Time traveling, either by machines, wormholes or by sheer speed, is one of science fiction's most common tropes ever since Einstein's theory on time and its relativeness became public knowledge. Since many technologies first introduced in sci-fi media (such as personal computers, touch screen interfaces, virtual reality and 3D printing) are commonplace nowadays, many people think that time travel will be next big leap for humanity, alongside teleportation and flying cars (why nobody thinks about flying bikes, though?).

So, do you guys and gals think that it will be a possibility in the future? If so, will it be something anyone can use or only upper-class folks will have the money/power/tech to use it?

In my opinion it probably won't, and what backs up my argument is history itself. If people suddenly started going back in time to fix and/or prevent humanity's biggest mistakes and accidents or even daily goof-offs (let's not forget about the Butterfly Effect), our world's past would be constantly changing, making research and education on the subject downright impossible. Classes, books and documentaries on the matter would be severely affected by this fact - they might even cease to exist altogether, and while this can be a good thing for some people, it certainly wouldn't be for me, as history is my favorite subject in school.

But in the other hand, Earth has always been plagued by weird happenings and/or people ever since the dawn of time, and some of these can only be explained with time travel... If it DOES become available for the general populace sometime in the future, it would probably be banned soon after people start traveling back in time and sparking stuff like World War II and the 9/11 Attack, accidentally or not. Really makes you think, huh?

It actually is possible now because the faster you move the less time affects you thus if you traveled at the speed of light then one year to you would be 100 years for us and since it has been proven by having 2 synchronized atomic clocks and one in a jet that travels at the speed of sound the one on the jet was behind the one that didn't move thus if you were able to warp space around you you can travel ten times the speed of light thus 1 year to you is 1000 years to humanity on earth so in theory if you move fast enough you can be able to go BACK in time but the energy required to do so would be so tremendous and due to the mass of you and the machine you would burn out the energy you have so quick you wouldn't know that you filled so in theory you can time travel just that your going to need so much energy to do so and so there is my conclusion of time travel.
The end-Warioman21

I say yes to time travel in the future, but the government will make a law that stop people to time travel. Here is why the government don't want people to go in the past to change there live. For an example go to the past to help them win the mega-millions or killed someone who bullied them as a child. That is my argument.

pollution_skunk :

I think that a lot of people talking about time travel makes the one fatal assumption that messes all afterlogic up.

That time exists in the first place, (as a timestream, or whatever.)

You say what?!

Well, all time is, basically, is a form of human measurement, like inches so to speak.

An inch, is a unit of distance, and an object may span several inches in many different directions.

But what are inches exactly?

Well, inches, are abstract ideas.

They only exist in the mind.

All we have is matter, and motion.

Molecules move through space.

And, the way I see it, whether we invent the minute, or not. Matter will always be moving through space, as science subsets it too.

This is everything at it's core.

Molecules in motion.


Now, I have to ask. How does some molecules going way faster than others cause the other molecules to move in reverse motion? That doesn't make any sense to me, and certainly isn't scientific.You can go really fast, but you can't make everything else go backwards. I have no idea why one person going really fast would make everything else go backwards. but I see more solid proof I may believe it.

I remember one experiment, where they had an astronaut take a watch into outspace, and when he came back to earth he compared his watch, to a control watch down below, or something like that, and the times were different.

Now, Don't get me wrong, but before we say, "YES TIME TRAVEL!" I'd like to point something out.

Astronauts who spend large enough amounts of time in space grow a few inches when they come back down to earth.

why is this?

Well, because of the lack of gravity!

I just wonder. . .What if gravity effected the watches? Well, that was their point actually, and they said that therefore, gravity effects time.

Well, hold no now, how does gravity effect time? I would have to say it doesn't, cause all it does is weight stuff down, not actually affect time it'self, with is exactly what it did to the watches on earth, to as where they didn't affect the watch on space as much, hence the difference.

It may be gravity, but not time travel.

It's just people talk about this invisible thing called "time" And they say that by tapping into it we can affect everything make it retrace it's steps. But since when is there a timestream that we can actually affect and mess with? Where is it? Time is as made up as inches, in reality, they don't exists, they are our units of measurement. Same for time.

What if someone came up with something that didn't exist and then said, "if we effect this, we effect everything!"

It's all a bunch of theory- or hypothosis. But hey, it's fun to talk about. The science channel and TV in general loves to call stuff a theory that isn't though all of the time.

Straight up answer? No.
My reasoning? Well, for one, hypothetically there'd be tons of paradoxes, and another is that if it happened there could be a cult, fanatic group, extremists, you name it; that'll get their hands on one or make their own time machine and then boom! The Declaration of Independence was never signed. Or boom! A country got the upper hand in a war from going back and knowing what to expect.
   Another thing is that my friends I like to debate with will be like, "What if the U.N. decided to agree on something to change, like the Holocaust?" And I'd say that'd just make a mess of the world now. A major reason Israel became a country after WW II was due to the fact there was a need for a Jewish safe-land. Antisemitism (a hate for Jews) was present awhile before WW II, while some disagreed with it, I believe that people started frowning upon it because of the Holocaust. Without it, there is the possibility that antisemitism could've gone on for a while longer and escalated to something larger. This is just one event that would change everything today if there was time travel. I feel it's a unspoken rule that time travel shouldn't be really attempted--- for everyone's sake.

Nope, not gunna happen. Seems like a cool idea, but not happening. Not on earth anyway. It is quite possible that time travel exists in other galaxies, but seeing as humans have not yet mastered space travel, and are in fact just in its infancy, the idea of time travel seems very far away. There just isnt enough resources here on earth. Also, since we cant travel to other galaxies, we cannot get those resources, so I cant see it happening.

steel_attacker : Interesting theory! However, it also involves inter-dimensional travel, which is another subject entirely... Maybe it's easier to travel between universes than in time?

baileyface544 : Same thing as steel_attacker.

Warioman21 : This "energy burning" theory of yours is pretty interesting and scientifically accurate, to boot! Yeah, going at extremely high speeds can prove some risks to both machinery and the human body: just look at the huge number of lethal traffic accidents caused by speeding all around the world...

bigfoot192 : Yeah, that's my point too. 

BluemageKyle : Same thing as bigfoot192.

Sword legion : Whoa! I was mind-blown by your argument! I never really thought of time as a continuous flow that's merely measured by human means. We've been taking the Roman time measurement system for granted for such a long time now that I completely forgot about this possibility. Congratulations, you really think ahead of others!

bobq : Nice theory with some great basis on some of the "hard" sci-fi stories I love the most, such as 2001: A Space Odyssey. It has really grabbed my attention, mostly because of the fact that I absolutely love the genre and the concepts presented by Clarke on his books and that I'm an avid reader of anything possible

Time travel is possible, on a quantum level. Here and now in 2014, we have the technology to alter a molecule's speed of passage through time. However, without completely getting all technical, altering this speed of time flow is a little different than stepping in a blue box, and then stepping out of it in the year 1966. If such a thing were ever to become possible, which I doubt, it would take computer power that is hundreds of thousands of times more powerful and precise than what we have today. Even when you apply Moore's Law and the rapid development of our technology, that is still a couple hundred years ahead on the horizon.

Also, another reason why I think time travel as it appears in fiction will never become a reality is because we don't have visitors from the future. Think about it: let's say time travel as it appears in 21st-century fiction, becomes a reality in the 26th century. People would want to use it to witness major events in history, such as...
* 1991/12/25 - Fall of the Soviet Union
* 1996/07/05 - Birth of first cloned creature, Dolly the sheep
* 2001/09/11 - Attack of the World Trade Center & Pentagon
* 2009/01/20 - First black president of the United States, Barack Obama, is elected
* 2011/03/11 - Magnitude 9.0 earthquake/tsunami hits Japan

... all of those and other important historical events that happened in the last 25 years, and not once have we seen a 26th century high school student visiting our time period to finish his/her history report. That either tells me that fictional-style time travel will never be possible, or humanity will be wiped out by disease / nukes / alien invasions / haruhi suzumiya / whatever before we have the technology for it to be possible.

Hi I'm back so I found more notes in my book that I've been refining since m,y last post and found some interesting things,for example nothing has enough gravity to affect time nothing,except for one thing,BLACK HOLES!You know how black holes are just collapsed stars,well due to their gravity nothing can escape nothing not even light or anything so as you get pulled in to the black hole a process called  Spaghettification pulls things into thin strips well since the gravity is so strong time is also pulled in,for example you somehow are able to survive going through a black  hole you would feel everything slowing down until it freezes but some objects make it inside and when they get inside the objects are moving at the speed of infinity which would make them able to travel BACK in time but something else could happen because when it gets in there if time stops moving well time doesn't exist thus anything absorbed my a black holes are well deleted from EXISTENCE yes existence it destroyed matter and yeah also there have been theory's that it actually sends the objects to the future.Also black holes can die out and have had no traces of objects they absorbed so 1 of 3 thins have happened 1 they could have ceased to exist,2 they were sent further in time ie. the future,3 or they could have gone back in time there is my conclusion so I might have dis proven some theories and aided some,try to beat that theory and facts guys.
The End-Warioman21

I love this question.  I do not believe time travel is possible because I do not believe time exists.  I believe there is only one time and that time is now.  The past and future are only constructs of the human mind.  Anybody ever seen any time other than right now?  Nope, you can think about the "past" but it isn't really there it is just an idea in your head same goes for the "future".  So I don't think you can visit these ideas other than in computer simulations and the like because they don't exist as most people believe them to exist as actual (times places or whatever) that you can go to.  As an after thought, this theory of mine also bleeds over into why you will not age differently at the speed of light and most theories about why nothing can go faster than the speed of light.  

A problem most people here are probably thinking is how to make everything around you go backwards as in time but what is happening is your going forward in time thus the perspective of them going so in reality you should go forward I. Time for time travel or go back I. time by using speed but the problem with that is as you start moving faster and faster you gain speed and mass and the faster you get the more mass you gain or experience it until you are gaining more mass than speed so you would need something strong enough to withstand the force of it and heat you would need something as strong as diamond or stronger that means until we can find something to protect us from those speeds then time travel is possible and already exists but we would not survive the process so there would be no point in doing so.As to why we haven't seen people from the future here because they may have dressed like us and how are we going to distinguish that one person from everyone else.That is my conclusion
The end-Warioman21.