Out of Pod Experience

So i was watching the History Channels "The Universe" and they were talking about theoretical time travel. They said if you travel faster than like that you should be able to reverse time based off of the time dilation theory since time slows down when you are traveling at great velocities. I disagree, I believe time travel is impossible or maybe i just have a lack on information. I'm pretty young and never studied since intensely but I figured that it was impossible. If you travel faster than light that does not necessarily reverse time. I feel like people nowadays views time as a measure of distance. For we consider the speed of light is the primary law of time in the universe. Vision and time are different. Yes, light refracts off everything which allows vision, but that does not mean exceeding the speed of light will reverse events. I fail to see the correlation between exceeding light and reversing time itself. What we see is reflections of everything, the laptop I'm typing on is only able to be seen from light reflecting off of it. If I exceed light that does not mean It will reverse me typing this post. It will simply... Idk catch up and surpass the light particles which we interact with. Idk.. this is what i was thinking... Please enlighten me on your thoughts and correct me if I'm wrong, again I didn't study anything or conduct research this was just my thoughts based off of some random information i remembered.

Basic rule of physics: don't try to understand relativistic or atomic-scale situations based on our large and slow human-scale world. Things just don't work the same, and you're always going to get the wrong answer.

Also, the math on FTL = time travel is indisputable. Unfortunately it's equally indisputable that we'll never be able to travel faster than the speed of light, so it will remain a theoretical concept.

I've seen a few neat articles like this one involving The Grandfather Paradox where attempting to play with time begins to skew probability. It implies that if you did find a way that technically 'could' let you travel back in time, the universe would never actually allow it to happen. Something terrible would happen to the people attempting to travel, the machine might break down, or never reach it's destination.

Things could get downright cartoonish or seem like the project was cursed.
One way or another your chance of success would be zero.

Slight correction: warp drive "works" by bending space to shorten the distance you have to travel. You actually move much slower than the speed of light, you just arrive at your distance faster than if you took the long way. The math on it (or at least a warp drive as imagined by physicists inspired by Star Trek) is pretty solid and doesn't break any laws of physics.

Of course the slight problem with ever building one is that bending space like that requires energy on the scale of "convert the entire mass of the universe into energy".

It's possible, but only to the limits of the Couchy Horizon.

True, but only because no one knows what gravity is.

If you understand gravity, and are able to alter its effects, you can then travel at many times the speed of light without time dilation.

Once this becomes reality, then you can start playing on the chalk-board for working out whether time travel is possible, until then you have every bit of maths telling you it's impossible.

It's like trying to pick a rental car before you know which airport you're landing at - no point.

It's also a little bit like posting a thread without approaching the rules of syntax, grammar, punctuation and layout. This may not be a thesis, but please break your text out...just a little bit.

Like this.

AK

As previously noted, traveling forward in time is done everyday.

The only "practical" theoretical way of traveling back in time that I've heard involved a big gravity field and some twisty geometry so that light traveling around the edge of the field arrived before the light that traveled directly across the field. Or something to that effect.

Also, neutrinos.

As many other people have stated time travel is possible as the GPS system has to be corrected everyday since the satellites travel a few milliseconds into the future and if left uncorrected the system would give bogus information. This is due to General Relativity.

Time travel is possible by moving very fast or by being in a very strong gravitational field. Going a decent fraction the speed of light will give a significant time dilation allowing the people on the spacecraft to go years into the future. This method is very impractical as it will require an enormous amount of fuel to accelerate the craft since it's mass will increase with increasing velocity. And you would need a path light-years long with nothing and I mean not even a grain of sand in the path of the spacecraft as hitting it at relativistic speeds would instantly obliterate the spacecraft. So some form of shielding would have to be developed.

For the gravitational time travel you would need a black hole. You would have to orbit it very near the event horizon which will require a lot of fuel along with posing a great risk to the crew. Being close in the gravitational field will allow the crew to time travel into the future much like "light-speed" time travel.

Wormholes are another way to time travel but the energy required to make one large enough for a ship to enter would be on the magnitude of a star so it isn't likely to happen naturally or artificially by any means we can think of. Physics may solve that problem in the future but who knows for sure.

FTL is a different story since you aren't violating the speed of light you just bend the physics. We have equations for a warp drive right now (Alcubierre drive) but we have no clue how to compress or expand the fabric of space so it's a long way off. Another problem is the inside of the warp bubble would be hotter than the surface of the sun so again some kind of shield or ultra high SPF sunblock will be needed.

The problem with time travel though is compared to everyone else you would be travelling "back" in time. Just imagine traveling 1000 years into the future but only 1 year has passed on the spacecraft. The Earth would be a lot different when you got back if it even still existed. It's kind of the same as when your grandparents got their first computer or cell phone. They have no clue what it does and how to work it but for younger people it's no problem. You and everything you own would be considered an antique.

There is a good sci-fi novel called the Forever War that talks all about this. Basically without too many spoilers the humans are at war with an alien species and in the beginning they pose not threat but after traveling for a few years aboard the ship at light speed time has dilated so much that the human ship is almost killed the next time they encounter the aliens as actually hundreds of years have passed between their last encounter and the humans' ship is now obsolete.

As far as travelling back in time it's theoretically impossible unless you consider parallel universes or travel faster than light (which is impossible without bending the rules of physics). Travelling back in time would also cause the overall entropy of the universe to decrease which can't happen unless you provide energy to the whole universe...good luck with that one.

Didn't they try that in Event Horizon? Didn't work out too well for them

Or a pony... teach the things in hell about the magic of friendship