Seeing the past: A somewhat realistic idea

[Forlorn Radiance]

Originally Posted by ledwix

Actually, mass becomes increasingly greater as you approach light speed, if my memory serves me correctly. This is why it is theoretically impossible to get an object to travel at that speed, because as it hit the speed of light, its mass would be infinite, and so would the energy required to get it to that speed. This is also why we consider objects that move at the speed of light, such as photons and gravitons, to be massless particles. Also, I thought time travel was only possible in the forward direction, not to the past, because of the breakdown in the equations for general relativity.

Nicely put. E=mc^2 can tell us that an electron (which moves NEAR the speed of light) would need an amount of energy equivalent to all the energy produced from every star in the universe since the beginning of time to get it to light speed. That being said, if you could get enough energy, anything is really possible.

On a side note, the "window dimension" idea seems much more likely to me. Lets say that time travel is possible. If people from the future, no matter how distant managed it, wouldn't we have some traces of them now? Its much more easy to believe that time travel would also affect space, and thusly thrust us into an alternate dimension. The past (time) we see, may not, or more likely than not, would not be anything of any great relevance.