as the time travel follows the Novikov self-consistency principle, there’s no need for parallel universes.
Essentially the type of time travel employed in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. So you wouldn’t be able to change anything, even if you did do things — as if you did something, it had always already been done previously (before you travelled back).
It is true, don’t waste my time.
“it’s a fun fiction which is always contradictory in some way” <-- that is not true.
General relativity allows for closed time-like curves and the existence of those means time travel isn’t necessarily impossible, and if that is the case, it has to abide by the Novikov self-consistency principle.
Willfull ignorance wastes only your own time.
In that case time travel would be meaningless regardless, impossible to prove, and doesn’t matter.
Dumbledore disagrees. The type of timetravel that happens in HP: Prisoner of Azkaban is self-consistent. Same as with Rick’s timetravel in the snake episode of Rick & Morty (specifically excluding the snake time travel, which is an example of non-consistency, leading to endless paradoxes).
Now ofc having a timeturner and/or a timemachine would be the impossible part there, but again, CTC’s are technically allowed by GR.
One of my favourite theory about human evolution is the stoned ape theory. It delivers the conditions of the evolution. Apes were forced outside of the jungle and ventured into open field and had to depend on different nutrition. So they ate some mushrooms and eventually ate ones with psylocibin. Small amounts increase your eyesight - so you can hunt better, bigger amounts are very sexuall arrousing - so more reproduction :)
Nah we’ve had them. We just lock them in mental hospitals.
Just tryna find the 12 monkeys bruv
Oops innit
Or they know better than to visit the violent primitives.
Or it’s because we don’t have time machines yet. It’s like making a phone call when you have the only phone in existence.
Exactly. We can still only send a single gel banana back in time until we invent proper time machines.
Imagine creating the first functional time machine only to have a shitton of time travelling tourists appear in it the second you turn it on
I believe the only viable timeline is the one where time travel is never invented because if you create the machine to go back to prevent something happening then there is no need to create the time machine.
Which yes is an actual paradox
Unless the time machines end up being restricted in travel only to the times after they’re built. Which would resolve the paradox
Ex: The movie Primer. A good time-travel idea in a bad movie.
A great movie.
Basically everytime you go back it will make changes to the future in such way you don’t exist thus the time machine by its very nature can never be discovered. Everyone that does immediately erases their future self from existence.
That’s why the reason for inventing the time machine is “just in case”
If you were a future historian with a time machine doing research for your doctoral dissertation, you’d probably prioritize visiting the most poorly-documented eras first—the Information Age would be at the very bottom of your list.
Future historians could have infinite time. We could get grad students a thousand years after time travel is invented. Of course, they could be sneaky.
