IWT6 Topic Poll (for prospective participants)

[Hi! My name is: Katie]

As long as you've accepted the fact that time travel will never be possible...

What are you saying?! Time travel is totally possible. It has something to do with Physics and energy and vanishing islands... aren't you keeping up with LOST?

[Dragavan]

Hey -- Deputy DEP! How've you been?

You know, right now I'm actually in a fairly safe position (or so it seems) with respect to time travel: I think it might be possible; that is, I think if the world is around long enough, we'll probably be able to travel forward in time, but probably not backwards.

We already travel forward in time.

I think it depends on which theory of the nature of time ends up being true as to weather or not travel backwards (or even forward at a different speed than we currently do) ends up being possible. There are too many unknown factors in our current understanding of fourth dimensional physics to really be able to say either way right now.

As for what I believe is most likely possible: I think it is technically possible, but in doing so you will change the past, creating a new timeline, and therefor will never be able to return to your own time of origin... unless somewhere along the line the ability to travel between alternate dimensions also becomes possible... Controlling either of these things, however, will be nearly impossible because of the near infinite number of variables that get involved.

[Ryan_DuBois]

We already travel forward in time.

Thanks for the reminder.



To rephrase: I think that, in the future, we'll be able to travel forward in time at a much faster rate than we already do.

One method to "sort of" do this is to approach the speed of light.

[ChubbyTeletubby]

Let's not do this again.

[End Master]

What's odd is that Yazz left during a time travel debate and now he comes back for a Looping Story contest.

[apotheosis]

I don't know if any of you have read Watchmen, but tachyons go faster than the speed of light. Therefore, if we use a tachyon capacitor, we can build a time machine.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tachyon

[Ryan_DuBois]

What's odd is that Yazz left during a time travel debate and now he comes back for a Looping Story contest.

Haha, I saw the irony in that too.

[Dragavan]

...tachyons go faster than the speed of light. Therefore, if we use a tachyon capacitor, we can build a time machine.

Except tachyons are completely theoretical, so using them as an example is just as valid as saying that whipping around the sun in a spaceship could cause time travel... or even that time travel is completely impossible... There is nowhere near enough evidence in any direction to really say anything even close to solid on the subject.

All we have are ideas and far fetched theories... which doesn't make for much of a debate, if you ask me. Kind of like debating the existence of a god or not... about the same amount of hard evidence on that one too.

We can have fun talking about ideas and theories on the subject of time travel all we want (which I actually enjoy, as it's one of my favorite story subjects), but actually debating it is useless... Unless you are debating specifics of how it works within a certain piece of fiction (like how Back to the Future screwed up its own rules in the second movie).

[Usoki]

EDIT: Pointless history for those that don't have photographic memories for pointless things!

You mean, for those of us who don't keep a secret Word Document filled and updated with whatever personal information people let slip?

I'm all for fun discussion of random theories, many of which are utterly bogus, but... I have never understood how using a planet's gravity is supposed to give you a slingshot effect that will allow you to travel through time. I understand using gravity to increase speed, but to have it mess with time just seems too weird. How do they technobabble-ically justify it? Do they bastardize the theory of relativity, or what?

[ChubbyTeletubby]

Well doesn't the theory of relativity state that space AND time are affected by gravity? I honestly don't know.

Real life is much stranger than fiction, that I do know. When you start to puzzle about this stuff you just end up realizing what a pathetic moron you really are. I don't, but I'm sure YOU do. That means all of you.

Good day.

Also, I don't care for the new contest theme. Which probably means it's a smashing idea. What does my opinion count, anyway?

Ta!

[Dragavan]

I have never understood how using a planet's gravity is supposed to give you a slingshot effect that will allow you to travel through time. I understand using gravity to increase speed, but to have it mess with time just seems too weird. How do they technobabble-ically justify it? Do they bastardize the theory of relativity, or what?

They are all aboard the USS Make Shit Up ... So they bounce a graviton particle beam off the main deflector dish and it causes a temporal causality feedback loop that creates a static tachyon bubble to engulf the ship as it approaches light speed using their sub-light engines (not the warp drive), which requires the aid of the sun's gravity to achieve... Simple, really.

[Locke]

All this reminds me of one of my favorite old sci-fi texts. Anyone read Tau Zero, by Poul Anderson?

[apotheosis]

While time travel is sort of a pointless concept to ponder from a rational point, faster than light travel is not. I mean, assume technology continues on its trajectory, advancing at an exponential and at times logarithmic pace. There will be a point where we need to start seriously considering how the hell we will make it to other solar systems and ultimately galaxies. Now conventionally, we cannot travel faster than light. So that leaves us with a few options:

-Make light travel faster. (The vacuums we have aren't true vacuums since they have vacuum energy, so we'd need to build a true vacuum, then maybe we could create some sort of a galactic highway in which things go faster than our current measure of c)
-Tachyons (things always traveling faster than light, but this is really far fetched as Dragavan said)
-Tear some sort of whole in the space time fabric so you can go from point A to point B instantly. This one is also a bit far fetched, but, hey, people use to think that the earth was flat.
-Become virtually immortal, and then just wait a really long time traveling at some fraction of C.
-Just take hallucinogenics so we think we actually accomplished faster than light travel when really we never moved.

I'm up for the latter.

[donteatpoop]

Well welcome back, YazZMaN

[Ryan_DuBois]

Thanks, DEP. It's good to see (or whatever) you guys again, by the way.

I have a lot more thoughts on this interesting subject, but I honestly don't know enough about the physics involved to say much more than I already have.

So I'll end by agreeing that the universe is, indeed, a very strange place. Even Mathematics, which seems to be the most sane and rational science of them all, has produced some insane results. For instance, it's been mathematically proven that there are true statements we'll never be able to prove true -- in other words, there are questions we'll never know the answers to.

That's wild.

On top of that, i raised to the i power is a real number (I think it's equal to the reciprocal of the root of the value e to the pi power).

And there are infinitely many different sizes of infinity.

It's a strange world.