Current Events > Time travel affects future, or time travel creates branching timelines?

(+) Yeah! (+)

Which makes more sense to you?
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None of it makes sense to me since time is a man made concept.
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Branching timelines, since it prevents paradoxes.
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Branching timelines
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Solar_Crimson posted...

Branching timelines, since it prevents paradoxes.

Plus it allows Nintendo to retrofit official Zelda timelines!

Once anyone can time travel. Were all doomed.
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I'm a fan of the branching timelines one because that means alternate universes too.

Branching timelines but I do like media where it's a singular loop.

Like I watched this one horror movie about a time travel machine and the people running the test were trapped in there with a killer. And it turned out the killer was one of them, from the future, after using the time machine, and the time machine was made based off plans from the future.

It was really fascinating to see this recurring loop in action and you could almost feel the time compressing and expanding with the pacing of the show.
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Neither. Time travel reinforces the future.
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mooreandrew58 posted...

None of it makes sense to me since time is a man made concept.

Nonsense. How is it that a car can cross a railroad track and not get hit by the train?
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both

Branching timelines > single malleable timeline > stable loop

in terms of fiction anyways
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DevsBro posted...

mooreandrew58 posted...

None of it makes sense to me since time is a man made concept.

Nonsense. How is it that a car can cross a railroad track and not get hit by the train?

Things move doesnt mean there is a "timeline" that can be traveled.
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It's fun both ways, but branching timelines makes more sense to me.
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I'm a total sucker for any sci-fi with time travel of any kind though.

If someone has died, and a person goes back into the past, where someone is still alive, would they unknowingly be conscious, even though they're already dead? If that's the case, it's possible all of us, or some of us are already dead.
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TheDrivingForce posted...

If someone has died, and a person goes back into the past, where someone is still alive, would they unknowingly be conscious, even though they're already dead? If that's the case, it's possible all of us, or some of us are already dead.

Yes, because from their perspective, the future in which they've died hasn't come to pass yet.
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mooreandrew58 posted...

None of it makes sense to me since time is a man made concept.

This is false

Timekeeping is a manmade concept, but time itself is a real physical concept alongside space
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mooreandrew58 posted...

DevsBro posted...

mooreandrew58 posted...

None of it makes sense to me since time is a man made concept.

Nonsense. How is it that a car can cross a railroad track and not get hit by the train?

Things move doesnt mean there is a "timeline" that can be traveled.

That's not the same concept as time though. The only reason the car can pass without getting hit is because they weren't there are the same time.
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predestination.

if you travel back to the past, that was already accounted for. nothing you can do can change what already happened, only your knowledge of events.
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it could be neither like the mind time travel

like in the tv show odyssey 5 about 5 astronauts who see the earh being destroyed from space and their minds are sent back in time by an alien to find out how it happened and stop it

since their minds are the ones traveling they dont know if their actions change the future or create a new one

too bad the show was cancelled
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LordMarshal posted...

Once anyone can time travel. Were all doomed.

If time travel is real then it already exists.
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BlueBoy675 posted...

LordMarshal posted...

Once anyone can time travel. Were all doomed.

If time travel is real then it already exists.

Another reason I dont believe in it. Surely someone would have goofed coming into the past and gotten noticed.
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Everything that will happen has already happened.
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I think quantum mechanics generally supports the branching timeline theory. The way I think of it, and I could be wrong, is that if individual electrons exist as both a wave and a particle simultaneously, then why not an entire universe?

A lot of people think of time as some big clock counting down since the big bang, which makes no sense because time is relative. But if you think about it, time doesn't really exist at all. Time is simply change and the way we perceive things moving through space-time. As human beings, our perception of time is 0 dimensional, meaning we can only experience time through individual moments as a single point on a line. But time is not a line either, which only represents future and past. It exists in many other dimensions, like a plane (2 dimensions), a cube (3 dimensions), a tesserract (4 dimensions), and so on.

If we perceived time in 1 dimension, our entire lifespan would appear seamless to us, and we would be able to visit each moment as easily as looking at a different spot on the wall. Does that mean we could go back to a past moment and change something and affect our timeline? I think it does. We would still be able to observe our 1 dimensional timeline as something different, though we might not know what that is until we change it. If we perceived 2 dimensions of time, we could simultaneously see every possible outcome from birth till death. Everything that could happen or could have happened, we would see it. You could "choose" to do things differently except the concept of free will would be entirely irrelevant, since you have already made every choice you could possibly make.

Or maybe I think way too much about this.

mooreandrew58 posted...

BlueBoy675 posted...

LordMarshal posted...

Once anyone can time travel. Were all doomed.

If time travel is real then it already exists.

Another reason I dont believe in it. Surely someone would have goofed coming into the past and gotten noticed.

Trump is the President?
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TheDrivingForce posted...

mooreandrew58 posted...

BlueBoy675 posted...

LordMarshal posted...

Once anyone can time travel. Were all doomed.

If time travel is real then it already exists.

Another reason I dont believe in it. Surely someone would have goofed coming into the past and gotten noticed.

Trump is the President?

Im not sure I get what your joke is. If anything someone time traveled in the past and predicted it both with back to the future and the Simpson's
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If you travel back in time and everything plays out the same way without interference then that proves that free will is a myth.

https://existentialcomics.com/comic/278
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For storytelling purposes the easiest way to do it is a single timeline with time travelers immunity

When you think about it, time traveling breaks thermodynamics, because matter (you) that didnt exist before (in that timeline) popped into existence.

Just say that breaking thermodynamics desynchronizes you from the timeline and you essentially become a completely seperate person from who you were before you time travelled

Boom. No grandfather paradoxes. No branching timelines.
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I love me a good stable time loop. It can be really satisfying to see how the ends come together, especially with some ironic twist.
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AlisLandale posted...

When you think about it, time traveling breaks thermodynamics, because matter (you) that didnt exist before (in that timeline) popped into existence.

Not necessarily. The matter simply moves from the future to the past in the same way that a car moves from one town to another.
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DevsBro posted...

AlisLandale posted...

When you think about it, time traveling breaks thermodynamics, because matter (you) that didnt exist before (in that timeline) popped into existence.

Not necessarily. The matter simply moves from the future to the past in the same way that a car moves from one town to another.

If it where that simple we would have done it by now
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Wouldn't you merely traveling to the past be enough to change the future? Like step on a piece of grass and you fucked up son
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DevsBro posted...

AlisLandale posted...

When you think about it, time traveling breaks thermodynamics, because matter (you) that didnt exist before (in that timeline) popped into existence.

Not necessarily. The matter simply moves from the future to the past in the same way that a car moves from one town to another.

but there was a fixed amount of matter at that point in time, and now there is more. where did the matter that created your time travelling self come from?

Going back in time is not possible. The only thing you can possibly do is observe the past. The stars towards the center of the galaxy are moving slower in time. Also the closer you get to a black hole, the slower time is moving. If we observed an identical Earth near such a star, it could possibly be billions of years behind. Essentially, there are places in the Universe that are not 14 billion years old. Both younger and older.
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Fam_Fam posted...

DevsBro posted...

AlisLandale posted...

When you think about it, time traveling breaks thermodynamics, because matter (you) that didnt exist before (in that timeline) popped into existence.

Not necessarily. The matter simply moves from the future to the past in the same way that a car moves from one town to another.

but there was a fixed amount of matter at that point in time, and now there is more. where did the matter that created your time travelling self come from?

Nothing was created, or destroyed. Just moved.
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mooreandrew58 posted...

BlueBoy675 posted...

LordMarshal posted...

Once anyone can time travel. Were all doomed.

If time travel is real then it already exists.

Another reason I dont believe in it. Surely someone would have goofed coming into the past and gotten noticed.

Why can't we be the first timeline and simply haven't gotten there yet?
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Time travel is worse than zombies for being the most overused fictional premise now imo
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mooreandrew58 posted...

BlueBoy675 posted...

LordMarshal posted...

Once anyone can time travel. Were all doomed.

If time travel is real then it already exists.

Another reason I dont believe in it. Surely someone would have goofed coming into the past and gotten noticed.

There's a theory that we won't see time travelers until the very first working time machine is turned on, in which case they would start showing up instantly. This also says that they can only travel as far back as that point in time, since time machines did not exist before it.
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GiftedACIII posted...

Time travel is worse than zombies for being the most overused fictional premise now imo

Yeah this. Why that i thought endgame was a disappointment.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CII_Q2aXa-k" data-time="
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If time travel exists, then it has always existed. You can't change anything because that change has already happened.
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My feeling is past time travel doesn't exist.

It doesn't make any sense to me to be able to reverse the universe, or that the universe for some reason has a record of what happened that you can go back to.

However, if backwards time travel was possible, branching is certainly how it would work.

(future time travel could just be something like stasis)
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Gravity time dilation is real and it doesn't even make any sense.
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Steins;Gate had the best implementation of time travel tbh. All possible branches (worldlines) already exist, but only one is active. The active worldline diverges based on the actions the observer takes via time travel or other time mechanisms.

I.e. if the time traveler were to travel back in time and kill Hitler as a baby, the present is "recreated" to match how the world would naturally have progressed. Only the observer is aware the worldline has diverged.
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mooreandrew58 posted...

DevsBro posted...

mooreandrew58 posted...

None of it makes sense to me since time is a man made concept.

Nonsense. How is it that a car can cross a railroad track and not get hit by the train?

Things move doesnt mean there is a "timeline" that can be traveled.

You seem to be implying that there needs to be some sort of "time force/energy/dimension" in order to travel through time, but that doesn't need to be the case in order to go "back in time."

I always see that line "time doesn't exist cause it's a manmade concept", but that's usually used in a diminishing way that doesn't make sense. Time doesn't exist in the same way that meters "don't exist", but you can do a hell of a lot with the concept of measurement.
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Rika_Furude posted...

Steins;Gate had the best implementation of time travel tbh. All possible branches (worldlines) already exist, but only one is active. The active worldline diverges based on the actions the observer takes via time travel or other time mechanisms.

I.e. if the time traveler were to travel back in time and kill Hitler as a baby, the present is "recreated" to match how the world would naturally have progressed. Only the observer is aware the worldline has diverged.

Uh Okabe is only aware of the divergence because of his special ability
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Irony posted...

Rika_Furude posted...

Steins;Gate had the best implementation of time travel tbh. All possible branches (worldlines) already exist, but only one is active. The active worldline diverges based on the actions the observer takes via time travel or other time mechanisms.

I.e. if the time traveler were to travel back in time and kill Hitler as a baby, the present is "recreated" to match how the world would naturally have progressed. Only the observer is aware the worldline has diverged.

Uh Okabe is only aware of the divergence because of his special ability

Yes no shit
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Guide posted...

Time doesn't exist in the same way that meters "don't exist", but you can do a hell of a lot with the concept of measurement.

More like time doesn't exist in the ssme way that length doesn't exist, which is to say it does.

People say this crap trying to sound smart without having even the slightest clue what they mean when they say it.
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Distance is a thing that exists though. "Meters" is a man made concept, but the idea that some things are a distance away from other things is definitely an observable fact. Time "doesnt exist", in that only "now" exists, this moment.
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