Time travel doesn't exist because time travel wiped out the timelines where it did

[Jfdlsjfd]

If you create an alternate timeline when time traveling, and you are guaranteed not to alter your own world (altering only another one, which you don't care about), I can see an monetary incentive to time travel: time tourism. Provided it can be achieved for an inexpensive price, it could work. There might be a market for hunting megafauna. Or LARPing in London's 16th century. Or worse, spend a competitive week-end trying to kill Hitler with your high-tech weapons, not because you want to make things right, but because "Hitler killing contest" always sells all the tickets every week-end.. It might not be fun for the people of the alternate timelines, but the idea of the first society to create timetravel messing up with thousands of timelines out of boredom has some strange dystopian appeal. There might be some who would care for the alternate timeline denizens, and call timetravel a tool of Evil, but they'd probably be a small minority, with most people just being happy to call them NPCs and ignore their plight.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

I don't believe that time is actually a thing. Change my mind.

 

[Eyes of Nine]

If we are taking that view, your statement is kind of like saying that left-right is not navigable separate from forward-back, which is clearly wrong. I can walk forward without walking right.

Well, Einstein said it's all relative (paraphrase). If you are walking across my field of view, you are walking to the left (or right). So in relation to me, you are walking left-right; not forward back.

 

[Umbran]

Well, Einstein said it's all relative (paraphrase). If you are walking across my field of view, you are walking to the left (or right). So in relation to me, you are walking left-right; not forward back.

Um, no, that's not anything like what Einstein said. In physics terms you are close to "not even wrong".

Einstein recognized all motion in as a vector in a 4-d spacetime, that could have components both across your field and towards/away from you.

 

[GMMichael]

If we are taking that view, your statement is kind of like saying that left-right is not navigable separate from forward-back, which is clearly wrong. I can walk forward without walking right.

I'm sure you can. But can you walk forward without any time passing? Which begs the "time travel" flip side: can you stand in one place, but go to the future/past?

That's not the quantum world angle. In the Many Worlds interpretation, all possibilities exist and are realized in their own timeline/universe. You only see one of them.

Ah. I was thinking of the double slit experiment, which shows that since it's equally probable that a photon goes through either slit, both outcomes actually happen and interfere with each other. The photon making a drawing of Schroedinger's cat is highly unlikely, so the cat is VERY hard to see.