Saturday, March 26, 2011

Time Travel

I got a request to do this and I listen to the people!

Firstly, time travel backwards is generally accepted as impossible.  Excluding the fact the object being transported (you) has mass, light speed is the cosmic speed limit.  To go backwards in time you need to go faster than light or use something like a worm hole.  Worm holes do exist, but they are smaller than a single atom.  Expanding them through some futuristic technique may be possible, but their existence will be ended almost immediately by (it is thought by people such as Steven Hawking) radiation feedback.  That is, radiation going through the worm hole, out the other side, and back through over and over again till it builds up sufficiently largely to destroy the worm hole.  A similar concept is that screeching sound from amps you get when sound is going through the microphone and projected by the speakers so loudly that it is again being picked up by the microphone and projected a second time.

Time travel into the future is allowed for, however, and has even been done, albeit not very far.  There are two ways to do it from Einstein's theories of relativity.  One is via the mass of another much more massive object and the other is via velocity.  Using the first method, an extremely large mass would be required, such as a black hole.  If one were inside a ship on the edge of the event horizon of a black hole, time dilation would occur.  Not only would this be extremely dangerous, the outcome is theoretically about only 4 seconds of time per second into the future (so 1 year around the black hole = 4 years on earth).

The second option is via a large amount of velocity.  This is the best hope for traveling into the future.  If a ship could get to 99.9% of the speed of light, which may be possible in the future, hundreds of years would pass on earth for every 1 year on board the vessel.  Interestingly, Hawking explained that a ship such as this would take about 6 years to get up to speed.  What he didn't say is that it completely depends on the mass of the ship itself and the amount of power moving it.  If the ship were much less massive, it would take much less time to accelerate to speed.  Essentially, his calculation is meaningless.  We have no idea how massive such an object would be, nor the amount of power possible to get out of it.  Sergei Avdeyev has traveled about 20 milliseconds into the future from his extremely long stay on the Mir space station.


I would have to recommend cryogenics as the only method of 'time travel' for the immediate future.  Of course, once you are frozen you cannot be woken until that little detail is figured out :)

Comments welcome as always!

25 comments:

  1. time travel would be so amazing *thinking at doctor who*

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  2. Time travel probably doens't exist, well atleast not back in time, if it did, why didn't any time traveler met us or something, if there is time travel in 60 years, i would go back to NOW while i'm writing this to change this comment , if you know what i mean XD *feels a hand on my shoulder from 60 year older me*

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  3. It seems very difficult, not in many lifetimes it'd be even "possibly"

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  4. I think being cryogenically frozen is worth the chance of it not working. Better than a 100% chance of never coming back

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  5. If time travel was possible, we should have seen some delegation or representative from the future already, right? hehe

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  6. I'm generally freaked out by the thought of cryogenic freezing. Whats gonna happen to me when im in there?

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  7. I can't possibly fathom traveling through time, especially to the future. Wouldn't it just be a possible future? If it were THE future, wouldn't that mean that any present actions be irrelevant, and that it was already more or less predetermined? Hmm...

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  8. I can't imagine going through time. I just don't see how it could be possible. Maybe that's just me speaking as a representative of the 21st century, I don't know; but time travel just seems so far-fetched and downright impossible. I guess mankind will have to wait and see what comes (or who).

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  9. This post is proof of why we need Doctor Who to be real. The technologies inside a TARDIS would be a huge, huge explanation to time travel, methinks. Don't you? Ha.

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  10. sadly, even cryogenics hasn't been perfected yet. :(

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  11. I feel like it's not really time travel to the future but time-slowing for yourself. In my head it seems more of a time anti-traveling.

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  12. Like Mr Bunni, if timetravel does ever exist, it's only going to be towards the future, because wouldn't someone already be back? Saying how to do it?

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  13. What Patres said is true, if we had already time-travelled back to meet ourself in the past, it would have happened to us in the past, haha.

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  14. Cryogenics is scary at first, maybe. The temperature the body is put under stops all brain activity from occur, and all metabolic processes are also stopped, so you won't be thinking about anything, contrary to Demolition Man. :)

    They haven't figured it out, but the idea is that by the time the medical portions are figured out to actually resurrect the patient, the cryo-tech will also be there to awake them :)

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  15. Really nice post man, you explained an such an easy way to understand.

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  16. What would you do with this techonolgy if it were available now?

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  17. Interesting, how i think of time travel was say you walk with a circle of people around you.. they have to compensate by moving in the direction your going in whilst moving around you, slowing there overall movement around you.. if you go fast enough they will take a long time to get around you, whilst a person at the same time is stood with a group of people walking around him but he isnt moving, therefore they do cycles faster... in comparison the moving 'person' is under the effects of time at a lowered rate... think of 1 cycle of the people going around him incomparison to the stationary person, he may have 5.. so 5 years for the stationary person pass whilst 1 year passes for the moving person... this is all based on arbitary numbers and constant velocity.

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  18. I'm not sure what you're talking about Crazy guy ) lol, sorry

    @psyke I would go between 100-200 years into the future to the Cowboy Bebop times, i.e. space frontier where humans may travel freely between them, biology is conquered, hang out on space stations, meet even more fascinating people. Just think of the video games!

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  19. Love this post, glad you listened. They're working on using the hadron collider near Geneva, Switzerland to try and produce worm holes and they hope to be able to produce "unparticles". Let's see where all this goes. Keep up the great post and thanks for listening to the community!

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  20. It's stuff like this that makes me want to get into the physics field.

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  21. If the more massive an object is the more it effects time, surely somebody living on top of a mountain would experience time slower (albeit almost insignificantly) than a person residing at sea level due to the fact that they are further away from the central gravitational pull?

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  22. actually, they would experience time slower. The more massive the object, the more it distorts and slows time (like a black hole). But I think you've got it now )

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