• Question: do you think its possible to travel forward in time

    Asked by IMDANIELCODLEGENDBANTAMANLOOOOOOOOOOOL to Matthew, Laura, Andrew on 10 Nov 2014. This question was also asked by Aahh_maaan.
    • Photo: Matthew Camilleri

      Matthew Camilleri answered on 10 Nov 2014:

      Looking at the history of human civilisations it is difficult to believe that time travel is possible, as there were a number of catastrophes that people could have actually avoided had they been advised to do so.

      Considering that if time travel is invented there might be rules that would state that no human can interfere with matters of the past or the future then it might be a reason why we have never seen any time travellers.

      If we were to develop time travel we have to find a way how to get speeds to much higher than the speed of light, and seeing that we are not even close to get to the speed of light I’d have to say we are light years away from being able to travel forward in time.

      At the end y answer would be: with our knowledge of how things work it is currently impossible to see a future were time travel is possible, but who knows what future generations will come up with. Science can make everything possible, a thousand years ago the concept of electricity was an impossibility, and now it is used in every single household to power all of our appliances.

    • Photo: Laura Schofield

      Laura Schofield answered on 20 Nov 2014:

      There is nothing in the laws of physics (as we know them) toale time travel impossible, in fact they state that it is completely possible as long as we can manage to travel faster than the speed of light. That’s the challenge! We don’t currently have a way to achieve this so we can’t do it right now.
      I watched a film called About Time a few weeks ago and that dealt with the concept of time travel reasonably well really! Albeit in a very romantic comedy setting…

    • Photo: Andrew McKinley

      Andrew McKinley answered on 20 Nov 2014:

      We are all travelling forward in time, at a rate of one second per second…. That’s not really very useful – I suspect that what you want (and, really, what we all understand by “travelling forward” is to “travel forward faster than the world around us”!

      One of the consequences of Einstein’s theory of Relativity is that this is absolutely possible – essentially, if you can accelerate to a high speed (close to light speed), then time for you passes more slowly than the world around you. This means that if you accelerate your spaceship and time yourself for 30 seconds, you might slow down again to find that days or even years have passed for the world around you – even though you feel as though you have only been travelling for 30 seconds!
      This effect has been observed in the real world by sending atomic clocks (very precise clocks) around the world on jet planes – two clocks are synchronised, one remains in the lab, the other is sent off on a jet plane – and when they are brought back together, one of them is a few nanoseconds ahead of the other! Nanoseconds aren’t very significant, but the principle is proven – all you need to do is to travel quickly!

      As for travelling back again though – that remains impossible; the laws of thermodynamics tell us that entropy can only increase – to travel back in time would contradict this, so any trip to the future as described above would be a one-way trip 🙁

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