(a) cannot travel back in time or
(b) there are very strict conditions placed on that.
________
You are forgetting about the time police?
Posted on 01/07/2019 3:35:22 PM PST by Peter ODonnell
Time travel -- it is of course a subject central to science fiction. Most of us probably believe it might one day become possible. It does not seem to be that close to becoming a reality.
There are, apparently, laboratory experiments with mysterious sub-atomic particles that demonstrate the existence of time travel on a limited basis. But as to human beings getting into a time machine and ending up in their future or past, we don't have anything like that available.
But we do already know some things about time travel, from what we can observe around us.
(1) If the human race is capable of doing it in the future, they either
(a) cannot travel back in time or
(b) there are very strict conditions placed on that.
We know that because, with the exception of some isolated and unverified claims, it is generally our experience that humans from the future do not appear among us. So if they have come back from our future, they must be either so well disguised as to be undetectable (as such), or so infrequent and following rules of non-contact with us, that we never see them.
We could be pretty certain that if time travel became commonplace in future societies, we would be dealing with a steady stream of "time tourists" including reckless teenagers using their parents' time machines for a joyride. Not that one would necessarily suppose that out of all history, the year 2019 would be dialed into very many time machines, but you never know what famous event might be about to happen, and those time travelers might be here to see that unfolding.
So perhaps we will discover the means for time travel in the future, but may not be able to get this far back, or any distance back at all, perhaps it only works forward, and then you have to wonder, once you made that jump, could you then come back to your time of origin?
Now, a separate question would be, can intelligent alien life forms travel through time? Perhaps they can do so in the limited sense that they can travel faster than light and arrive places in relatively short periods of time that would otherwise take millions of years. But if an alien life form did that and arrived on earth today, we might not know about it. That life form might be able to pass itself off as human, or might have a technology to remain invisible (so might our human descendants of course).
Some passages in the Old Testament and in the Revelation of the N.T. sound a bit like time travel was employed, for example, the showing of visions of the future would be most easily explained by angels (citizens of the Kingdom if you prefer) travelling back in time with video evidence that they showed the selected prophets, who of course described what they saw in terms that they understood. And much of what those prophets describe sounds like it might be in our time or not that far advanced beyond now, suggesting that these time travelling angels came back from a time not far into our future. So how about this for a scenario ...
The Kingdom begins at some point in time not very far off into our future. The power of the Kingdom originates from outside our world, unless we want to believe that some human being (or a group of them) is very close to developing these powers and could represent themselves in that way. Either way, these are powers that nobody claims to have in public at least, so it would seem more likely that they exist somewhere else and become operative in the Kingdom which, as a separate question, we are by no means sure would be on the earth at all.
So time travel may have some sort of closely guarded oversight of the government of the Kingdom, so that only authorized delegates (perceived as angels by our ancestors) could employ the power for specific purposes.
Once something has not happened (like a good actor shooting Adolf Hitler) then it cannot happen in this universe. This rules out a large amount of possible time travel, there would be no "going back" to do things that might seem beneficial, if they didn't already happen. If time travelers prevented an airliner from crashing (and we had no idea they had done so) then that could happen, so long as it was done the way it turned out to have been done.
This is more than just idle curiosity -- it may help explain the mystery to many of us, why does God not intervene in our sorry world and end this apparently failing free will experiment, and replace it with the Kingdom which was always going to be better anyway even if we were improving by leaps and bounds in our conduct, which we clearly are not?
The simple answer to this might be that God also cannot do what has not been done, so if God develops out of a pre-divine being anywhere in the universe (this argument is not restricted to the earth) then He cannot go back from that point in time to do anything except those things that He actually did do in the past. I know that sounds crazy, but in fact it is more or less what we are told about Jesus Christ, born around 4 B.C., but apparently "present with the Father at the creation of the world." How does that work? Even if you accept that Jesus Christ was born as a man but had divine attributes, how did He end up at some distant point in the past, thousands or millions of years before His birth, to participate in that act of Creation? And how did God the Father manage to do that, even if you don't accept the idea of Him coming into being and going back in time, then you are still left with the paradox that God must have existed before the moment that all things were created (in this universe at least).
Give your mind a workout. Is it possible that the Kingdom, the second coming included, can only happen when an unknown entity (not necessarily even human) evolves to the point of having God-like powers, and can then execute plans and bring forward the Kingdom. Perhaps it's not so much a question of choosing the time, but becoming the agent.
It makes no sense to us in our limited human ways of thinking that God already exists, has unlimited power, but chooses not to use most of that, and instead allows all sorts of bad and lamentable things to occur in our world. We have always imagined that must be because God wanted to give a sufficient number of human beings an opportunity to participate in this experience before calling an end to it and replacing it with that better dispensation. But that always has overtones of a certain amount of careless or cavalier disregard. The suffering of the holocaust or Gulag, for example, were no mere trials of Job. Surely at some point the failure of the free will experiment would convince even the most patient Creator that it was time to accept the inevitability of chaos, disorder and sin arising from free will, and limit further unnecessary suffering.
But perhaps the explanation is as simple as this -- God does not yet exist. When He does, it may take Him only five minutes to draw that same conclusion, call off the madness and do the things that have already been done, in the mystery of time, while enjoying the opportunity to do all things desirable in the future.
Time is an analytical construct. No going back.
However, I can place my pen on one side of the desk, then another, and then back again. In a sense, the pen has gone back in time, to the position it had been in previously.
This thread reminded me of Asimov, then I saw your post.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_Eternity
In the future, humanity uses time travel to construct Eternity, an organization “outside time” which aimed to improve human happiness by observing human history and, after careful analysis, directly making small actions that cause “reality changes”, as well as to help establish trade between the various centuries to help those in most need. Its members, known as “Eternals” and by the roles they hold, prioritize the reduction of human suffering, at the cost of a loss to technology, art, and other endeavors which are prevented from existing when judged to have a detrimental effect. Those enlisted travel “upwhen” and “downwhen” and re-enter time in devices called “kettles”. Their rules prevent them from earlier travel to the Primitive times before the 27th century, when the temporal field powering Eternity was established, to prevent accidental damage to pre-temporal history. Also, humanity’s fate is unknown – the earth is empty by the 150,000th century, but this is preceded by a period called the Hidden Centuries from the 70,000th–150,000th centuries in which for unknown reasons they cannot access the world outside Eternity to learn more.
Wow!
The past is kind of freaky!
No dinosaurs, well, except for Nancy Pelosi.
It’s like I’m in a black hole with all these different colored lights flashing around me!
Damnit.
I’m in Las Vegas again.
Must have put the regular cam in instead of the time travel cam.
I’ll get this straightened out in like four million years.
I like John Wheeler’s concept of the Participatory Anthropic Principle and Its from Bits. The future influences the past.
I don’t think it exists.
If you owned a vacant lot, and hopped in your “DeLorean” and went 25 years into the future, where a three story building now stood on your “vacant lot”, how did it get there?
Someone had to plan it, build it, etc...therefore meaning that every nanosecond that passed had to have an accompanying “future” nanosecond, ad infinitum. As time passed progress had to be made in the construction of said building in an orderly fashion. The building is not going to just magically “appear”...somewhere in that time cycle some human intervention had to have happened to get it done.
Each “future nanosecond” would need its own “future nanosecond”, and so own. It boggles the mind to think of that kind of theory.
IF time travel were possible, I don’t think you could see your future (or past) “self” when you go there...in one case, you wouldn’t be there because you “disappeared” in the past, the other you can’t find your future self because, well, there’s only one of you.
I probably botched up that whole scenario, as it’s confusing as hell to even think about. So, I’ll just live in the time allotted me and let time, be time.
You know what I know about time travel?
I’ll tell you what I know about time travel.
No matter how many times I travel back in time to tell myself not to become a fatty McFatterson, I still eat all the pizzas.
And, even though I never admit it to myself, I think I do it (eat all the pizzas and become a fatty McFatterson) out of spite because I ain’t gonna let myself tell me what to do!
I travel forward in time about 24 hours in what most of you call a “day”. It may be more or less depending on what I’m drinking and who I’m traveling with.
I’m about to enter my “time travel recliner” and go “forward in time” 3 to 4 hours while experiencing the Alabama-Clemson game and a six-pack. I’m expecting a bumpy journey but should get out ok on the other side.
And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed, until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemies. Is not this written in the book of Jasher? So the sun stood still in the midst of heaven, and hasted not to go down about a whole day.
Joshua 10:13.
Time does not exist, if you live forever.
(a) cannot travel back in time or
(b) there are very strict conditions placed on that.
________
You are forgetting about the time police?
Time travel is possible but we just don’t know how to do it yet.
Someday we’ll figure it out and then wonder why we didn’t
figure it out before
“Someday we’ll figure it out and then wonder why we didn’t
figure it out before”
It’s not possible because nobody has ever come back from the future and said “here’s how you do it”. :)
I made my post tomorrow.
But you are reading it today,
Or are you in tomorrow, today?
There was once a young lady named Wight
Whose speed was much greater than light
She went out one day
In a relative way
And returned on the previous night.
Sacrifice, the future has it's price And today is only Yesterday's tomorrow..."
From 'Circle of Hands' by Uriah Heep.
Time travel is the easiest thing in the world to do. It’s changing the speed and direction of time travel that poses the challenge.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.