Essay On Time Travel

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Others have noted that we're all travelling forward in time (in fact, the theory relativity says that we are all travelling at the speed of light through spacetime) so I'll tackle the travelling-backward-in-time part of the question. And that breaks down into issues of whether backwards time travel is a theoretical possibility, and whether it's a practical one.

On the theorectical side, as Mike Garrow notes, special relativity suggests that all of spacetime exist in an eternal 'now' because the finite speed of light means there is no access to information - including notions of when someone else's 'now' is - faster than light can carry it. So, on the one hand, all of history is already written out and so you could contemplate reach back to points in spacetime that existed prior to your local 'now'. On the other hand, light only propogates 'forward' in spacetime ergo without adding exotic information carriers such as tachyons into the mix there is nothing that actually enable the reaching back to occur. The past is blocked by the light cone in Minkowski's spacetime. (Light cone).

Still on the theoretical side, Schroedinger's equation and other treatments of quantum mechanics, have nothing to say about time, so all descriptions of the evolution of systems are equally valid whether run forwards or backwards. Time is assumed to be 'out there' somewhere and quantum systems could, in theory, evolve in either temporal direction, but we don't experience or observe this. The de Broglie-Bohm solution to this and other troublesome ambiguities (e.g. results from double-slit experiments) requires 'pilot waves' (Pilot wave) to propogate backwards from every event in spacetime, including those of all the particles in an 'observer' in its futu...

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...traveller's situation gets much, much worse

Consider that the rotating planet is revolving around its sun at 108,000 km/h (and with momentum vector pointing towards Scorpio in April and Orion in October, giving a speed differential of 316,000 km/h and a ka-boom of about 150GJ, akin to 35 tonnes of TNT going off).

The Sun, in turn, is moving in an undulating orbit around the centre of the MIlky Way at 800,000 km/h (ka-boom would be 15 TJ - about a 3.5 kiloton baby nuke), which in turn is moving with the Local Group towards the Virgo Cluster, which in turn...... and so on and so on.

So, where would the traveller from the future actually land? Most probably actually nowhere, shooting at some relatively hefty velocity through empty space (maybe that's why we never observe them) because the planet now is certainly not be where it will be when the traveller leaves.

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