"Time Travel"
 

This is somthing I have been pondering for quite some time and I would like imput from a few high-level thinkers.
I know there are a couple impossibilities in this idea but please dont get hung up on them.
When you see a star at night, the light you are seeing is not what is happening right now but what was happening (perhaps) millions of years ago based on the speed of light and the extreme distance betwine the Earth and most stars.
So here is my theory.
Assume (by some freak act of phisics) that we found a way to rocket a shuttle many times faster then the speed of light. If we shot this shuttle very far away from earth and passed light for a long period of time would we be able to eventualy stop and (with a very powerful telescope) look back at the earth as it was thousands or perhaps millions of years ago? Just like we on Earth can see the birth of a star that has most likely already died out in real time, could we look back on Earth and see such things as living dinosaurs, or the Battle of Thermopylae? Or possably see yourself playing outside as a child? I'd like to hear your ideas.

Re: "Time Travel"
 

I have thought of this many a time. Theoretically it is very possible to see the past light emitted from the Earth, if you travel just ahead of the Speed of Light. As far as actual small-scale events including people and such, I imagine any images retrieved from the telescope would be blurred beyond recognition no matter its' power, due to the relatively dim atmosphere of Earth.

Re: "Time Travel"
 

Nima was a being from the future, many many years into the future, his stepmania skills were alright for his time, he would be considered a low-middle class player. Nima, getting sick of people ignoring his scores like 14 perfects on 0x1311, saved up his lunch money for several years until he could afford to build a rocket shuttle that moved so fast he could travel faster than light and eventually see back to our current time. Nima did just this, and using his state of the art wireless internet connection that could pick up a connection from anywhere in the universe, he played stepmania in the year 2003. Playing to only get bad scores to look new to the game, Nima wasted a little under 3 years gaining respect in the past stepmania community he had time traveled to. He eventually became the worlds best stepmania player, and could finally show his skills from the future from which he came. Nima made many videos to prove himself legit beforehand, he posted some scores, each better than the last, eventually, his bad 14 perfect score from the future he posted. People had already started to become suspicious by this point, and even more people had been convinced by this score. Nima, not knowing what to do because his camera had broken and he was stuck in space, he couldn't make a new video to prove his legitimacy. Instead of saying that because people would believe he was lying, Nima claimed his past videos are all the proof anyone needed, he had made no mistakes showing judge/.ini in those videos on good scores he claimed. Tsutter, unconvinced by Nima's excuse, continued to call bs upon Nima, as well as many, many more players. At this point, Nima had started to realize some of the differences of the future because of what he had done to the past. Nima knew what he had to do, lie to everyone, but give them what they wanted, and say that he wasn't legit. Nima did this, and saved the future from himself.
Nobody knows for sure what has become of Nima since these events, many believe he still floats around in his space shuttle, commenting on random youtube videos every now and then, other believe he returned back to his own time, and continued to play stepmania.

Re: "Time Travel"
 

The school's old Earth Systems teacher explained this in class once.
It has always fasinated me.
I would like to see the Big Bang more then anything.

Re: "Time Travel"
 

i can see where you are coming from on this. of course its impossible, butthe theory is sorta probable. if only there could be such a high powered telescope to actually see so far. you would most likely be able to see into the past because the light that the earth gave away 10,000 years ago would be shown if you are 10,000 light years away.

Re: "Time Travel"
 

Also ponder this. If you were going faster than the speed of light and you looked out a rear window toward the earth that you are speeding away from would you be able to see anything at all while you were moving? Would it be complete darkness because no light is hitting you?



Are you high?


What I am trying to get at with this is if you throw a stick in a river and hop in a car and speed down stream for a while then stop, eventualy that stick will reach you. Do you see what I'm getting at?

Re: "Time Travel"
 

I'm not sure what you're building a window out of that holds up in vacuum at a velocity faster than the speed of lgith, but there would be plenty of light on all sides of you, just not the same light that you'd see if you were stationary.

You won't be able to tell what you're looking at in the same way that just driving very fast at normal Earth speeds starts to create tunnel vision and blur what you can see around you.

Also...the important thing you seem to be missing in the OP is that light is not the same thing as images. Moving away from the Earth extremely fast until you've "passed" the light that is a million years old is something you can do in theory, except what you're really doing is moving away from the -sun- extremely fast until you've passed the light that is a million years old, and so you'd be able to see, um...some light that is technically old.

If you focused your super powerful, incredibly accurate telescope back at Earth and looked at it, you'd get -A clear image of Earth right now exactly as you left it- (Or potentially a few seconds after you left it depending I suppose on how long it took you to travel that far away.

What you're suggesting is somewhat analogous to saying "If I follow a river really far down from the lake, and then look at the water, can I see the lake"

Yes, it took the light emitted from say, some star far away, so long to get here that it may have already gone nova and we don't know because the light from the explosion hasn't reached us, but if you were to travel there at many times the speed of light, it would have still already gone nova, just as you approached it, you'd see the star's development accellerating because you were catching up to the light it was emitting right now.

Going really fast doesn't actually turn time backwards for everyone but you, as much as some bad sci-fi would have you believe. The best you can do in terms of going faster than light is to use it to functionally time travel into the future.

Re: "Time Travel"
 

Another discussion totally obliterated by Devonin's great mind.

Re: "Time Travel"
 

yea, but the theroy he is saying still makes sense. No one knows whether this is true or not because we havent done it, but i do agree the light from the earth would be so spread out, looking trough a telescope, that everything would be blurry and the only thing you would see is light. Like when you look at the planets in the sky its just light even though they aren't stars.

Re: "Time Travel"
 

Nobody knows whether this is true or not because our understanding of physics says it is completely impossible to go faster than the speed of light.

Re: "Time Travel"
 

That's because we can only perceive information traveling slower than the speed of light.

~Tsugomaru

Re: "Time Travel"
 

Well we still have no evidence that are only 3 spacial dimensions. As long as we're not wiped out before we get the chance, I'm sure we'll get to a point where the speed of light is laughable.

Re: "Time Travel"
 

if we are speaking physics then the g force our bodies would exprience would crush are bodies, so yes we could not travel any where near the speed of light...

Re: "Time Travel"
 

I do not agree with this. The acceleration wouldn't have to be any more intence than a normal rocket, just (hypotheticly speaking) the acceleration would probably take longer.

I am a big fan of really really old movies. The some of them about space travel (before we actualy did it) talk of how the forces over 5 G's would kill a man in seconds.
We know that man can survive (with injury sometimes) ejecting out of a jet aircraft. If I remember right I think that is a short burst of 200+ G's.

If you can base your statement on fact I really would like to look at your sources.




to this I answer...

Re: "Time Travel"
 

we are always looking into the past no matter what

Re: "Time Travel"
 

You can't make a rocket shuttle go 10000000000000000000000 per second.... Yeah, that's 10 with 21 zeros behind it, AKA the speed of light.

Re: "Time Travel"
 

You forgot the units. You can make any number seem big if they are measured in units as small or smaller than picometers.

You wouldn't die from the "g-force" unless you went from 0 to light speed within a matter of seconds. The g-force deals with acceleration and one g is 9.8 m/s^2. If you can steadily accelerate to the speed of light, then it shouldn't be a problem. Although you can't feel it, we're traveling through space at well over a hundred kilometers per second, but we don't experience any g's because we're not accelerating much.

~Tsugomaru

Re: "Time Travel"
 

Leaping over all of your impossibilities, yes, you could do this.

However, it would never happen, given they are impossibilities. We don't need to get hung up on breaking the speed of light - that's not the real problem (Sure, you can't break the speed of light across the shortest possible distance between two points in flat three-dimensional space, ever, but that doesn't mean it's impossible to find a faster path between those two points and beat light there). The real impossibility is this telescope that will intercept the incredibly old light. There are just too many problems with this, such as the myriad of obstructions in space that would prevent that light from ever getting to your telescope. You'd never be able to get a clear image of the surface of the Earth regardless of the telescope strength.

Re: "Time Travel"
 

The focus of this confuses me, as I don't have the physics knowledge to give myself a clear explanation.

If we can see bodies of space that existed millions of years before mankind, then given the amazing technology, we should be able to see images of the earth in previous states, but I have no knowledge to back that up. HOWEVER, when the OP spoke of going faster then the speed of light and then stopping to look at the earth. Wouldn't light catch up with you in less than a second once stopped? If so, wouldn't that result in seeing absolutely nothing from the telescope, or images of the earth changing so fast that the human mind couldn't comprehend it happening?

Re: "Time Travel"
 

The reason why we are able to see light from millions of years ago is because that's how long it took to travel from its source to the Earth.

~Tsugomaru