Are Time Travelers Stealing Our Stuff?

dangerouseddy said:
now I know where all those odd socks went ;)
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You time traveled in order to complete the missing sets ? :D

That's what I mean when I say time travel would likely already have affected whatever future you live in now. The act of you missing socks made you go mad with desire to create the time machine! Your mad desire bring to a time when you had two socks, and rather than wait to see where they go you take your socks, now you are happy that you have a complete pair of socks, but as it turns out you're the reason why you lost your sock in the first place! :eek:

Of course the issue against this thinking, is that you would be able to create a paradox, i.e. kill yourself, but if you kill yourself how do you go back in time from a future point in order to kill yourself? Does the universe just hickup? does the universe actively conspire to stop you?

Eh... regardless, I'm going to send myself the powerball and various other lottery numbers from all the major jackpots for the next 10 years, getting all that money will give me the resources to build ... a time machine! (no one steal my idea, I'll go back in time and kick you in the nuts!)
 
Time travel is possible but the timeline can never be changed. It's called the predestination paradox. Basically anything that will happen has happened. Trying to change the timeline just leads to events that caused everything in the first place.

Its an easy theory to follow and understand and it also makes perfect sense. It's been used in movies, a good example is minority report. They don't travel back in time but they know the end result of actions. Tom Cruise knowing he's going to kill someone is the catalyst that sets him on the path to killing someone. It's also been done a bazillion times with traveling back in time but I can't think of any examples at the moment.
 
devil22 said:
Seems not quite right. If someone gets a time machine, then they can never do anything different than they remember? What makes that impossible? You could always go back to a time where you don't remember meeting yourself, and uhm, meet yourself. I think you're saying that's impossible, because you did not remember meeting yourself before you went back, but that's the usual definition of time travel; you can go back and do anything.
And any way, your mind is not much different than the universe, if you can't change something you remember, you really can't change anything else either.
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You still don't seem to be understanding what they are saying. They are saying that going back in time is like hitting rewind on a movie. The story is already wrote. Anything that you do in the past you already did. Doesn't have to do with you remembering it or not. Time is like a movie that is playing out, hitting rewind on a movie doesn't let you change the events of that movie.

Think of it like in Bill and Ted's excellent adventure where they know that they have to go into the past to put a key there to get out of jail. They know this because they find the key there in their time put there by the future them. Which means that they already did that.

These that are you replying too see there only being a single time and consider true time travel to only be taking place in that line. Anything else they consider jumping into an alternate time line where events took place differently than they did in our time.
 
Going backward in time is impossible because time is only a concept - it's the movement of particle arrangements in relation to one another. In order to go backward, you'd have to completely rearrange the entire universe to the exact configuration it was at for that given moment, do what you want to do, then rearrange it again. Assuming you could do that the problem then is that that the particles that make up you and your time machine are included in that system. You would have to somehow exclude those particles from the rearrangement, which would alter the original arrangement of the universe, or somehow duplicate those particles, which would add matter and energy to the universe. It's just simply not something you can do, even if you had an infinite amount of power at your disposal.

The only way you could really "rewind" the universe is if you were outside of it and had absolute control over the forces that govern it so that you could simultaneously throw everything into reverse. Basically you'd have to be God.
 
devil22 said:
This doesn't fly. If you changed the properties of one single particle like an electron or photon, or an atom, you could have a cascading effect that re-arranged everything in the timeline anyway, like the butterfly effect.
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totally agree.

There's an old movie (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097883/) where time travellers take things from today to save tomorrow. It is old but still pretty cool.
 
In order to travel back in time (not possible) with our brainstormed unobtanium alloy built time machine, the time machine would already have to exist in this time as a beacon. Why? Because planets, stars, and everything moves. You would need to calculate exactly where the Earth was at that given moment in history, and you would need to calculate a safe spot to drop in at, unless your time machine beacon WAS the point of origin/destination. It becomes less difficult if your time capsule lands in local orbit and has fuel to change it's angle of attack for safe re-entry, but the hypothetical energy requirements go up with mass, one can presume. I suppose with sufficiently advanced technology (and magic), you could have a full time traveling space craft that allowed you to feed off of cosmic strings and fire off random beacons into oblivion until one sends a signal forward for telemetry...? Sounds even more far fetched, since the signal wave would take infinite energy to reach you in a timely fashion. With such technology, I don't think our stuff is really a concern unless they're heisting unique things like art. Nothing metallurgical would have any value, since they could just harvest asteroids at that point.

Then again, there is of course John Titor, who had a classic car and a big box ;)
 
Check out one of my favorite tulime travel short stories: All You Zombies by robert Heinlein, it deals with time travel paradoxes in a humorous way. Good quick read.
 
Exavior said:
You still don't seem to be understanding what they are saying. They are saying that going back in time is like hitting rewind on a movie. The story is already wrote. Anything that you do in the past you already did. Doesn't have to do with you remembering it or not. Time is like a movie that is playing out, hitting rewind on a movie doesn't let you change the events of that movie.

Think of it like in Bill and Ted's excellent adventure where they know that they have to go into the past to put a key there to get out of jail. They know this because they find the key there in their time put there by the future them. Which means that they already did that.

These that are you replying too see there only being a single time and consider true time travel to only be taking place in that line. Anything else they consider jumping into an alternate time line where events took place differently than they did in our time.
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I don't understand it, but that's because it makes no sense. You are not time traveling if you can not change anything, you are "time viewing". You are sitting in the future with a time machine, what stops you from changing anything besides what was changed already?
 
That doesnt make sense whatsoever. If you time travel and change the past by stealing something before a disaster, its the same as traveling 20 years before that even and stealing the same object. The point is stealing it, period. Doesnt matter when and how. You take something away from a timeline, which in theory alters the present and future. How in the world would taking in before it gets destroyed be any different than stealing it at another time? This is all theory of course.
 
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But what if I go back in time and have sex with myself? Then I have a baby which grows up to become me in the future?

And what if as I grow older I become a terrorist bomber who's just trying to prevent worse catastrophes? But before I become that person I'm a time traveling detective trying to stop myself?

Damn it must suck to be Ethan Hawke. That dude's life is too complicated.
 
Wyodiver said:
Wasn't there a movie about time travelers going to airplanes right before a crash and snatching people for parts, or something?
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Yes it was called Millennium.

Which was based on the book Millennium by John Varley.

The movie was a pretty close to the source material. As always the book is better. To sum up yes the future is your standard dying world, they take plane crash victims right before the end, replace them with almost perfect replica bodies... and send the recovered humans even further into the future after the world has healed itself to repopulate mankind.

I am just going to take a wild guess and assume the Varley book is the better read.
 
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If you're into time travel movies, you must watch Primer, a film shot by one guy on a budget of $7,000 and it doesn't succumb to the Hollywood tendency to simplify for the audience. You will either love it or hate it.
 
Wyodiver said:
Wasn't there a movie about time travelers going to airplanes right before a crash and snatching people for parts, or something?
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I think you might be thinking of Freejack from 1992.
"Bounty hunters from the future transport a doomed race-car driver to 2009 New York, where his mind will be replaced with that of a dead billionaire."
Emilio Estevez
Mick Jagger
Rene Russo
Anthony Hopkins
 
devil22 said:
I don't understand it, but that's because it makes no sense. You are not time traveling if you can not change anything, you are "time viewing". You are sitting in the future with a time machine, what stops you from changing anything besides what was changed already?
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It all has to do with how you view time. If you view our time as a straight line then you can't change anything as it already happen. If you tomorrow you went back 1 week and took $10 from your own wallet, you would have already lost $10 last week. It isn't so much viewing as doing an action already done. As you are acting out whatever when you go back in time, however that whatever part has already happen.

if you did something different say go back and killed your great grandfather. Or the typical kill Hitler as a baby, that is going to create a different time line. So some view that as not our time but you then entering a different time line where that event did take place. leaving you now with two parallel universes where both times exist separate from each other. Then you get to something like DC with their infinite Earths. Or even the movie Parallel which covers that. People able to go from one time line to another where different events took place so that today in one time line is different from today in another. Maybe there is a time line where the USA is still part of England, maybe the dinos didn't go extinct and are now the intelligent life force on Earth. To some people with how they view time that is what they believe would be the case. If you went back and change something that you didn't in our time line, you actually are not in our time line anymore but have created a new parallel universe where your action has now taken place.
 
The entire premise outside of the idea of time travel is that backwards time travel is utterly, totally, and completely impossible in every possible circumstance.
 
Burticus said:
But what if I go back in time and have sex with myself? Then I have a baby which grows up to become me in the future?

And what if as I grow older I become a terrorist bomber who's just trying to prevent worse catastrophes? But before I become that person I'm a time traveling detective trying to stop myself?

Damn it must suck to be Ethan Hawke. That dude's life is too complicated.
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Which begs the question if you have sex with yourself is that masturbating or gay sex?
 
Exavior said:
Which begs the question if you have sex with yourself is that masturbating or gay sex?
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If Burticus is asking whether he should go fuck himself for spoiling an entire movie, the answer would be yes.
 
Conman said:
I think you might be thinking of Freejack from 1992.
"Bounty hunters from the future transport a doomed race-car driver to 2009 New York, where his mind will be replaced with that of a dead billionaire."
Emilio Estevez
Mick Jagger
Rene Russo
Anthony Hopkins
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"Freejack" was a hoot to watch, but as a few of us pointed out including me in post #30, the movie was "Milllenium", where dying civilization from 1000 years in the future steals people who are about to die in plane crashes to help restore society. I've seen worse, if it wasn't patting itself on the back for being clever the whole time and the preachy environmental tone, I might have liked it better.
 
Some caveats that bothered me when thinking about this:

If you disappeared from this realm and reappear in the past, conservation of energy gets messed up. Where will the matter to create you come from?

If you stayed in both places simultaneously, one would not know about the other.
The immune system would fail due to eradicated 'ancient' microbes.
Are you traveling alone? or does the air in your lungs come with you?
Sudden pressure changes would seriously damage your body. If you suddenly materialized in the past you'd displace the air around you possibly causing lung collapse.
How would you 'find' Earth to teleport to?

You would 'change the past' by your very appearance.
If time travel were possible, you'd be already mentioned on some ancient parchment as a prophet, ghost, god, whatever.

Wanna see the past? look up at the night sky. You are in fact observing the past.

I'm all ears to criticism
 
Just time travel to the future and steal things from there. It's just a possible future anyways and can't affect the past in any way.

Screwing around with the past is a good way to get yourself rubbed out of existence. If you kill your grandfather.. well... be prepared to take his place and become super inbred.
 
Hypergreatthing said:
Screwing around with the past is a good way to get yourself rubbed out of existence. If you kill your grandfather.. well... be prepared to take his place and become super inbred.
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But when Fry (Futurama) went back in time and became his own grandfather, the inbreeding caused a brain disorder that allowed him to save the universe from the giant brains! :)
 
evilsofa said:
If Burticus is asking whether he should go fuck himself for spoiling an entire movie, the answer would be yes.
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I didn't say what we were talking about!!! I could be talking about my great uncle/aunt Ethan... yeah thats it. Thats the ticket.
 
The whole idea of having your stuff stolen by a time traveler has gotta be one of the mostest dumbest thing-ys people have thought in ages except for maybe that NASCAR is fun to watch...that's a much more vacant mental concept.
 
If we've learned anything from the Star Trek documentaries, is that thou shalt not mess with time. LEAVE TIME ALONE! It always ends up making a huge mess. Pretty sure it's in the prime directive.
 
I believe the problem is our understanding of the dimension of time. We cannot remove ourselves from Time to observe it as a dimension.

We can observe the 3 "understood" dimensions, X Y Z. As an observer you can stay stationary and watch something else move in any combination of those 3, because the observed object moves away from us. But no person has ever (publically) observed something move away in the dimension of time. So much like the idea of flatland, we can't fathom it because we cannot observe it.

So I must come to the conclusion that nature has tidy solution to dealing with the dimension of time. I do not believe that the threat of existence would be influenceable by any member of nature. So I would be left to believe that nature off shoots from a main timeline and creates auxiliary timelines any time someone OR something creates a rift in time....which probably does happen naturally.
 
westrock2000 said:
We can observe the 3 "understood" dimensions, X Y Z. As an observer you can stay stationary and watch something else move in any combination of those 3, because the observed object moves away from us. But no person has ever (publically) observed something move away in the dimension of time.
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Hafele–Keating experiment. Atomic clocks travelling at high speeds around Earth end up disagreeding with those left 'home'.

Additionally, shifting of the color space emitted by fast travelling celestial bodies.
 
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