Inter - Dimensional Time Travel as mentioned in Real Life

[Darkest_Sage]

Ok there is a question that gets everyone for the first two seconds then they go umm... idk

I have my thoughts on the answer but I would like to hear other people opinions.

The question is

"Theoretically if you were able to go back in time, and you killed your Grand Father what would happen?" You wouldn't exist! So then who would go back in time to kill your grandfather? No one! Then your Grand Father would live and you will be born, go back in time and kill your grandfather, but then You wouldn't exist! etc.

THe idea is that your Grand Father in another dimension would die and things would continue on from there. So that would suggest people cannot go back in time and change the future for themselves, they would be changing it for other dimension versions of themselves

So is there another Dimension right now?
How many variations of existence could occur, infinity! are there that many?
Do they exist now or would they only exist after someone goes back and changes something?

Damn All I have time for now tlak more later

[LazarusPrime]

I think that at the point a decision is made, reality splits and two universes are created, one in which the decision was to do something and one in which the decision was inaction. Therefore, you would continue to exist in the reality in which you did not kill your grandfather. Therefore, it follows that one cannot go back in time and kill one's grandfather.

[TopCat]

Answer: 42

Thread locked

[ReggarBlane]

It's fiction.

But if you want to get technical, think of time-lines like a massive web of lines going in all directiong intersecting others. To go back and change time in a manner that would remove the possibility of your existence (without actually doing so), you would be required to re-align the axis of your perceived time (since you realigned it anyway to go backwards in your own time) at a point up to, but not including, the moment at which you make your future existence an impossibility. But at that point, you're no longer affecting your own time-vector.

I'm also a staunch believer that what has happened has happened and cannot be changed in any time-line's history. If you go back and think you alter another time-line, the truth is that you actually already did it in their time-line. By removing your future birth from another time-line, you basically fulfilled a requirement to prevent your birth, which was already not going to happen in that time-line anyway. By that concept, what we are doing and will do is already done in time.

I choose to believe such possibilities are moot and make sometimes-interesting fiction especially in comic situations, but more often are the device of lazy writers who need a plot-hole to make their story work in an uncomedic situation.

[MaverickLlama]

I use the Douglas Adams view of time travel, which seems like what ReggarBlane said:


Any change that is made, takes effect when the action is made, not when the decision is made. Leaving out the "killing your grandpa" paradox, let's have a few examples:

I go back 10 years time and mail a letter to myself.

When I return to the present I will have that letter.

The common misconception is, before I wrote the letter it didn't exist.

The letter's first appearance in the universe was when I arrived with it in the time machine. (assuming I wrote it in my own time.)

Even before I made the decision to write the letter, I had a copy of it. Because, it doesn't work the way I personally see it. It works the way an outside observer would see it:

2004 Chris arrives in a time machine, mails the letter to 1994 Chris, leaves in said time machine. The 1994 Chris recieves the letter in the mail and keeps it. 10 years later, 2004 Chris writes a letter, goes into the time machine with it, and comes back without it.

For a short period of time there were 2 copies of the letter: the 10 year old one and the new one. But the new one was dematerialized into a time machine, never to be seen again afterwards except in the form of its 10 years older version.

[faultystring]

I have a question... What if for you, you went back in time and killed your grandpa and dissapeard (ala Back to the future), but for everybody else, your grandpa would just die. I don't know any lingo to make this sound intelligent, but it's just a thought.

[Kana Li]

Ok since most people here seem to have problems with higher physics and logic at any level I will say this in as plan as English as possible. First I will lay down the ground work. There are things which must be defined to have things work out such as dimension, universe, and time line. A dimension(in the none physical since) is the plan where all things belong to. It is believed by some that there can be multiplied dimension. Which are crated by any when there is a choice of some kind even if that choice dose not require intelligence to make. If there is more than one dimension than they all take up the same space. The universe would be the infinite space that the dimensions are contained with in. Multiple universe if the Universe is infinite there cannot be more than one. But there could be more than one what could be called lesser universes in each dimension. These lesser universes are finite and exist in parallel to an other lesser universe in there dimension. This brings us to time line a time line can only be made by the process of unnatural time travel. So by kill your grandfather you make another time line. Which would exist in the same lesser universe, this dose make it possible to have killed your own grandfather and live to tell the tell.

[Cyrus]

Answer: 42

Thread locked

I agree.

[Azurain]

Maverick... the problem with your scenario is that if you received that letter ten years before you went into the future, then your thoughts and perceptions would be different when 2004 and comes around, and if you did go back in time you would not do things exactly as you did before, which creates different changes which go around to 2004 and create different ones etc... until eventually you didn't go back in time at all...

The thing for me, recently, is this: if this situation occurs, do you end up just having never gone back in time at all, or does the fact that you never went back in time make it that things are as they first were, so you go back in time again and it becomes an infinite loop?

This is, of course, assuming the nonexistence of parallel universes. As for the 'every choice creates a parallel universe,' that's assuming that choice is nondeterministic... it'd be more accurate, to me, to say that every quantum event creates a parallel universe... If one believes in free will, then to say that every free choice and every quantum event creates a parallel universe.

I'd have to say, though, that the number would not be infinite, just so large that we couldn't possibly comprehend it (like 10^10^10^10^10^99999999999999999 or something crazy). With a finite number of events and a finite number of possiblities for each event, we'd still have a finite number of universes. Just a very large finite number of universes : ).

Just my thoughts,

-- Chris

(edited to point out that I don't believe time travel to be in any way remotely possible at all whatsoever; this is just speculation:)

[mrchapel]

[quote="Azurain";p="312095"]
I'd have to say, though, that the number would not be infinite, just so large that we couldn't possibly comprehend it (like 10^10^10^10^10^99999999999999999 or something crazy). With a finite number of events and a finite number of possiblities for each event, we'd still have a finite number of universes. Just a very large finite number of universes : ).
[/quote]

Great just when I've come to terms with the fact that I'm an infinitely small speck in an infinitely large universe.... I have to deal with the fact that I'm an infinitely small speck in an infinite number of infinitely large universes.

[SomGuy]

"Theoretically if you were able to go back in time, and you killed your Grand Father what would happen?" You wouldn't exist! So then who would go back in time to kill your grandfather? No one! Then your Grand Father would live and you will be born, go back in time and kill your grandfather, but then You wouldn't exist! etc.

Well to me time is just a value that measures the current location of matter at an interval, these intervals being the time it takes the fastest possible object to move the shortest distance. Time progresses by forcese acting on each other logically making every moment part of a huge function. From any point the future or past is just the previous moments that "could" be traced back if we could understand all the forces acting on all things at all times.... which would never happen mind you. So what you are saying is, you going to one point and adding yourself in there. Well when you do that you not only change the entire future but the past as well. Everything has to be set up so that you would exist at that moment and time. Therefore your actions will not change the past that allowed you to exist to kill your grandfather. In this line you would have always killed him, your existance in the future does not have anything to do with your existance in the past aside from them being natural progressions of the same thing in opposite directions.

[peter-griffin]

Thank you, Reggar, for proving fate to be an actuality.

Posted Fri Apr 23, 2004 1:52 pm:

Oh, and about a decision making another universe (I hope you meant dimension)...I'd like to note that such would mean an intricate link between the physical fabric of reality and the decision-making processes of every organism in existance.

[ReggarBlane]

The "proof" is only valid if physically traveling backwards through time is possible. Without that, the "proof" is nothing more than a guess.

At this time, it seems it would take nothing short of a miracle to physically travel backwards in time due to limitations in modern physics (time with velocity with at-rest mass and all that rot, ya know). That would suggest the possibility that our fate MIGHT be our choice if we can't definitely prove total causality.

[Lord Terrible]

Going back to the Killing Your Grandpa time machine subject... I believe that time travel is impossible, and the entire universe is nought but a large collection of substances. If you were to "reset" this great big collection of protons, neutrons, electrons, photons, tachyons, dark matter etc. to a certain state and position, with the exception that you were there to kill your grandfather (and succeed), the whole reality would be altered likewise, thus never giving birth to you, but you still exist because you popped out to kill your grandfather for some reason.

If you weren't there and your grandfather was killed by you, you would have never been born and thus never tried to kill him

Taking the letter-from-the-past analogy, you would only receive the letter if it provoked you somehow to write the letter. If you DID write the letter, unprovokedly, and delivered it to the past, only to not write the letter again, you really didn't get the letter at all, because you never wrote it and sent it. If you, however, wrote and received the letter, and wrote the letter later in life in order to send it to the past, the circle would be completed and the letter would exist

Bottom line in my opinion here is that alternative timelines or universes can't interfere with eachother. It's not like a piece of string being divided by a timetravel, more like a string you could take a leap backwards on. Or something

[SomGuy]

It's not like a piece of string being divided by a timetravel, more like a string you could take a leap backwards on.

Read my post. Translated to your analogy, a nearly infinte amout of "strings of time" exist for every possible placement of atoms, each timeline is unique and "time travel" would just be hoping on to a certain string where you existed at a certain time with the same exact brain at that moment. Honestly it is just stupidity to think such a thing actually could happen.