[Beery Swine]

Originally Posted by muguly To view links or images in this forum your post count must be 2 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.

What if time was kinda like string theory(indulge me for a minute): if the beginning of time was the first pluck of the string then every second, minute, hour, day, etc., has it's own particular frequency. Now, if scientist could somehow find these frequencies and pinpoint which frequency vibrated at a particular time, they could build something to vibrate on that the various frequencies and potentially have an object exist in any. period of time. Keep in mind that I have given this no in depth thought, it just crossed my mind.

I'd love to see a video game based on that. The concept sounds friggin sweet.

[Phalanx]

The philosophical questions are more easily answered after you determine the mechanism for accomplishing time travel. There are several possible ways to travel into the past, each one implying different consequences for the future. What you want to do is engineer a method of time travel that allows you to change the future while avoiding the paradoxes that traditionally come with it. A practical time travelling solution does not have to be "pure" in order to accomplish objectives of human concern. I will assume the goal is to go back into recent human history and change the outcome of a nuclear holocaust.

One method of travelling into the past is to simply reverse the velocities and time arrows of everything in local space, perhaps on a solar system scale, except for what is inside the time machine. This can be accomplished by manipulating universal constants locally by deforming Calabi-Yau space until you exactly reverse the time variance of the decay of the K-meson (since the violation of time invariance by the decay of the K-meson into two pions instead of three is an indicator of the precise direction of the cosmological arrow of time, and from there the thermodynamic and electromagnetic arrows of time). You won't be moving back in time in an absolute sense because the rest of the universe keeps moving "forward"; you are merely rebuilding the solar system as it was at a previous time by modifying the physical component of space that sets time arrows. You cannot reverse the time of the whole universe because there exists nowhere else to absorb the entropy, but you are allowed to reverse small areas because the rest of the universe can absorb that entropy and remain in compliance with the second law of thermodynamics. The fact that Sol jumps behind 20 years in its galactic orbit relative to the rest of the stars will be a matter for the astronomers to ponder while you go back in time and save the world.

From the perspective of the universe, time has continued to move forward. From the perspective of the Earth, an extremely unlikely series of events occur resetting everything to as it was at a previous time: people unbury coffins as the dead regenerate and come back to life, walking backwards through their timelines towards their births; the planets reverse their orbits about the sun; clocks run backwards; the missiles reassemble themselves and fly backwards into their silos as the generals unpress their buttons. The time traveler must not interfere while time is reversed; otherwise, his actions will alter the future of the time-reversed earth, which is to say he will be changing the past (his future). Eventually the time machine will restore the local Calabi-Yau spaces to their original dimensions, flipping the time arrows back to their original directions. You are in the past (with slight differences due to cosmic radiation from space outside the time-reversed area and the resulting butterfly effect.)

One consequence of this method is that since you were inside the time-machine while the Earth was resetting, the atoms that make you up will be absent from history. If you were important, then you will return to a very different past; but if you were fairly insignificant, adverse effects might be minor. Since the universe's time arrow did not change, the "future" you came from is part of the universe's past, so no paradoxes are created. You are free to stop the impending nuclear war. No need for multiverses either.

It isn't elegant, but it allows the sole survivor of a future nuclear holocaust the ability to resurrect humanity, at the cost of him being erased from history and the lives of everyone who knew or loved him, and spend his time posting on internet forums, his story too unbelievable to ever be told, as the world charts itself a new journey, blissfully unaware of just how close it came to destruction.

[Dzepxich]

^^^One of the coolest posts I've read in a long time. Thanks!