[Verruckter]

Originally Posted by devonin

You might want to qualify your statement a little there, perhaps with reasons, or evidence, or logic.

We're discussing the possible consequences of time travel if it were possible, not just trying to decide if it were possible. Clearly it isn't possible by our current understanding of science, but that doesn't mean it never will be.


As for your postscript. I would argue that time exists because there are things that are not happening at this exact moment, so there must be some context for describing when they happened. Things that happened before this instant happened some number of instants ago. That's time.

Our labels of time are entirely subjective. Time doesn't use days and hours and minutes, we do, but that doesn't mean that time doesn't exist outside of our labels.

A tree is present objectively regardless of whether we acknolwedge that it is there, or what term we choose to apply to it.

Well, he's actually right. Time does not actually exist. It is just an image used to describe something that is far more complex. But in reality, it's not. Things aren't the same they were one hour, one minute, one second ago. But this energy, flow or whatever you might want to call it is not empirical. You cannot measure time, you cannot touch it, nor feel it, and it does not bend, twist nor turn.

The concept of time can be misleading because it "affects" everything. But in reality, it's only universal because it so happens that nothing can stay the same forever. The way molecules and atoms are built, it is absolutely impossible for something to stay exactly the same. They will degrade as "time" goes by. And since we observe this phenomenon on every single thing constituting our own universe, we conclude that all these individual cases are bound by a single force: time.

In reality, the only possible way of going back in time would be to "fix" every single atom and molecule the way it was a few minutes ago. But of course, that is impossible.

So, in fact, if you wanted to go in a "separate" version of reality, where, for example you invented something as a kid that made you a wealthy man years later (thank you thetenthdimension.com), it would be impossible because there would be no such alternate reality: the only possible one would be the one where you didn't make such an invention.