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.
In the Back to the Future movie, Marty’s young grandmother and teenage mother, living in 1955, took a look at Marty’s sleeveless vest and asked him if he was in the Coast Guard.
When Marty woke up in the bed at his grandparent’s house the next morning, Marty’s teenage mother back in 1955 saw his designed underwear and assumed his name was Calvin Klein.
You ain’t going nowhere without Mr. Fusion.
You ain’t going nowhere without Mr. Fusion.
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Nu huh.
That’s just what *they* want you to think.
What you really need is a heapin’ helpin’ of Fiction!
Fiction can fix anything!
In “Back to the Future” didn’t they repeatedly ask McFly why he was wearing a lifejacket?
Let us go back to some point in time and materialize. What could go wrong?
Enough to give even Milankovitch headaches
7
For humans for the foreseeable future (and I am talking many millennia); time travel is impossible; forward or reverse.
Consider. We have no idea of where the boundary of our universe is; none. We only know what we have been able to observe but that in no way means there isn’t a vast expanse beyond what we can or cannot observe. Hence, we have no idea where we are in the universe as a whole. None because it all is expanding and we don’t know where the “edge” is which means we cannot possibly calculate where WE actually are as we hurdle through “space”.
Minus Andromeda, most everything else is flying away from us so we can’t get a good fix on where we are in the universe (because for all we know we are just part of a large chunk of what we “see” still moving about). That is the piece that stymies us and most likely always will. If we have no fix on where we are, how can we even travel two minutes into the past when we have no idea where the location of the Earth WAS at our time of departure two minutes in the future? Two minutes could put one of us on the other side of the Earth in a vacuum considering how fast our solar system is moving. 2 Seconds might put one of us in the Earth’s core.
Also consider the Earth’s rotation, the Earth’s position in the solar system; the Earth’s “wobble”, the solar system’s position in the galactic arm we inhabit; the dance our solar system does on the galactic plane moving above and below, The galactic arm as it spirals, etc..etc.. etc.
The math is staggering. To compute it alone will require mind boggling amounts of computational capacity let alone the energy it would probably take to pop a hole through a higher dimension to drop back (or forward) through space/time.
Just my $0.02
Thanks for the thread...I enjoy these types.
Ronald Reagan became President. Twice.
Knowing liberals as I do, this alone means that time travel is impossible.
You would be in orbit around the Sun, not on the surface of Earth.
Actually, you'd be somewhere in interstellar space ...
Well that was fun, the only point I might dispute in all of those comments would be the difficulty of a time traveler “fitting in” — going forward, yes, because you don’t know what to expect, but going backwards, you do know and you could prep like an intelligence agent might do. Some might be more skilled than others at this. I would love to travel back to Mozart’s time, join his orchestra (possibly as a backup keyboard player) and amuse myself by playing Beethoven tunes not quite written yet (in 1788 let’s say).
People might not think I was that unusual except maybe for the constant washing of the hands that a modern person would no doubt be doing in that day and age. I could also amuse myself by writing letters such as this to the Times of London (if it existed then — I know there was no postal service so a personal visit might be needed) ... Sirs, I have developed a technique to foretell the weather and can inform you with considerable confidence that the winter forthcoming will be exceptionally cold. Your ob’t servant, Peter O’Donal — dated 15th November, 1794.
Time travel has not, does not, nor never will exist.
Why?
Because it doesnt exist now.
This entire monstrosity is moving thru space at breakneck speed orbiting around the center of the Milky Way. If you travel back to a physical place in time, Main street in front of City Hall by the local movie theater aint gonna be where you think it was.
Very nice! It too easy to think our local theater stays put.
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