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

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.
 
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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.
 

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.
 

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.
 

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?


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.
Having equal probabilities to go through either slit is not the key feature. What is key is that the events of passing through one slit or the other are indistinguishable. Then, the event of reaching a distant screen cannot distinguish a photon that arrived from one over a photon that arrived from the other slit. Then the amplitudes of the arrivals, from one slit or the other add.

Note that this is a functional description. We don’t know why things are this way. We have just found a concise mathematical model of what happens which is fantastically predictive and therefore useful.

Regarding relativity, I thought the point was that physics / physical reality has no preferred frame of reference. Although, curiously, cosmologically, background radiation seems to provide such a frame.

TomB
 

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?

Well, what do you mean by "without any time passing"? Because, if we are thinking of this as spacetime, then time never passes - we pass through time, just like we pass through space.

Right now, I have some control over how I move through space. A car is a machine that does not (significantly) alter how we travel through time, but allows us to alter how we travel through space, in a limited way.

Right now, I have no significant control over how I move through time. A time machine would allow me to alter how I travel through time.
 

Well, what do you mean by "without any time passing"? Because, if we are thinking of this as spacetime, then time never passes - we pass through time, just like we pass through space.

Right now, I have some control over how I move through space. A car is a machine that does not (significantly) alter how we travel through time, but allows us to alter how we travel through space, in a limited way.

Right now, I have no significant control over how I move through time. A time machine would allow me to alter how I travel through time.
Used to have a big joke in our game group because we had read the back of the VHS for the movie Cyborg which had this brilliant marketing tag line "One of the best post-apocalyptic time-traveling cyborg movies."

Anyway, the group racked our brains trying to think of another movie (besides Terminator) that fit into this niche category and couldn't think of any. We did finally ease up on the rules and declare that traveling forward in time, in one direction towards the future, at 1 second per second was technically "time-traveling". Umbran's quote reminded me of our long-standing in-joke.

We still couldn't think of any other post-apocalyptic cyborg movies though lol
 


There's also the Hitler Paradox. A high-tech thinktank develops time travel. They try to kill Hitler.
Paradox 1) Killing Hitler at any meaningful point in the timeline prevents World War 2. Doing so removes the postwar Military Industrial Complex that never gets created. This prevents the accelerated postwar technological development that leads to the thinktank being created in the first place and the technology to build timetravel technology.
Paradox 2) So many people will be trying to kill or protect Hitler that they will cancel each other out. Eventually the factions will try to destroy timetravel before it is developed to end the conflict on their terms. Also known as the Rick & Morty paradox, from the episode Rattlestar Ricklactica .
Paradox 3) There are two time-traveling factions: the "Snakes" (symbol is an upright arrow or an oroboros), who want to preserve the "true" historical timeline, and the "Spiders" (symbol is an eight-pointed Chaos Cross or a spiderweb), who want to disrupt the timeline. The latter either wants to impose their moral and political beliefs on the space-time continuum and right perceived wrongs or nihilistically disrupt the timeline for their amusement. Either the Snakes want to protect Hitler and the Spiders want to kill Hitler or the Snakes support and foster the Allies and the Spiders support Hitler's rise to power and the creation of the Axis to trigger a world war. Hitler would never have been important without the events of the Time War. See Fritz Leiber's Change War series or Kurt Vonnegut's Mother Night .
Paradox 4) Adolph Hitler becomes a paranoid with a strong persecution complex because random people keep trying to kill him throughout his life. He creates a group of loyal followers to protect him that leads to the creation of an autocratic police state with him in the center. The perceived enemies are Jews and people with Left Wing politics because those are the two biggest Venn Diagram circles among his would-be assasins. Israeli and Soviet time-traveling hit teams reinforce this hatred. His entire worldview and political bent are created from this persecution. In Atlas Games' Over the Edge rpg, this is called the Throckmorton Paradox.
Paradox 5) Timetravelling assassins try to kill Hitler. Interrogation and torture of the assassins provide a rudimentary understanding of the mathematical theory and/or mechanical instrumentation of time travel. A fortune of resources and manpower is attached to timetravel research, but the mathematicians and intellectuals who could have fathomed the notes have all fled to Britain or America. After the war American, British, French and Soviet thinktanks using captured German scientists and recovered document troves build on the German's crude attempts at timetravel. Eventually one of them succeeds and builds the early prototype of a functional time machine. The others use their spies to steal information so they can catch up. This forms a club of nations that have timetravel. The fear of a neverending time war leads to the nations refusing to use timetravel. Eventually the end of the Cold War and advances in technology means individuals can build crude timemachines. A group of idealists build a timemachine and try to go back in time to kill Hitler. They fail and are captured, interrogated, and tortured to death to find out all they know. The Nazis start work on a timemachine...
Paradox 6) Timetravelling assasins go back in time and successfully kill Hitler. When they return to the present subtle or radical changes have occurred due to Hitler's death. Perhaps another autocrat rose to power and World War Two happens anyway. Or America remains conservative and isolationist, stays out of the conflict and World War Two ends quickly with the victors becoming politically ascendant. See A Gun for Dinosaur by L. Sprague de Camp.
This is basically how every game of Chrononauts ends up playing out
 

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