Time Travel Question

You would catch up. Unless the object was then propelled further into the future. Or some one came and moved it before you got there. Or worse, when you sent it forward it fell and killed someone standing in that place because you had expected it to be empty.

Are you moving the object only through time or also through space. Going forward is both easier and trickier. Easier in the sense you are not messing with past events, there for it is a bit cleaner. But it can be trickier in this way. With no knowledge or precisely the way the future will be anything can happen when and object is moved.

But if it is a controlled experimental location and it is successfully moved through time only with no glitches it, you would catch up to it. But remember, even though it is 24hours ahead it is still 24hours newer. For example if you have a rose that will wilt in 24hours but you need for a decoration in 48 hours. If it was sent ahead in time, when you needed that flower fresh it will be. Rather than an already wilted flower.

As this is entirely hypothetical, you can catch up with it if that serves your story, or you can have it keep moving ahead of you if that's what you want. Nobody's able to contradict you.

LonnieG said:

I would like to know what the general thought is concerning sending an object, or a person, into the future. If the object or person is not moved will it be at its original send location when the sender gets to the point in time the object was sent to.

So if I were to send an object 24 hours into the future, would I be able to pick up the object in 24 hours or will the object always be 24 hours in the future relative to me.

My thought is that I will "catch up" with the object.

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You catch up.

If you go into an uninhabited forest or whatever and send a big brick 24 hours into the future, what you'd be doing would be sending it to the same time of day but the next date on the calendar. When you get there, there it should be.

Like when the Doc sent Einstein into the future in the mall parking lot - a couple of minutes later, there he appeared. Really, watch Back to the Future, because you haven't, and it explains this basic theory (as it generally exists in pop culture/sci fi/etc.) clearly.

There's no reason to be bound by the BTTF 'science', though.

Buffysquirrel said:

There's no reason to be bound by the BTTF 'science', though.

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It's not about the science, it's illogical for you not to catch it up. If you don't catch it up, what you've done is caused it to wink out of existence. If it's not there in the future for you, it's not going to be there for anyone else either.

Buffysquirrel said:

There's no reason to be bound by the BTTF 'science', though.

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I wasn't suggesting there was, but then the OP could be making up his or her own rules, I'd think.

I only meant it as I think BttF explains the general 'rules' that permeate most general time travel pop culture stuff well and clearly - especially what the OP was asking about. He sends Einstein in the car, there're the time circuits, the grandfather paradox, etc.

If one doesn't want to accept those conventions that's cool, but I thought the OP was kind of asking about the conventions.

Travel into the future has a major philosophical twist: which future will it go into? The future never exists, and there are many possible futures. If you sent something into the future it might go into a future that will be different from the future into which you go at the ordinary rate. That assumes that the universe is not predestined in all details, but logic tells us that it actually is predestines.

Regardless of which side of the philosophical question you are one, there is plenty of room for a series of novels.

JimmyB27 said:

It's not about the science, it's illogical for you not to catch it up. If you don't catch it up, what you've done is caused it to wink out of existence. If it's not there in the future for you, it's not going to be there for anyone else either.

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Depends entirely on the rules generated within the story.

Buffysquirrel said:

Depends entirely on the rules generated within the story.

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I disagree. It's a bit like the one about the all powerful being creating a boulder so heavy he can't lift it - the internal logic doesn't make any sense.
If you send an object a day into the future, that's when it is. Anyone who is around can pick it up, poke it, prod it. If it's not where when you get to that point in time, it's not there, and never was.
The only way it makes sense is if we're talking parallel universes, and the time you sent it to is on a different leg of the Trousers of Time[SUP]1[/SUP]


1. With apologies to Terry Pratchett

So is the object getting a 12-hour jump in time, skipping the intervening time, or does it have a 12-hour buffer in between its starting point and end point that can never be reduced? In the one you catch up, in the other the object floats ahead, perpetually twelve hours out of reach.

I could go either way. Maybe time is a wave, where you can access the peaks, but not the troughs. We move forward through an eternal "now". Your object is shot ahead and rides the wave where it landed, in a different, inaccessible part of "now".

Or maybe "now" is really where we are, with nothingness before and behind. Kind of sux to go back into the past, eh?

Or maybe "now" is now, but you can access another now by stepping out and instantaneously re-entering. Or maybe stepping out takes one billion times longer than the passage of time in our existence because that's just how time passes in that extra-dimensional, time-travel space.

Time travel can be as trippy as you can make it. A lot of the New Wave writers like Moorcock, Ballard, and Bayley did some weird stuff with time travel stories.

While I agree that you can make your own rules regarding this, since it is an impossible feat, I believe the logic behind it would be if you send an object to 24 hours in the future, that's where it's going.

On a side note, time would still exist to the object. So if I send a half eaten apple to 24 hours in the future, by the time I caught up to it, I would think it would have browned and began to mush. IMO.

JimmyB27 said:

It's not about the science, it's illogical for you not to catch it up. If you don't catch it up, what you've done is caused it to wink out of existence. If it's not there in the future for you, it's not going to be there for anyone else either.

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If we're talking about logic, it's illogical for the object to end up in the same location it was sent from, as the Earth will travel, in those 24 hours, approximately 1/365th of the way around the sun. Therefore your object should end up floating somewhere in space - unless your time machine adjusts position also.

So let's discard logic, as, at the moment (as far as I know), this is all speculative anyway, and just take our best WAG (wild-assed guess).

lbender said:

If we're talking about logic, it's illogical for the object to end up in the same location it was sent from, as the Earth will travel, in those 24 hours, approximately 1/365th of the way around the sun. Therefore your object should end up floating somewhere in space - unless your time machine adjusts position also.

So let's discard logic, as, at the moment (as far as I know), this is all speculative anyway, and just take our best WAG (wild-assed guess).

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That's not illogical, it's just wrong, and can be fixed by use of a heisenburg compensator equivalent.
My point remains, if you never catch up to the object, it never exists again.
Imagine you are a person at the point in the future where I've sent an apple forward. It turns up at 5pm on Friday, materialising out of thin air. Since I knew where I was sending it, at just that moment, I stroll around the corner, having waited out the intervening time.
But, if I can't catch it up, the apple won't have materialised, because I'm there too.

Presuming time travel exists:

1/29/13 at 2:15 PM, I zap the apple with my time ray set to 24 hours of projection.

For the next 24 hours, there is no apple

1/30/13 at 2:15 PM, the apple reappears, untouched by time since its subjective time was only the time it took for the ray to hit it.

HOWEVER...

Time travel is also space travel. The earth spins on its axis and orbits the sun. IIRC, it moves about a million miles per day. So if my time ray wasn't also a teleporter, the apple would suddenly appear on Jan 30 in the cold depths of space, sad and lonely, never to be eaten.

But most time travel stories kind of skip that and assume that time travel comes with some sort of handy geographical alignment feature.

DG.

David Goodner said:

Presuming time travel exists:

1/29/13 at 2:15 PM, I zap the apple with my time ray set to 24 hours of projection.

For the next 24 hours, there is no apple

1/30/13 at 2:15 PM, the apple reappears, untouched by time since its subjective time was only the time it took for the ray to hit it.

HOWEVER...

Time travel is also space travel. The earth spins on its axis and orbits the sun. IIRC, it moves about a million miles per day. So if my time ray wasn't also a teleporter, the apple would suddenly appear on Jan 30 in the cold depths of space, sad and lonely, never to be eaten.

But most time travel stories kind of skip that and assume that time travel comes with some sort of handy geographical alignment feature.

DG.

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My time machine is gravitationally bound to the same place it was with respect to the nearest major mass. Thus, if it is on a planet, then it remains in the same location relative to that planet. There can be some wandering when the time machine is used far from a planet, but that isn't a major problem, because it is usually used on a planet.

I always figured that if you stuck something in the future it would stay in the future because once you place it, it is continuing on in time just as you are, not existing statically. Otherwise, where is the box while you're in the past, waiting to catch up to it? In suspended animation? Does it just pop into existence when you get there? Wouldn't you see yourself placing it, then? If you're in the future and the past is catching up to you, then doesn't that mean that the future is constantly crashing into the past?

I always figured if you travel forward in time there's no going back. You've gone forward in time but once you 'land' then that's your present.

Another idea might be that you aren't really going forward in time but parallel in time, landing in a future that's not part of your original time stream. In which case, you'd never see the box in the past because you left it in a different place and time.

I always figured (in my mind) that when Marty went back and changed the past, it was a parallel future he'd created that branched off from the original one. But that just could be because I love the idea of parallel universes and parallel time.

skunkmelon said:

I always figured that if you stuck something in the future it would stay in the future because once you place it, it is continuing on in time just as you are, not existing statically. Otherwise, where is the box while you're in the past, waiting to catch up to it? In suspended animation? Does it just pop into existence when you get there? Wouldn't you see yourself placing it, then? If you're in the future and the past is catching up to you, then doesn't that mean that the future is constantly crashing into the past?

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Time travel can hurt your brain. And, of course, there's no real answer so you can do whatever you want as long as you're consistent.

But consider this example:

I'm testing my Time Projector, which can project things into the future. (We shall ignore the spatial displacement issue for now.) I zap an apple five minutes into the future.

From the apple's point of view, the universe spontaneously gets five minutes older.

From my point of view, the apple disappears and then reappears five minutes later. It is chronologically five minutes older than it is physically.

That's too short a time for me to notice. If I sent it a week into the future, all the other apples I bought on the same day would be going bad when the one I projected reappeared, still fresh.

Otherwise, sending something into a future that never became the present would be the same as destroying it.

David G.

It would depend on how you set up your internal rules, and what you are trying to do. If you've got a time-travel machine and it's set to send the apple 24 hours ahead of now, if you turn up 24 hours later, there it is. If you set it to send the apple 24 hours ahead of you, then it will forever move forward in time, just out of reach.

What I'm really taken with is the idea of the apple emerging in the wrong place, at the right time: you get there and there's police tape cordoning the area off, because some guys head was apparently smashed by an apple. It must have dropped from a height, in spite of the one witness, obviously drunk, who claimed that the head exploded, and there was an apple inside.

If you're talking factual scientific, you just can't do time travel.

If you're talking science fiction, you can do anydamthing you want. Many authors have.

caw

frimble3 said:

What I'm really taken with is the idea of the apple emerging in the wrong place, at the right time: you get there and there's police tape cordoning the area off, because some guys head was apparently smashed by an apple. It must have dropped from a height, in spite of the one witness, obviously drunk, who claimed that the head exploded, and there was an apple inside.

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The explosion would be a little stronger than that, because the atoms would impinge on other atoms, and there is a chance that there would be nuclear fusion. Even without nuclear fusion there would be a substantial explosion as the two different materials expanded instantly to their natural densities.

Hawking's article is available at:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/mos...ING-How-build-time-machine.html#axzz2JfuwXzQC

It's just the wormhole and the really fast spaceship. Other actual methods include going through a balck hole and using a rotating mass of considerable length and mass. Then there are the, as yet, only fictional methods.

Ron Mallett of U of Connecticut has done some interesting theorizing on time travel and how it could be done. I've heard him talk, he's got some way out ideas, but with solid physics behind them.

http://www.phys.uconn.edu/~mallett/main/papers.htm