"The whole concept is absurd. Just imagine if lots of people had a time machine. Think of the crowds trying to change history at various well-known events. "
Posted on 04/06/2002 11:18:28 AM PST by Hellmouth
Edited on 04/13/2004 2:07:39 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
Ronald Mallett, a physicist at the University of Connecticut, believes he knows how to build a time machine - an actual device that could send something or someone from the future to the past, or vice versa.
He's not joking.
(Excerpt) Read more at boston.com ...
a) may be prohibitively expensive.
b) may very well be highly regulated by law (and you thought guns were regulated).
c) might very well not change one's own present, only the future of an alternate timeline. This greatly reduces any incentive for attempting to alter the course of history, because it would have no effect on your own history; and would only affect one of a potentially infinite number of timelines.
Um, do we now have a clue as to your dietary habits, PH? ;) If Plato's been tinkering around with a time machine, I want to know. There's a few things I'd like to change...
No way. There's too much money to be made in time travel. It would be far more difficult to regulate than the drug trade. Besides, if you got caught breaking the rules, you could just go back and make the necessary correction so you wouldn't get caught. No problem. Time travel will always be unregulated.
"The whole concept is absurd. Just imagine if lots of people had a time machine. Think of the crowds trying to change history at various well-known events. "
I fear I may have revealed too much ...
It would be as bad as another 8 years of Clinton!
Let me take a shot at this. Time travel, if it can be achieved, can only travel to places that exist. The past was and can be proven to have been because we were there and experienced it. The present also exists because we are and as such know that it is. The past and present have been and are.
Now the future. The future has not, by it's definition, occured yet. It isn't. Since it doesn't exist yet there can be no time machine or travelers. They are not and therefore, can't.
To look for time travelers, search the past. The means to travel time must exist in order to see travelers and the future does not yet exist. If you should somehow find proof of time travel in the past then the means to do so now exists.
How's that?
Interestingly, if you step back and take a serious look at the technological capabilities that are now available to us (many of them routinely, including the Internet that I'm using now), and seriously view them through the eyes of an ancient, then about the only obvious "powers of the ancient gods" that we have not yet achieved, in at least a limited fashion, are shape-shifting and immortality... and we are on the track of reengineering ourselves and cracking the aging puzzle right now...
Fly to the moon? Done that. Communicate instantly at great distances? Speak and have the desired person hear you thousands of miles away? Fly through the air? Call fire down from heaven to destroy cities at a word? Give sight to the blind? Cause people without ears to hear? Bring drowned people back to live? Create animals, even humans, with no father? Virgin births? See through human bodies? See real-time visions of faraway lands? Access much of the accumulated knowledge of all mankind? Create visions of heaven and hell? Merely point and have fire come from your fingertips to kill? The list goes on and on and on.
(And sometimes, even get elected.)
Anyone else here wonder why he didn't "long" to find a cure for whatever killed his father? Seems to me that would have been a far better goal. (Though I have to admit, time travel has always fascinated me.)
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