In a Catholic view, would time travel be possible?

[IWantGod]

We would need
1.- An almost infinite amount of fuel to come close to light speed.
2.- As an object approaches the speed of light, its mass rises precipitously. If an object tries to travel 186,000 miles per second, its mass becomes infinite, and so does the energy required to move it.

Please consider my solution in post 17.

 

[whatistrue]

This OP made me think of a story I read years ago. “Rotating Cylinders and the Possibility of Global Causality Violation” by Larry Niven.

(from Larry Niven Bibliography) Niven borrowed the title of a mathematics paper by Frank J. Tipler for this look at the principle of “cosmic censorship,” the way the universe protects itself (sometimes rather violently) from the paradoxes implied by time travel.

I personally wouldn’t want to be the person responsible for testing the theory.

 

[IWantGod]

I personally wouldn’t want to be the person responsible for testing the theory.

Kind of like being squished to the size of a pea or being physically erased from the time line leaving no memory of you?

Yeah, i think i will have to agree with you on that one.

But post 17 has a different solution. Care to comment?

 

[whatistrue]

Kind of like being squished to the size of a pea or being physically erased from the time line leaving no memory of you?

Nothing nearly so benign. Think “well, if this star goes supernova the totally functional time machine that @IWantGod built won’t be an issue any more. Ever”.

But post 17 has a different solution. Care to comment?

The idea of using time travel as a form of space travel has a long history. IIRC, one of the biggest issues is “steering”.

 

[John10]

If we slow down a portion of space,

And how would we achieve this? I understand your time machine, but honestly think it is not feasible to achieve what you propose.

Everything seems to indicate we can only live within our current time.

 

[IWantGod]

And how would we achieve this? I understand your time machine, but honestly think it is not feasible to achieve what you propose.

Everything seems to indicate we can only live within our current time.

True, i honestly have no idea of what would be required to slow down space. lol

Edit: enter the gravity drive!

 

[Prodigal1984]

Yah but what would happen to the person who these tragedies we stop soul?
Would all of these people have a second chance at salvation? Or what is one of the people goes down a wrong path after you stopped them from dying in say a genocide? Could they then lose the salvation they had by choosing a different path and now end up in hell?
What if this all is an entire redoing of someone in the future coming and changing history right now? We would never know!

 

[Dan_Defender]

It would be against God’s plan to travel back in time and change events. The most that could ever happen is to ‘see’ the past as if present there, but not change it.

 

[JimG]

As I understand it, as an object approaches the speed of light, its mass increases, its length in the direction of travel decreases, and time slows down. So that if a physical object actually achieved light speed, it would have infinite mass, zero length, and time would stand still.

Extrapolating from that, I assume that at faster than light speeds, mass would go negative, length would go negative, and time woiuld go backward.

Probably the same conditions would apply as one approached a black hole, and if possible, entered it, passing through the event horizon.

 

[ZMystiCat]

Time travel is a possibility.
Scientists say if one were approaching the speed of light, time would slow down for you while it would continue moving at the same rate for everyone else.

Err…how are you defining time travel? Are you defining it as being able to move backwards and forwards in time as we want, or are you defining it as seeming to “jump” forward.

If the latter, that isn’t really “time travel” as we tend to discuss. It’s just moving forward in time but at a different rate.

If the former, I don’t think we’ve been able to do better than theorize about what would be required, but even that theorizing comes with the caveat of “can’t be done”.

 

[JimG]

Well, time dilation is certainly true for objects traveling at near light speed. So if there was a generation of space travelers who could travel at, say .99c, they might travel to a distant star and then return to earth, experiencing only a time duration of several years. But when they got back to earth they would find that thousands or millions of years had passed and the sun had turned into a red giant and fried the earth. All their descendants would have long since died.

It is not theoretically possible to reach light speed, because it would require an infinite expenditure of energy, but I don’t know if the same can be said of just skipping past light speed and going faster than light. Probably not possible either, but if so, one could easily travel backward in time.

 

[JacobHarrison]

The theory that it will cause a parallel timeline comes from the Grandfather Paradox. Whenever the past is changed, it will cause a timeline where the time traveler does not go back in time, resulting in two simultaneous realities.

This means that if people from the future altered the past, there would be parallel versions of ourselves in a different timeline who can make different decisions that can make them have a different afterlife than ours.

That leads to a question about the Antichrist, will there only be one to deceive the world in the original timeline, or would there be parallel Antichrists in the alternate timelines?

 

[JimG]

Connie Willis wrote two SF novels involving time travel, titled “Blackout” and “All Clear.” In those novels, historians were traveling back in time to research WW-II. They were supposedly prohibited from tampering with the past. The time portals or “drops” were not entirely reliable, sometimes dropping one off several weeks or several years beyond the desired aiming point. In the end, it seems that the researchers were in fact making small changes which ended up ensuring that the Allies won the war, and the drop points closed up, leaving some of the researchers to live out their lives in the past. It seems that the time continuum was protecting its own history and using those from the future to accomplish what needed to be done and had in fact already been done.

 

[Prodigal1984]

Yah I’ve read and seen film depicting this kind of thing. One that actually portrays what your talking about is Stephen Kings 11.22.63 which also was adapted into a show on Hulu.
In it the main character travels back in time to stop Kennedy from being assassinated. The world seems to send problems that try to ensure the character cannot stop this from happening. Things like cars hitting the bus he is on, traffic jams, people who weren’t in the timeline of history as now being there to try to stop him. The closer in time and vicinity to the assassination he gets, the world seems to throw out every conceivable natural obstacle it can to stop him.
In the end he does stop the assassination, ends up being charged for attempted murder himself, is freed and then goes back to the future to his original time, only to see his actions caused basically the destruction of America. Nuclear war, the entire country is in poverty etc. The time travellers goes back through the wormhole and resets time to where he never changed history.
This is one of the better thought out time travel views I have seen. Although Back to the Future was an amazing early concept on the grandfather paradox, I think this is more accurately how it would be if one went back and changed time. The time space continuum would probably make it almost impossible for you to change it, and if you succeeded, well sometimes the best intentions we have end up being disastrous.

 

[HopkinsReb]

Time travel is a possibility.
Scientists say if one were approaching the speed of light, time would slow down for you while it would continue moving at the same rate for everyone else.

If you look at the equation, it doesn’t start going backwards if you get past the speed of light. You end up with an imaginary number in the denominator. But it’s not possible, as mass approaches infinity as velocity approaches c. It would literally require an infinitely powerful force to push to the speed of light.

 

[phil19034]

I think if time travel was every made, i think many tragedies in our lifetime could be stopped by going back into time.

I don’t think think so… Back to the Future surely got time travel wrong.

I would guess that one of two things would happen if you travel back in time…

1. your actions in the past were already part of the timeline so there is nothing you can do to change the future.

or

1. any changes would create a new timeline/dimension/universe and would not change the original timeline/dimension/universe.

The only question would be whether one could return to their own time after changes had been made in the past?

In other words, if you go to the past and make changes (if possible) you will never be able to return to your present. There is also the theory that the smallest changes to the past can lead to significant changes in the future.

 

[BartholomewB]

and you went into the past and changed a person known for being a sinner into a virtuous person?

That was the idea underlying the Terminator movies. Except that Arnie didn’t turn them into virtuous people, he terminated them.

 

[Prodigal1984]

There is also the theory that the smallest changes to the past can lead to significant changes in the future.

The butterfly effect

 

[metalwolf]

Plus there is the fact that if you went not into the near past but into the far past like 1000 AD or AD 27, people wouldn’t be able to understand you.

Plus there is the thing of accents,dialects and such. Plus period dialect and regional dialect and would consist more than throwing in thees and thous.

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