Time Travel: By Stephen Hawking

[sgreger1]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/mosl...e-machine.html



For the science crowd here on snuson, or anyone intirested in time travel, the above article is a must read. Stephen Hawking discusses how we can (and can't) travel through the 4th dimension. It is a long but easy read that even those who are not into science can understand.

If you want to know how time travel could work, read this article, it's the best one i've seen yet.

If anyone has any other cool articles on time travel by non-conspiracy sites, please post em as I love this stuff.

[texasmade]

i saw that episode last week....but i missed the episode yesterday

its interesting if i had no family and we had the resources id do it

if they have it by the time im in my 50's or 60's ill do it

they might find a way to stop aging haha

[f. bandersnatch]

As an ardent supporter of both Bill and Ted, and as a fan of their awesome adventure, I am in favor of time travel.

[sgreger1]

As an ardent supporter of both Bill and Ted, and as a fan of their awesome adventure, I am in favor of time travel.

Bill and Ted! Man now that's old school. And an awesome adventure it was.

[sgreger1]

[Darwin]

Ol' Stevie is really blue-skying in all this conjecture, for a hard physicist, but these ideas are not remotely new to the literary science fiction enthusiast. Talk of creating or enlarging wormholes is really talk of being able to create and control energies that would make the largest nuclear bomb exploded look like an exhausted firefly and our ability to do that is only glimpsed dimly in the foggy far distant ultra-future. As far as the going-really-fast gambit is concerned that's not really time travel at all. It's merely a distortion of the time sense of passengers cruising in a vehicle at high percentages of the speed of light. And actually attaining such exalted velocities takes us back to the problem of creating and controlling energies many orders of magnitude greater than we can at present--energies representing a significant fraction of the output of an average star, at least. That's a pretty damn tall order and I'd be seriously surprised if such happened in the next millennium, or even the one after that.

I do think that we could thoroughly explore this solar system within the next couple of hundred years if materials and propulsion science advance adequately but that's a long long way from even the very nearest star. Our distant progeny may find some tricksy way to sidestep Einsteinian space and travel stellar distances but even then if it requires many trillions of joules of energy it might be possible but is unlikely to be remotely cost-effective. If it cost the future equivalent of a hundred trillion dollars to send one person to the nearest star it's doubtful that we would do it. Not even a knowledge junkie such as myself would sign on to that much effort for so little effect.

[sgreger1]

Hawking has been pretty off-the-norm as of late.

Your right that his last theory (the going really fast theory) isn't time travel in that the time still did pass, and it's only one way. It's just a way where you can do something in a time period that to a distant (and slower moving observer) would seem like time travel, kind of.
But accelerating to 99% of the speed of light would require a massive amount of energy. Unless we plan on converting several gas giants into fuel every time we launch a shuttle, it isn't practical with the sources of energy we have today.

Moving around outside of our solar system, in my estimation would require several hundred years of further research. But, I am skeptical of even that prediction because I bet no one would have imagined we would goto the moon or create nuclear fission (A bomb) in less than 100 years back in the 1800's. So anything is possible, as things are moving exponentially faster each year as far as technology is concerned. Plus, the singularity! lol.

The problem with time travel is that it creates (or allows the opportunity to create) paradoxes. The universe doesn't like paradoxes because it would mean chaos, and the universe is a very arranged and precise system. I hope that by the time I grow up we haven't scrapped our space programs and are walking men on at least mars. Theres so much cool stuff yet to discover.

As for time travel, I think probably not going to happen, or if it does, would be thousands of years away. If there was time travel, then where the fark are they all? Where is the time travel tourism? Why is my future self not coming back and hooking me up with lottery numbers?

[Premium Parrots]

been there, done that. only came back to this date to hassel you guys.

[sgreger1]

Guys, GUYS! I am traveling through time, RIGHT NOW!

[texasmade]

you constantly travel through time.


you just don't age less

[sgreger1]

Texas, do you have a whole database of x-rated yet snus related signatures you switch up regularly? lol

[texasmade]

i kind of...just wing it heh

i have a few more that will likely get added this week

[Snusdog]

From Douglas Adam's: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

As any competent linguist will tell you that the major problem with time travel is not an issue of science but rather one of grammar and the main work to consult on this matter is Dr. Dan Streetmentioner's, Time Traveler's Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations. It will tell you, for instance how to describe something that was about to happen to you in the future right before you jumped back in the past to avoid it. The event will be described differently according to whether you are talking about it from the stand point of your own original time or from the standpoint of a time in the even further future, or from the standpoint of something that remains in the future to a past time that you are traveling to from an even more remote point in the past.

Most readers get as far as the Future Semiconditional Modified Subinverted Plural Past Subjuctive Intentional before giving up. In fact later editions of the book leave all the pages blank after this point to save on printing cost.

[Darwin]

Ah good ol' Doug. Lost a good one there. I loved his stuff even though he wasn't really a science fiction writer. He was however among the best long form satirists out there. Miss his work a lot.

[tom502]

I like Dr. Who.