If we time-travelled and changed things, would the outcome be worse?

Text-only Version: Click HERE to see this thread with all of the graphics, features, and links.



BlackC@t
Sorry mods, I didn't know if this belongs in the GDF or the philosophy forum.

I think it would, it's like when you throw a stone into a pond, the small object creates big ripples.

Fire
I think this is to much of a hypotesys

BlackC@t
Hypotesys? that's not in my dictionary no expression

Fire
the word's prolly written incorrect
lemme see if I can find the decent spelling

Fire
hypothesis

close enough

yerssot
IF it is possible (but that's not the point of discussion here)

it has been a said a few times you still have two options left then:

1. you could try and kill your dad, grandfather, ... (or on mothers side too of course) but just when you try to pull the trigger, the mechanism fails and you can't change anything in the world anymore and everything stays the same

or

2. you can change stuff and in that case, it can be dramatic... what if you kill someone and later it looks like his great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandchild will bring worldpeace or something?

Lord Soth
It's much like the movie The Butterfly Effect. Change one thing in history, change everything today. The movie A Sound of Thunder is all about that

Cipher
I like the ripple idea, but I don't think changing a small thing would neccessarily change the world.

BlackC@t
I don't think it would change the world either, but it could change your life and the life of your loved ones.

Cipher
Yeah, it depends on what you do, I guess. Like if you saved a relative who was killed in an accident, how would things be different?

BlackC@t
Maybe during the process of saving them, you'd get seriously injured or someone else you know would end up dead. I don't really know what would happen, but psychologists say that if we time-travelled and changed something then the outcome would not be quiet what we expected.......

carnival_junkie
someone REALLY likes the butterfly effect...

but anyway. it all depends on what you changed.

eleveninches
What do you mean IF??

People from about 150 years in the future have already gone back in time and 'changed' the past.

Cipher
Wha? How do you know? Did you meet them or are you one of them?

eleveninches
I will be one of them eventually, and I recieved a message from my future self that i made in the past.

Cipher
You're going to live that long? Guess you take good care of yourself, huh?

eleveninches
Well, they could stop off on their way back through time to pick me up before i get too old big grin

eleveninches
And they went back in time thousands of years to make the local people worship them like gods and make the locals be their slaves and have pyramids built for themselves and stuff like that.

Cipher
That's true.....

They must have futuristic PDAs to keep track of where and when they need to be.

eleveninches
And then they can have all of the local woman for themselves big grinbig grinbig grin

They only have to find an area that they have proved did not contain any ancestors of the people in the modern world, and then they can do whatever they like and get away with it, as their futuristic technology will be able to cover it up. Like when they get bored, they can just move out and nuke the area, leaving no evidence of their existance there

Cipher
Nuke the area? Wouldn't that have consequences in the future?

eleveninches
not if the area was eventually submerged (because of the last ice age ending and lots of people being drowned)

Cipher
There's still radiation.....

Plus, an ice age in 150 years? Takes a little longer than that......



Unless...............

eleveninches
no, people from 150 years in the future travel back in time 12'000 years and make the natives worship them as gods.

Cipher
Hmmm.....

But why?

eleveninches
to be worshipped as gods and be able to do whatever they want without being caught. However, the time cops are hunting them down across time to put a stop to their illegal activities and their breaking of the temporal prime directive

Cipher
Ah. But how would they know? Anything that was changed would have always been that way from the future perspective.


Unless the time police are outside of time somehow........

eleveninches
no, the time police went back in time as well and are using their samurai and monk skills to infiltrate the corrupt society and they are going to assassinate the people behind it in the past, and if they fail, then they will order the nukes to kill the enemy

Cipher
Nukes will change the past, though. But how do you fit into all this?

eleveninches
I dont know yet. From my perspective, it hasn't happned. I only got told this by my future self, who left a message for me when he (I) went back in time.

ragesRemorse
assuming you could travel back in time, this would mean there would have to be atleast two timelines of existence. Changing somthing in the past could potentially completely destroy the present timeline you traveled from to reach the past.

Lets say you went back and killed hitler. The change in the present time you came from, where millions of jews and people were slaughtered could not change instantaneously. you have have 80 year old jewish people appearing out of no where. you would have all the people that died in the war appear out of no where.

Lets say also you traveled back in time and changed somthing that prevented you from being born. this would change stop you from going back in time and changing the events that stopped you from being born in the first place, so the only thing you would have done is erase yourself from existence.

Time travel is an impossible theory. The closest thing we have to seeing in the future and past is the stars

eleveninches
/\ ah, but if, as you say, there are multiple timelines, then I can go back into the past and even prevent myself from being born, but then stay in that new timeline, as I have left the previous timeline when i went back in time, and thus, it is still intact and I am able to do the same thing again in an unending temporal loop.

ragesRemorse
But as soon as you went through with the action that henders your birth You would cease to exist, in both timelines instantaneously , or all. You would never have been born, meaning you would never have had the chance to travel back in time in the first place

eleveninches
Well, my younger self would cease to exist in the new timeline, but i would still exist in it, but I had LEFT my original timeline when i went back through time, so whatever i do in the new timeline does not effect the original one.

ragesRemorse
but you would have never been born to be in the new timeline. now if your talking somthing like parallel universes or existences that would be different. Talking time travel though, if you did somthing to prevent your existence from ever occuring, then you couldnt exist in any time line, you never would have had the chance to travel back in time.

eleveninches
It's the same thing. Travelling from one timeline to another is the same as travelling between parallel universes.

Syren
eleveninches, you have an answer for everything wink

eleveninches
yes

ragesRemorse
No it's not. Parallel universes are existences existing and functioning alongside of ours. travelling through time is just going from point A to point B in our existence but different times. A parallel existence to ours would already be different than what we are living now in our existence. It would be altered eigther minutely or greatly. Two different theories, but then again, i guess we will never know untill we are able to travel through different realms of existence and leap frog through time. Theoretically speaking if possible, time travel could already be a reality in one of our parallel existences.

How hard can time travel be? I mean al you need to do is connect two wormholes. lol

Syren
If you ever manage to do it, I will personally become your slave for the rest of eternity. I have that much faith in your capabilities stick out tongue

ragesRemorse
alright, i'm going to take you up on that.

ash007
how do you know people aren't time travelling already?
We wouldn't even know

eleveninches
We clearly ARE travelling through time. We are travelling FORWARD through time at the rate of one second per second.
big grin

HarmonicFlo88
Time travel is theoretically possible. let me give you guys a link.

http://freespace.virgin.net/steve.preston/Time.html

I agree with whoever said changing something in tha past wont really hurt tha future if tha change was minimal. i really need to go back because i lost 7000 dollars worth of money. anyone know where i can get a black hole?

eleveninches
Both travelling from one timeline to the next and travelling through parallel universes are the same thing. They are both simply a method of altering reality and travelling from one state of reality and existance to another.

eleveninches
This morning it was 7.00 am.
Then I did some stuff and after a while, it suddenly became 8.00 am.

Thus, (although it took me 1 hour to do it) I travelled (forward) throgh time.

Hence, I conclude that time travel IS possible

ragesRemorse
I'm just going to say it again. Time travel and parallel existences are two totally different things and theories. Parallel Universes exist alongside of ours. Traveling through parallel existences would be totally different than traveling through time. Changing events in the past may result in changing parallel existences along with ours, but it is still two different things.

If people were travelling through time, we may not know it, unless they changed somthing in the past. If somthing was changed in the past to effect our present reality we would know it. The change would be sudden , and without warning, maybe even causing an end to our existence.

eleveninches
The way I see it is like this.

If the past WAS perfect, then why bother interfering in it.
If the past was NOT perfect, then why would you want to go back there.??

ragesRemorse
LOL...yeah, guess your right

Reborn Again
Such a literal answer. stick out tongue


We measure time by the sun and the rotation of the earth, but ARE we really moving forward or backwards? Just because the years are increaing, does this mean we REALLY are moving forward? Remember Time moved backwards to year 1 before it began to move forward again. Or did it? How do we know when Time began?

But anyway I'm getting off-topic.

eleveninches
Time began when the universe began.

ragesRemorse
which was about 13 billion years ago, atleast to NASA's calculations.

Reborn Again
Time is infinite and not always calculable.

ragesRemorse
yeah, but i think it's funny that NASA believes they know how old the Universe is. smile I highly doubt we will make it anywhere in the Universe other than the moon, but we will know how old the Universe is. lol

eleveninches
they (scientists) believe that the universe began 15000000000 years ago, and will end in about 40000000000000000000000000000000000000000 seconds time

ragesRemorse
you know, i really thgouht it would be more seconds than that.

eleveninches
I saw somewhere where it gave the estimated time to the end of the universe.

It had about 46 zeros, but im not sure if it was seconds or years.

eleveninches
i just checked and it is about 30 billion years until it ends

azza2110

Jackie Malfoy
Interesting question I think that the outcome would be worst through because changing history wracks up stuff.Just like that movie " Back to the future"
It would be great to change some history but I don't think we should even if we could.JM

neo313
i was reading about the theory of tenseless time, and basically it says that time extends in all directions, but we simply lack the ability to see into the future, even thought it is already there. as the future is constantly coming into view, it creates the illusion that time is "passing", and events are happening right that moment or something like that... i duno i thought it was interesting. the weirdest thing about it is that everything in the future has already happened, it just seems like its happening at the moment that you experience it. could someone please explain this to me?

eleveninches
yeah. events in the future HAVE already happenned (in the future), but we have just not yet been able to observe them yet.

However, another way of thinking of it is that at every point in time, the timeline diverges into however many ways that the next event can take place (or into as many different timelines as there are possible events).

ragesRemorse
The future has not yet happend, and will never happen. You are just talking about parallel existences. The theory of parallele existence was created to cover up the dasterdly mistake of having three timelines constantly occuring, which are past, present and future.

eleveninches
past present and future are different points (or directions) in the same timeline (like backwards and forwards on the same timeline), whereas each timeline is constantly diverging, and we are only on ONE of those possible timelines, as there is is a different one for each possibility that might or might not occur.

Cipher
Time travel is impossible.

But if it were, the future would probably be different every time you went there because the various possibilities.

cornponious
Well, actually, Einstein theorized that time travel IS possible. The only problem is that in order to do it, you must exceed the speed of light. And when you do that, all matter transforms to energy.

Which is kind of a bummer.

You know, E=mc^2, where E equals the energy, m is the mass that disappears, and c^2 is the square of the speed of light.

Kid's stuff.


corn

cornponious
Of course, if you DID actually manage to travel to the past, you would invariably change SOME aspect of future events.

That much is certain.

corn

BlackC@t
Yeah. Most scientists do say that the outcome would actually be worse then it was before.

Alpha Centauri
You can't control what an effect it will have or how far it will reach. I won't say it'll be worse, sure as Hell be different though.

-AC

Ytaker
I don't think they nuke it. That would cause too much radiation. They just move anyone who works out something into a mental asylum, by getting a government order from a future government.

Ytaker
If you killed your grandfather, there would be two realities, one where he was dead, one where he was alive. You'd be in the dead one, where he was always dead. It wouldn't have any affect on the alive one, except that you'd no longer be in there. That's how the theory goes, anyway.

eleveninches
Ah, but he didnt mean that NOTHING can travel faster than the speed o flight. He just meant that nothing can accellerate towards the speed of light. Therefore, things which are (and always have been) faster than the speed of light cannot decellerate to reach the speed of light.

Ytaker
Unfortunately only Quantum effects do that. My theory on how people are going to exceed light speed is that a gravity beam will be fired, bending the space in on itself, shortening the distance and time. Gravity, and negating gravity, are more useful than antigravity as far as I can see.

eleveninches
If we created a wormhole to a part of the galaxy 50'000 light years away that could see earth, then we could sent a MASSIVE telescope there which could look back at the light coming from earth, and see what was happenning on earth 50'000 years ago. Similar methods thousands of years in the future could be used by historians to solve all crimes and mysteries of the past.

Alpha Centauri
Then technically could we not use that same Quantum effects/wormhole theory in reverse to see into the future?

Wooooooooo, find out after the break.

-AC

ragesRemorse
The problem is that you need two worms hole that are formed together or come together in connection. This even is nearly impossible. Besides, light cannot even escape a black hole, how would radio frequencies, or microwaves be able to escape it to be transmitted back to our recievers? If black holes can swallow up galaxies, i highly doubt that anything in the form of matter would survive being sucked into oblivion.

eleveninches
Travel through the wormhole to a point far away in space, then use a spaceship to move to another point in space that can see the light from earth

ragesRemorse
there are not two different Earths existing in two different times somewhere in space though.

eleveninches
Well, there could theoretically be another earth in the same orbit as our earth but on the other side of the sun

Cipher
I thought the problem with travelling at the speed of light is that you would need an infinite (or nearly infinite) source of power.

ShootingStars
Depends on what you changed... i mean, it probably would be worse, but there are slim chances that things would change for the better... i probably have too much spare time on my hands tho... stick out tongue

SaTsuJiN
I'm one to feel that things happen as they should.. but if we were to change things for the better.. we would have to be able to determine a very specific branch of actions that would give the affect for a desired outcome, especially if that change required to manipulate the course of action of more than one individual.

Text-only Version: Click HERE to see this thread with all of the graphics, features, and links.