Interesting Read: Time Travellers in 2008?

[Brendan]

Are Scientists At CERN Promising Time Travel By End Of 2008? - Gizmo Watch

thought it was an interesting read.

i for one find it a bit too far fetched, but at least the points made were based on scientific reason, and not say, a message from Xenu himself

[tenkae]

I saw a video like years ago in college about how scientists thought they could create time travel by taking some special lasers that rotated into a cylinder with a collapsed center. When I watched it and tried to understand how it worked it sounded really far fetched, like it was based mostly on achieving an incredible speed in the cylinder. They said it could only send you to a time when that device existed though, which that part makes sense. SO in the end they said once they finish it and turn it on, stuff would be spewing out from things in the future (maybe someone will be smart and send plans for a better time machine that doesn't require a receiving cone and can go to any time)

[Syph3r]

That particle accelerator is going to be very interesting to say the least. IF it works it should be nothing less of ground shattering and a great tool for scientists. There is however a large chance it will not do anything exciting which is a major blow to the scientific community. I hope something good does come out of this, as we haven't had a 'major' breakthrough in a while.

[Deagle]

nothin like some higgs particles to complicate, yet then simplify our world.

[Bobson]

Wow. Definitely very interesting.

Bear with me for a minute here, but let's assume that time travel really is a possibility. Let's also assume that 'time' really is active on different planes (or whatever they would be called, I honestly have no clue). In other words, right now, on a different plane of time or space (or wavelength, or w/e), everything is happening again, and things that haven't happened yet in our time are already going on. Right now, Einstein is doin his thing, albeit in his time, and Ben Franklin is signing the Declaration of Independence, and conquistadors are discovering the Americas - in their own respective times.

If we can't travel back to a time before this machine was first created, as the article states, wouldn't it seem logical that someone from the future will almost certainly go back in time to our present? Our present of course meaning the day in our future, perhaps even the very moment, that this machine is ready for human time travel?

What I'm saying is, if this all turns out to be true, and it works out as they expect, I imagine we probably won't find out on our own. I'd expect someone from the future to come back and ...teach us? Show us what's going on?

Hopefully you guys and gals are able to follow what I meant with all that. If so, here's a few additional questions you can think about.

If time travel ends up being a real possibility, or even a common, everyday thing, one would have to assume that future people would come back to our time and advise us to change things. For example, let's say America ends up getting in a civil war down the road. Or another leader somewhere in the world decides Hitler might have been on the right track. It's only logical to assume future people would come back and help us stop those horrible things from happening - effectively changing history (history, of course, that is dozens, hundreds, possibly even thousands of years in our future), and with that, possibly even the world.

Remember that Simpsons episode where Homer goes back in time, and he's advised not to change anything because it could dramatically alter the world he knows as the present? He ends up smashing a mosquito millions of years in his past, and when he returns to his present, the entire world is completely different. A funny episode, sure, and possibly an enormous exaggeration. But the fact is, nobody on this Earth could ever possibly know whether or not something like that might be a real threat.

We've got people putting brilliant minds to work trying to figure out time travel. At the same time we have people in the world who are trying to figure out what their family will eat for dinner, people wondering whether or not their infant daughter is going to die from that mosquito bite, and people hoping cancer doesn't take their son before he'll see his high school graduation next year.

Sometimes progress isn't really progress. Call me old fashioned, superstitious, ignorant, or anything else. But I don't think it would hurt mankind to stop worrying about the future, and focus on the now.

[tenkae]

I've always wondered about different planes, shifting through four dimensions. If the fourth dimension is indeed time, we should feasibly (and by this I mean when we actually figure it out) be able to cross planes and end up in different times, the problem is how to figure out which plane we would end up in. If the fourth dimension is just another dimension of space then we should be able to shift throughout the universe in an instant, therefor reaching our goal of traveling faster than light does in the third dimension. A third possibility is that the fourth dimension crosses realities. This is the one I'm most interested in. Crossing through the fourth dimension, ending up in an alternate existance, would be an entirely new exploration on its own. This would bring to mind the supposed laws of the same person existing in the same universe, which as far as I know is supposed to cause a paradox. If the fourth dimension does cross these planes though, I see no reason why it would cause any implosion of a reality, mainly because if we weren't meant to cross between them, why would there be openings or possibilities? If we could then this would mean they are all connected and we technically already exist in unison, just not in the same "place". Freaky-deaky stuff in my books 8|