RE: Crazy people & time travel

Everyone knows the plot about the movie 12 Monkeys. A catostrophic event happens, and the world goes to hell. Someone is sent back in time to essentially discover and thwart the event from happening. Similar premise in Terminator, and also a recent episode of the tv show Castle. let's just say for the sake of argument that time travel had been discovered at some point in the future. is it at all unreasonable to say such a person who had traveled back in time gets arrested or stopped by police, and doesn't have proper ID? i wonder if there has been a study of psychiatric patients being held at mental institutions who have no proper ID and claim fantastical stories. i know it makes for some interesting plot lines to books and movies; but could there be any truth to the premise?

Well if they ever do invent time travel, then its some thing to consider. (12 monkeys was a good movie)
Like these photos I have seen on this site, time traveller caught on film. I doubt if they would turn up with the wrong kit ect as they would know that they had been caught just by reading history.

Lawgiver
Everyone knows the plot about the movie 12 Monkeys. A catostrophic event happens, and the world goes to hell. Someone is sent back in time to essentially discover and thwart the event from happening. Similar premise in Terminator, and also a recent episode of the tv show Castle. let's just say for the sake of argument that time travel had been discovered at some point in the future. is it at all unreasonable to say such a person who had traveled back in time gets arrested or stopped by police, and doesn't have proper ID? i wonder if there has been a study of psychiatric patients being held at mental institutions who have no proper ID and claim fantastical stories. i know it makes for some interesting plot lines to books and movies; but could there be any truth to the premise?

So, a person in the future goes back in time, gets stopped by police, and tells them he is from the future.. and expects to be believed?

Time traveler or not, he's still crazy.

You also forgot the 4400, who was about people being taken at various points in time and "dropped" all together at the same time, with new powers, from people from the future to change it so humanity survives.

Fringe also explored that idea.

And I noticed a couple sci-fi basic ideas are always reused, with only different details. I then think about it that it is either lousy writers, or someone is trying to tell us something.

I also saw a Canadian premiere for a show whose title I forgot over a year ago that explored the idea of going back in time to save the world.

I think it is because of the inability of the writers to think something different about time travel stories.

But who knows?

It's dangerous - take one of these!


Source

Sorry, it gets cropped by ATS, look at the source for a better pic.

In the remake of the old movie, "The Time Machine". The main character invents the machine so he can go back and save the love of his life. But he consistently fails, and this frustrates him to no end. Then he goes into the future, and the leader of the molocks, I think they were called, answers the question as to why he always fails to save his fiance.

Answer; Because he would have never invented the time machine if his fiance had never been killed.

Point; The very act of traveling into the past, creates a paradox that cannot be resolved.

Which is to say, anyone traveling from the future to the past, is doomed to fail on some level, because the future would not exist as it is, if the past were different than what it was.

Uncle Rico?

I saw twelve monkeys, that was a good movie. I can't see time travel ever being possible, we are in a different position in space. If you go back a minutes, you could wind up in the middle of the earth or in space somewhere.

Now a signal directed in a specific direction could be sent, but you would have to know what direction to send it in. It could be directed at the frequency of thought of certain people and make them think of something. So could commands from another highly advanced race on another world. Maybe we were dropped off here to mine minerals for someone.

I can get just as creative as the creators of twelve monkeys if I let my mind wander a little. It is kinda fun thinking up possibilities. Maybe Hollywood will hire me as a writer, I did know a movie director, but she may be retired already.

Did you watch Bones last night OP?

I've counseled folks with that story. 1 was a John Doe. His files said that,he called himself Kevin. Army guy, the whole 9. Diagnosed back then as delusional schizophrenia. I always remembered him and his story. He had conviction unfortunately I've seen the same conviction in folks that thought they were Jesus. So there ya go. I could write threads about some of the people I've talked too and how they thought the world turned. That's all I got .

Also there is a good book out there called the Pilgrim the author escapes me atm. Based on a Jung file .

Lawgiver, what I great idea. If I were rich, I'd assemble all the camera equipment and let you go wild with a documentary about it.

As far as the term "crazy", some out there would call all of us ATSers crazy,

Time travel backwards on a linear timeline would be impossible, See: Grandfather Paradox.

And in the alternate reality method, with a multiverse, I assume if it was possible we'd have documented instances of it. Too powerful to not use/exploit. Whether our timeline would be of interest would be another matter.

rickymouse
I can't see time travel ever being possible, we are in a different position in space. If you go back a minutes, you could wind up in the middle of the earth or in space somewhere.

This shouldn't really be an issue. John Titor discussed this problem when explaining how his time machine worked. Not that I believe Titor was real, just that he was aware of the issue. So would any future scientists building a time machine.


reply to post by Lawgiver


OP, if the future people can build a time machine wouldn't they be able to make up some false ID to go along with it?

Stephen Hawking has famously said "..This picture would explain why we haven't been over run [sic] by tourists from the future..." in reference to his belief that time travel is impossible.

This is flawed logic.

Suppose that Tipler, Einstein-Rosen, and Graham, Wheeler and Everett were right: there are multiple parallel universes (multiverses, or worldlines) you could jump to with the right space-time distortion device.

Then suppose that a time travel device could be built (ie., harnessing microsingularities of the type the LHC is purported to have created).

You would be insane to travel to any distant past or future worldline without completely blending in, considering how unwelcoming our global cultures have been to perceived outsiders of any sort.

In short, Time travel will or has been created (lol). The tourists have blended in.

advances in one area of technology does not equate to advances in others. people are still as smart as they were 50 yrs ago. meaning that people are still as dumb as they were 50 yrs ago. if the technology exists for time travel, why is it that we always think the smartest and the best get to embark. could be a lucky person, richest person, or the person with the right connections. a time travelor is almost never the one who invented it, or so the movies say. but i know one thing. lies are hard to consistently tell. it is almost impossible to consistently tell lies. its so much easier telling the truth in a consistent manner. unless you are a sociopath. what i'm getting to is that someone who is from the future can very well be caught and locked up, gets scared/confused and starts telling the truth. i can't argue paradox or complexities of what time travel means. but what i am arguing is that if such a thing as time travel could be invented in the future, it would only stand to reason that more than one person has traveled. and if more than one person has done so, it would be reasonable to assume that a small percentage of such travelors could be arrested/institutionalized. if there was some technology that allowed such travelors in custody to go back, no doubt there would be some kind of fail safe protocol that would not permit them to disappear after being caught and catalogued in history.

reply to post by Lawgiver


Let's just say time travel is so improbable that it isn't even worth discussing. The idea of time travel breaks pretty much every physics law there is, but here are a couple of simple laws.

Matter/Energy can neither be created nor destroyed, they can only be converted - Well, I'd even argue this one a bit, but the standard model says otherwise and time travel means the destruction of mass/energy in your original time line and the creation of mass/energy in your destination time line.

Conservation of energy - Move someone from their time to another time, you move their energy with them which gives a net gain at their destination time and a net loss at their source time which changes the total energy of the universe.

Conservation of matter - Move someone from their time to another time, you move their mass which gives a net gain at their destination time and a net loss at their source time which changes the total mass of the universe.

There is also the problem of mass/energy persistence or the distribution of that energy or mass over time. If you travel back 200 years, weigh 200 pounds and carry 500 btu's of energy, then that 200 lbs and 500 btu's get added to the universe for 200 years and then hopefully a reset of some kind occurs. That may not seem like a big problem, but if there are millions of entities doing this, that could become problematic. But, take another scenario of permanent migration to the future in which case the mass and energy stay in the future until the final throws of entropy. There are other iterations of this problem, eg. you travel to the past for 30 years and return to your original time line. Once back, you travel back again to the first day of the first month and you stay for 30 days, then 29, then 28, etc., in 30 days you've just increased the mass energy transfer of your first month in your 30 years in the past by 6000%.

Even if you could leave your own time line and return at the same instance you left, you still deposit that mass and energy in the past or the future for the duration of the time you exist in the past or future, which of course increases the total mass/energy of the universe. If you look at all the possibilities and probabilities, time travel is ridiculous.

Another example, you have a full meal, go back in time and take a crap depositing that mass/energy (turd) in the system, you decide to leave and come back to your time without eating an equivalent meal to produce an equivalent crap when you get back to your original time. Now you've left probably 500 grams of turd in the past which will be added to the universe forever and you can't get rid of that nasty old turd. Can you imagine the mountain of time-displaced turds if a whole bunch of entities behaved this way?

Even traveling between parallel universes/realities would create almost exactly the same problem because you would be changing the mass/energy relationship in your originating universe and the parallel universe (especially if you left a turd behind, you'd have "persistence of turd" ad infinitum).

So, before you can even start looking at some viable and rational theory of time travel, you have to first look at the universe as a structure, or not. If the universe is a closed finite system, then the laws seem to apply. If the universe is open ended, then there may not be a problem with the creation and destruction of mass/energy. Or maybe the universe is based on total mass/energy over total time, which still may or may not create a problem.

Cheers - Dave

reply to post by Lawgiver


SOME people are as smart as they were 50 years ago. Others are so doped up on food chemistry they are having a high old time and are fine with that. I wish these people weren't running our country and managing it's finances though

We'll they say that when the time machine is invented you will only be able to go back to the point that the machine is invented because before that there was no time machine. The scientists will know they got it right though because all kinds of time travelers will appear to see the first time trip.

reply to post by bobs_uruncle


What if it's the same universe just a different time? Then the laws of physics are obeyed and conservation is maintained.

damwel
reply to post by bobs_uruncle

 

What if it's the same universe just a different time? Then the laws of physics are obeyed and conservation is maintained.

That would appear to only work if all time were the same time and that the universe was a finite closed system. The problem is that inside the system we experience the arrow of time traveling in one direction, so when it comes to the laws of physics, eg. matter/energy cannot be created nor destroyed, we look at a time slice. If you were an observer outside a closed and finite universe, well then you could do some pretty neat things, eg. add to the matter/energy content of the universe. It would be like writing with a black felt tip pen on a CD.

Since we are trapped inside this virtual reality and cannot see it or manipulate it from the outside, I find time travel highly improbable for any of us.

Cheers - Dave

reply to post by Lawgiver


As someone who is officially nuts, I approve this message.