Time Machines
Israeli scientist Amos Ori claims to have figured out how to make a time machine. Here’s the twist: once complete, the machine will only allow you to travel back to the time it was built. My theory is that no time machine will ever be built that can go back further in time than that. If such a machine could ever be invented in the future, we’d have heard about it by now.
August 25th, 2007 at 1:56 am
I’ve heard it’s theoretically imposible to travel back to a time before the device you’re traveling back in time with exists. It’d be like going through a door, the other side of which does not exist.
August 27th, 2007 at 1:32 pm
Why do you think we would’ve heard about it by now? Alternately, why do you think we haven’t?
August 27th, 2007 at 5:50 pm
Apparently you’ve never seen all the time travel protocols in every movie and t.v. show ever where they eliminate with extreme prejudice anyone who comes back to warn the locals about anything.
August 27th, 2007 at 7:32 pm
DM: that’s one rationale, although I don’t find it particularly convincing. Travel in space doesn’t require any special accommodations on the other end, so why should a time machine? Besides, once you get back to that point in time, the machine did exist back then, so what’s the fuss?
BR: Because so much nasty crap happened in the 20th Century that I find it implausible that anyone - no, make that everyone - in the future with the power to come back and change it would decline to do so, and equally implausible that anyone who did would go undetected. I suppose it’s possible that worse things will happen over the next couple of millennia, so if time travel were invented after that they might not care about our era anymore.
JJV: Sure I have, but Arnold’s robot always seems to do pretty well, even when facing off with much newer, better designed machines.
August 28th, 2007 at 5:56 pm
Time as we experience it is only an illusion, and objectively a corollary of the Second Law of Termodynamics as energy and matter become more indistinguishable from each other and the overall temperature of the universe increases however infinitesimally. It would be far, far easier to resurrrect a pile of fireplace ashes so that it is a maple sapling than to travel back in time.