In a Catholic view, would time travel be possible?

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Prodigal1984

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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.
This may be an odd question, but what if someday time travel were possible and you went into the past and changed a person known for being a sinner into a virtuous person? And would moving in time allow a person who is already judged to have a second chance at redemption?
A lot of theoreticals here and this could be expanded into a lot more what ifs regarding whether it would only be a reality for you and everyone you interacted with would be from some alternate universe( which also the Church doesn’t restrict the notion of a multiverse which makes me wonder if everyone has infinite copies of themselves who are in heaven or hell). When going into all of these theoretical situations it seems to make things more complicated in terms of salvation.
 
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I will just say it’s not possible. I will warn you now that this argument gets… really bizarre.
 
It’s absolutely possible to ‘travel’ into the future, though principally by aging more slowly than the rest of the Earth. At present, that’s a mere matter of seconds. Some day, perhaps it will be possible to be partially frozen, to have a brain inserted into a new body or the like.

I don’t believe there is any mechanism to travel into the past
 
I believe from a scientific standpoint, unless our knowledge drastically changes, time travel BACK in time is impossible. You can experience time at different rates due to gravity and speed, but not experience it in reverse. You may be able to hop dimensions into a parallel dimension where time runs more slowly, and it gives the appearance of travelling back in time, but it’s not the same since it’s a parallel universe.

But, just for fun (because I love ‘what ifs’!) I’d argue that God gives us everything we need to choose him. That’s why at judgment we are going to know that we were given all we needed and we still rejected and things could not have been done any differently. I think God really covers the bases there, so that being said, I think you could try to talk to and witness to someone, but what was going to happen will happen anyway.
 
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Lifeisbeautiful3 said:
It’s absolutely possible to ‘travel’ into the future, though principally by aging more slowly than the rest of the Earth. At present, that’s a mere matter of seconds. Some day, perhaps it will be possible to be partially frozen, to have a brain inserted into a new body or the like.
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In the sense of the way we all are right now, yes. The future becomes the present. This is an argument I don’t particularly want to get caught up in as it gets weird, so I’ll leave now. Good luck - you’ll need it for this one.
 
Time travel to the past is not possible, nor ever will be. Anything that happened cannot not have happened. It’s illogical.
Time travel to the future is theoretically possible, but I think a person will never be able to do it. If she could, however, it would be another question to answer if it was immoral (I am much inclined to think it would be, but of course this would be a question for moral theology in a future which probably will never happen).
 
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Prodigal1984 said:
which also the Church doesn’t restrict the notion of a multiverse which makes me wonder if everyone has infinite copies of themselves who are in heaven or hell
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A person cannot be other person, so there cannot be any “copy”. Probably if this was a serious thought the Church would teach against it.
 
GabrielZacarias said:
A person cannot be other person, so there cannot be any “copy”. Probably if this was a serious thought the Church would teach against it.
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I listen to a lot of Fr. Spitzers talks and he seems to say the multiverse is possible.
The multiverse theory however holds that basically every possibility in the universe will be represented in one of an infinite multiverse, which would mean that a version of yourself and everyone else in all history past present and future exist in the multiverse.
I don’t assume the church says every universe has a God because then we would be Mormons basically.
 
Prodigal1984 said:
This may be an odd question, but what if someday time travel were possible and you went into the past and changed a person known for being a sinner into a virtuous person?
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You cannot do this.
Only God can change someone from sinner to virtue.
And I doubt free will can be violated.
 
Prodigal1984 said:
The multiverse theory however holds that basically every possibility in the universe will be represented in one of an infinite multiverse, which would mean that a version of yourself and everyone else in all history past present and future exist in the multiverse.
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Well, that’s not the only theory of the multiverse. Some multiverse theories are that each Universe is totally unique and not a mirror dimension.
 
My GUESS is that if time travel to the past is one day possible, we would not be altering the past. But rather our travels to the past were already part of history. In other words, the past is static.

But that’s just a GUESS.
 
I don’t know Father Spitzers, perhaps because I am not american… Well, I think a multiverse, in the sense of many universes which are set in different “spaces”, wouldn’t theoretically be impossible, but any being in one of these universes couldn’t be in another one. When I say impossible, I use the word in the same sense that it has on the classical question of whether could God create another God. The answer is no, not by a defection on God’s omnipotence, of course, but by a defection on the question itself, for it’s illogical. So, one person can only be herself and no one else. Also, let’s say, a tree can only be a tree. God could, obviously, turn it into a dog, and He could also turn it into an odd mixture of tree and dog, or even make it appears as a dog to someone and to others appear as it is, but He can’t make it to be a tree and a dog at the same time, for defection on the statement of anything being another different thing. That’s why I don’t see how it would be possible that these different “universes” (assuming the Church didn’t pronounce against this notion, which I do not know really) could each have its own version of a person. Even if there were two persons very similar in two of these “universes”, they would be more like twins, for what I can say. For what makes me me and no other person is my soul, and it’s unique.
 
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Yes. Here is my reason. The Church has not defined this, so there is no doctrine. It is a matter of science. So in light of no doctrine, then the Catholic view should allow it.

Of course I believe it to be impossible for us today to go backwards in time, but it might be possible to build a machine that might send particles back in time, but only to a time after that device was built.
 
Prodigal1984 said:
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.
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I don’t see how you can get into the past if you can only slow things down.
 
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Time travel implies going to the future or the past. Not the same as traveling through space at a high speed and having time slow down.
Current science says that travelling in time is impossible. Not definitive, but highly likely to be true.
The Catholic view will always be in agreement with truths discovered by science. So with respect to time travel, the Catholic view would be in sync with current science, it is most likely impossible.

The idea that faith and reason would conflict is a heresy. It is a heresy held by some Protestants and my Muslims, but not by the Church
 
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Prodigal1984 said:
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.
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Here is my time machine.

If we slow down a portion of space, then it’s my theory, that if the portion of space is expanding slower than the space out side of it, this would cause a time shift. Lets call this a time bubble.

When this time bubble is brought back to normal space we would have achieved time travel into the future, since space and time outside of the time bubble would have changed at a rate faster than that inside the time bubble.

My being a mad scientist means that i probably have a faulty concept of space time here and i understand that, so please bare with me brothers and sisters.

But there is another possibility. Taking the same principle as before, our time bubble could actually be a form of intergalactic space travel. So this time we slow down a portion of space compared to the expansion of the universe. Within the time bubble is your spaceship, but instead of moving, space moves around you until you end up in your desired location.

But how do we slow down space and is it in principle a possibility?
 
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I think if time travel was every made, i think many tragedies in our lifetime could be stopped by going back into time.
 
Prodigal1984 said:
Time travel is a possibility.
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I doubt that, it may theoretically be possible, but in practice it is not feasible.

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.

This issue in my opinion is not restricted by Catholic teachings but rather science itself.
 
metalwolf said:
I think if time travel was every made, i think many tragedies in our lifetime could be stopped by going back into time.
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Unfortunately, as much as i would love to think otherwise, it wouldn’t go as entirely as we planned. More likely it would create another timeline where those things did not occur, but the original timeline would still exist.
 
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