Re: TimeTravel

haradon@acsu.buffalo.edu
Wed, 21 Oct 1998 17:30:57 -0700

--On Wednesday, October 21, 1998, 12:18 PM -0400 "Dan Fabulich" <daniel.fabulich@yale.edu> wrote:

> Lady D'Los wrote:

>>Two simple questions which I feel will tickle your brain cells... 
>>Timetravel, a Transhuman possability, or just a daydream? Would it be a 
>>good thing, or disastrous?

>
> Into the future? Absolutely. Backwards? Almost certainly not.
>
> Consider: if we were develop backwards time travel at some point in the
> future, then someone could have gone back in time to some point before
> today. If time travel will be discovered, then it has already happened.
>
> Thus, due to the very nature of time travel, if it hasn't happened
already,
> we can safely assume that it never will.
>
> -Dan
>
> "Decay is inherent in all compounded things. Strive unceasingly."
> -- The last words of Buddhadasa Bhikkhu

In "Hyperspace" by Michio Kaku, a scenerio is sketched out which seems like it would work. You make a worm hole - he descibred how to do this, it involves something with charging two sets of plates and relies on something called the Casmir Effect, which has been observed in the lab on a small scale, but he didn't go into much more detail about it - anyway, you make a worm hole using the Casmir Effect, and you have the two ends of a wormhole right next to eachother. You then put one on a ship, and accelerate it to near-light speed, and fly it around for a while, then after 20 years or so, return it to its original position. While this one end of a worm hole was going very fast, time was compressed for it - say it was going fast enough that only 10 seconds passed for it while 20 years passed for the other end of the worm hole which did not travel. Now, you have a wormhole which has one end at point A in space, and its other end only a mile or so away, but one end is twenty years ahead of the other one. You pass through one end and come out the other end twenty years into the future. Pass the other way, and go twenty years into the past.



Zeb Haradon
my web page:
http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~haradon