“There are ‘predictions’ and experiments, but, none of those can confirm the reality of time being an actual thing in the universe, other than what we can measure as ‘time’ passes. But, time is a necessity and not an actual ‘thing’. Time is a creation of humans for measuring changes as they occur.”
I would go further and say that the laws of physics, including what we experience as time, are all constructs of the mind. That is, whatever the fundamental reality is, it is not the physical universe. Rather, the physical universe is bound by the laws of consciousness. Nothing happens in it unless it is observed. Everything in it was first an idea or thought. And time, along with its forward arrow, is a function of conscious thought that we project onto our perceptions of the universe.
“Which came first? Mass and energy, or time? When did time get started?”
Consciousness came first. There is some fundamental reality not made of mass, energy, time, and space. Consciousness has its origin and subsistence there.
“There are ‘predictions’ and experiments, but, none of those can confirm the reality of time being an actual thing in the universe, other than what we can measure as ‘time’ passes. But, time is a necessity and not an actual ‘thing’. Time is a creation of humans for measuring changes as they occur.”
Well, there is more to it than that. Einstein discovered that time behaves in ways that are different from what our intuition tells us. It has been experimentally proven that time is not absolute but relative. And one of the things this means is that time, whatever it is, elapses at different rates under different circumstances. Another aspect is that no two events are absolutely synchronous apart from a specific frame of reference. (And events separated by distance are always also separated by time.)
“Still, it’s impossible to travel to the past or the future, and the only ‘time travel’ that humans are aware of, is the time we live in as it passes.”
As I’ve said before, many things are impossible until they aren’t. You are merely describing your own experiences and what you perceive to be the common, universal experience of others. I can tell you this. If a time machine capable of transporting humans exists, it is going to be treated as a closely guarded secret because it would be more powerful than any other technology we know to exist.
“Can anything from the past affect the future or the current time? We have not witnessed that. “
It is generally assumed that the past is the only thing that affects the present and future. However, science is exploring retrocausation whereby things in the future may affect the past.
“And, if in the future we were able to travel to the past or to the current time, thew whole universe would be screwy and the laws of physics would not apply anymore.”
There are many difficulties that time travel would bring. I don’t think it is possible to change the past. However, there is a difference between what happens and what we perceive. For example, we assume (reasonably) that the moon does not turn into cheese when we are not looking at it. Most of what we believe to be true experientially are really our minds filling in the gaps.
This is where we get into time travel paradoxes. If time travel were possible, could someone go back in time and stop Abraham Lincoln from being assassinated? I think there are at least two sides to this. First, I did not personally witness this assassination. I assume it to be true based on my understanding of history, which does not rely on personal perception. So, it is almost certainly true that Lincoln was assassinated and that it cannot be prevented by a time traveler. However, what if a time traveler understood that the historical record cannot be altered and set out to make it merely appear that Lincoln was assassinated? Then our history and perceptions would not be altered. And technically, neither would history. In this way, history could be participated in by a time traveler without altering it. However, this also supposes that the time traveler can take useful information with him or her backward in time.
“We haven’t witnessed such interruptions in our immediate environments or out there in the universe. Predictions would not have been able to be made in a ‘screwy’ universe.”
You are describing a psychological phenomenon. Causation is an aspect of our human experience that we directly observe. When a baseball bat hits the baseball, the ball is launched in a new direction. Cause and effect. We do not assume that the baseball flying toward the bat caused the bat to swing toward it.
However, in the subatomic realm, it may work differently. For example, magnets attracting or repelling each other might be an example of the future affecting the past. Likewise for the flow of electricity. Sure, we can describe these things mathematically as following rules that work when there is only a forward motion of time, but that is merely our labeling of the observed behavior.
Scientific and technological innovation requires us to entertain possibilities that are not obvious. Without using our imaginations this way we would not have radio, TV, computers, cars, airplanes, jets, rockets, and spaceships. I suspect the same applies to time travel.
So, can you tell me, if a civilization exists in a different galaxy out there, and they don’t have a sun such as ours and a planet such as ours, would they have figured out a way to tell time, and would they have such things as day and night and hours/minutes/years?
Time on Earth is how WE measure the changes in our environments. Is there such a thing as time measurements in distant space?
If humans needed to leave the planet because it was about to be destroyed, how would those travelers keep time, it they’re no longer dependent on Earth rotating every 24 hours and the planet making revolutions around the sun every ‘year’?
Time, as we know it, is the measurement of how long it took for those events to occur, based on our perception of our locality in the solar system. We, for example, can measure how long it took for an event to occur, based on how much water is accumulated in a bucket. Half a bucket would mean that the event took that long to occur, and some other event might have taken a full bucket of water. Our civilization devised a form of measurement based on planetary rotation of Earth, and revolution around the sun.
We don’t have any other means of measurement based on universal time or galactic time. In fact, universal and galactic time measurements don’t exist. If another civilization were to exist in the universe, they might not have needed to measure events in their existence. Are dogs and elephants and dolphins and all other forms of life, aware of ‘time’?