Time Travel = Mandate for Fate
by VnutZ79 on 14 November 2006
Let’s assume you decide to travel into the future. If there was such a thing as free will, it should be impossible to have any discernable destination. For instance, you decide to travel forward in time to meet your great-great-grandchildren. In order for them to exist in a future that you can travel to, a necessary timeline would have to take place whereupon certain individuals met and had children, etc. etc. This would imply fate as key events must take place for the voyage to occur. Without fate it would be impossible to have any destination as an infinite number of potential outcomes are possible.
Now, if free will does exist and you are able to travel into the future, there is no guarantee that two individuals traveling to the future would necessarily land in the “same future.” This follows the multiple world concept (somewhat akin to the movie “The One” starring Jet Li).
Traveling into the past would seem “logically cleaner” as events have already transpired and you should be able to jump into them. However, the Observer Effect will inevitably alter the outcome of time as it would be impossible to be present in the past without having some influence.
Unless, the world were governed by fate. In that case, you could travel back in time because you were “supposed to” and the past has already compensated for you being there. While you may perceive that you are altering things, the circular loop of time that you are involved in will show that event has always taken place and fate requires that you DO travel back in time to do it. This would allow you to actually return to your own time reference without having created any anomalies, because it has always happened that way.
Free will, throws a monkey wrench into the system because conceivably you could alter the past in such a way as to negate the fact that you ever existed. Or alter the past such that time travel was never discovered which means you never went to the past which means you could never have disrupted things. BLAAAAAAHHHH (runs away with hair on fire waving arms in the air). Or, avoiding the self-negating paradox, free will causes the same problem as traveling into the future – how do you return to your “present” if your existence in the past introduces variables and options that will inevitably create numerous pathways through time?
Thus, it seems to me, that for time travel to exist – it is a requirement that 1) FATE exists and man has no FREE WILL or 2) somehow the multiple world/dimension thing exists and we simply move through those worlds based on choices (which isn’t that far from actually being fate anyway).
http://www.omninerd.com/2006/11/14/coffeeshop/14
From Summoner
I think that whoever wrote this article has no concept of quantum mechanics.
Wave function collapse as originally proposed by Schroedinger dictates that for
any particular moment in time, there are an infinite number of possibilities
for future events all of which exist in a state of quantum flux. Basically
saying that for each moment we make a choice, there are an infinite number of
alternate realities where we made a different choice. The present that we travel
through is a singularity of time in which all of the choices we have the potential
to make are occurring regardless of the final choice we make. And,
interestingly enough, Stephen Hawking proposed a while back that the same can be said
about the past. Just as we have infinite futures, we also have infinite pasts. If
one were to travel through time, they would not be able to interact with their
direct past or change it in any way because they would be interacting with any
number of possible pasts. Thus any paradox is eliminated and you actually
could kill your grandfather, because the resulting time line from that change
exists on its’ own independently of the observer/interactor.
I suppose that it could be said that it is fate for you to make all of the
choices at the same time, each existing in a different parallel reality. So much
for fate AND free will, because neither really exist. Our consciousness just
seems to travel from one reality to the next depending on how we collapse the
probability wave.
Not that time travel is possible anyway… LOL
Is this the type of conversation you hoped to spark?
Sincerely,
Summoner
From Brenna
One word…paradox… Another concept…slipstream and split timelines… You know, electrons are not always here. Where do they go? We don’t know. Perhaps into one of the other timestreams of parallel universes. Perhaps through the fabric of what we can see with our limited three dimensional senses (they only seem unlimited, because we can’t usually see in four dimensions) into a space that we cannot see, because we are so limited. We postulate that the fourth dimension is time. We don’t know for certain that it is, but people CAN see in time…some people…sometimes.
If you’d like a for-instance… I do something (no, I can’t control it, so don’t ask) that is akin to astral. I don’t just travel in space. I travel in time, usually forward but sometimes back. I’ve had dreams where I am standing behind myself, observing. I think Em has heard me talk about this before, so she already knew this about me. I will stay for a time and then leave. I remember these “dreams” and when they occur, I already know what the people around me are going to say and do, because I’ve heard it before. I also know where my astral is in the room, but I’ve always been afraid to turn and look myself in the eye, not that I know I’d be able to see myself, at all. That’s when I go forward.
When I go back, it’s a different affair. The most potent one of these I had was when I was in grade school. Again, I was standing behind someone. In this case, it was my parents. I was sitting in the back seat of a car, and I had the distinct impression that I was hiding from them. The dream was so vivid that I asked my father when it happened, relating everything they said and did, believing it was a memory I had of being a toddler, before my parents separated. Since I wasn’t standing behind myself, that made sense… In my mind, it couldn’t have been an astral, because I wasn’t behind me. Any doubts my father had about what I was capable of vanished. You see… It was a memory of sorts, but it was an echo of a night a year before I was even conceived. I couldn’t have “remembered” it, because I technically didn’t exist yet.
Don’t get my biological mother on this subject, though. It seems that me conversing with my grandmother’s twin (who died when she was 16) was a little too much for her. Then, she found out that I could do this astral thing, and that was the last straw for her. Reason for it? She’s never had a psychic experience in her life…save one, and once she found out about my astral, she blamed that one on me. When she was pregnant with me, my Uncle Bobby (her youngest brother) was in Viet Nam. She had a very vivid dream of standing there, watching him make a phone call from Nam. My Aunt Peggy called her the next morning, and my mother passed this amusing dream along. Uncle Bobby HAD called Peggy from the field the night before. Out of the ordinary was definitly not Bio-B’s thing, and her concept that I’d dragged her along for the ride with me didn’t sit well with her.
Brenna
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http://www.brennalyons.com http://www.myspace.com/brennalyons
Nobody’s knocking. Nobody calls. Nobody’s footsteps out in the hall.
NOBODY, a dark fiction anthology from EWAG. On sale now.
Stephen Hawking is recently in the news for saying (if I have this right) that the universe could have originated without the assistance of God. Given his own sad condition, I can’t help wondering if he feels he could similarly manage without the assistance of God himself…