In the neat Calvin and Hobbes book, “Scientific Progress Goes Boink”, the kid creates a machine that duplicates himself. The duplications, unfortunately, do not see what they have to do with the original’s intended use of them. Sci-Fi writer Stanslaw Lem, one of the greats along with Asimov, has a character duplicate himself in order to get help in repairing his damaged spacecraft. As in the Calvin and Hobbes situation, the duplication cannot understand any dire needs prior to his creation.
The standard criticism of a time machine is that one cannot be in two places at the same time. X gets into his time machine and programs it to place him at ten minutes before he gets into the machine. If the time machine works, X sees himself planning to do what he has already done. That amounts to a personal schism considered physically impossible.
I do believe that, somewhere on a planet in a distant galaxy, sentient beings, if there are any, are hearing old 1940’s radio shows and have possibly made a god of a received image of Mae West. I also believe that, if we could see Earth from quite a distance, the observational instantaniousness, if possible, would reveal the past as present. Is a time machine a real possibility?
I’ve thought about that and theorized that you could actually see the past, but you couldn’t interact with it.
In the same way that we see stars in our sky from suns that have died years, dozens of years, hundreds of years, thousands and thousands of years ago, I assume that it is theoretically possible to see the Earth’s past from far enough away.
If one could travel faster than the speed of light, far enough away, and pick up the image of Earth and zoom in on it, you would see what had already been.
Other life out there, though, might not perceive of the universe in the same way, may not even be looking for radio waves, or light waves, or anything similar that would hint at our existence, assuming that they even share the same senses that we do, and are self-aware enough to exhibit the traits of civilization.
And, even if they did exist, and they did receive radio waves, who’s to say that they decode the information correctly? Maybe they try to listen to image information and get nothing but horrible white noise.
If I remember correctly (from a physics class), going into the future is possible with Einstein’s theory of relativity. Faster velocity leads to slower aging…so in a sense, if you travel at the speed of light for a long time you won’t age at all, while everyone else ages normally. Time is relative to the observer.
There’s always the possibility of parallel universes (every watch Dragonball Z?)…I’m not to familiar with string theory, but I believe parallel universes are discussed there.
Someone says, somewhere, that the greatest proof of no time machines is that we have not encountered anyone from the future. I disagree.
By the way, Calvin and Hobbes is the man.
Good insights! Thanks, Ezrach and October.
About sentient beings on other planets who may or may not understand us, here’s a possibilty. Let’s say a UFO landed on the White House lawn. The president calls together our best scientists in order to ascertain whether or not we can communicate with whoever piloted the UFO. One scientist, whose name is withheld for security reasons, suggests that if beings were able to construct a spacecraft that could travel from a distant galaxy to ours, they must understand the laws of physics as we know these laws or have a knowledge of the universe that surpasses anything we have yet learned about it. Then he brought in the clincher!-- If these aliens are able to build a spacecraft, they think as humans do. They can see in matter the potential for constucting what mind imagines. We can communicate with them. It’s only a matter of translation!
As for the problem of traveling at the speed of light, can any human traveler survive a shift from matter to energy? I loved the movie, “The Fly”, in which our attempts to transmit humans as energy forms, taken for granted in “Star Trek” episodes, is thwarted by contamination in the sending chamber. Are we really smart enough to defy this grinding forward motion we find ouselves in?