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[redacted123]

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[Nilocy]

I've conducted an experiment which proves time travel is impossible or at least, will never be realised. When I have a child, I will tell them to come back and pick me up with a time machine at this exact time, failing that pass the same instruction onto their child. So far, no time machine. Therefore, time travel is impossible.

I've done an experiment like that aswell. Put a piece of paper, on it written the exact time and date of when I lock it in a box. No-one came back. Gaurenteed in all of future history, a timetraveler (if it's possible to travel back in time) would have. But alas, they didn't.

Also, some theories were floating about that the LHC could be a catalyst for time travel. Something to do with i dunno, particles... of time... and stuff?!

[Jude]

My logic is based upon the last 100 years of discovery... Around 120 years ago, we were just discovering Penicillin and now we have vast quantities of many types of anti-biotics and vaccines... 120 years ago we were just experimenting with telephones and now we have mobile radiation emitters with us wherever we travel. So then you think... If we did this in around 100 years... What will our technology be like in 500 years time as our scientific community experiments further and further... Such as the experiment on creating a black hole within a confined space.

However there are many potential threats to Earth and with technology advancing at a century by century pace, we may be extinct before we reach our ultimate scientific goals. Therefore I put it out to you that 500 years is all humankind has left on this Earth - Maximum.

By your "logic", and I use the word highly loosely, we can make the same prediction I did about unicorns in 20 years

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[Sean Mirrsen]

You're forgetting a wonderful fact. To us, it may seem as though nothing is happening. Then, think of this. Someone creates a time machine that allows travelling back through time. Presuming it's made public. Lots of people go back in time and change stuff. Someone thinks of using the thing for crimes or revenge (within 1.5 seconds of the announcement of the discovery), and goes on a rampage. This prompts the creation of the temporal police, that stop all TM usage and revert all timeline changes. People begin to think they are secretly manipulated by time-travelling agents, and a rebellion forms. The rebellion acquires their own time-machines and a temporal war breaks out. Then, the last sane man on the Earth realises where this is going and secretly sneaks back into the timestream, discreetly killing off the inventor of the time machine or one of his relatives. The timeline resets to normal, since no time machine was ever invented. At some later point, someone else invents the time machine, and the process repeats ad nauseum. The end result is that such temporal wars will be fought until the end of mankind, whenever that is going to be, and the timeline will remain unchanged.

[chaoticag]

In that time frame, we would have fought time splitters, the AI war and the Covenant. We also will have made contact with Klingons and Spock will help Captain Kirk go on space adventures. This is all scientific because all those works have science in them, what else are science fiction writers trying to tell us?

Although if someone in the future had made a time machine, then the world would have been destroyed already by your argument. Either this means that in the future we will all be Ladies and Gentlemen, or time travel will never be invented.

[ArkDelgato]

I saw this one video that explained pocket wormholes and how using them to abbreviate time to travel through it would only work after the first one is made, because to get back you need to have the wormhole to begin with.

Time travel is a horrible idea though. If it was invented any smart government would kill the inventor and cover it up.

Sure, it may seem like killing Hitler before he did anything is a good idea, but what if Russia took germany and staged a full on war instead of a cold one?
Boom, there goes the western-centric society as we know it.
TIMETRAVEL = BAD

Cryogenics can be considered forward in time traveling if you like, I guess.

[Angellus]

You're forgetting a wonderful fact. To us, it may seem as though nothing is happening. Then, think of this. Someone creates a time machine that allows travelling back through time. Presuming it's made public. Lots of people go back in time and change stuff. Someone thinks of using the thing for crimes or revenge (within 1.5 seconds of the announcement of the discovery), and goes on a rampage. This prompts the creation of the temporal police, that stop all TM usage and revert all timeline changes. People begin to think they are secretly manipulated by time-travelling agents, and a rebellion forms. The rebellion acquires their own time-machines and a temporal war breaks out. Then, the last sane man on the Earth realises where this is going and secretly sneaks back into the timestream, discreetly killing off the inventor of the time machine or one of his relatives. The timeline resets to normal, since no time machine was ever invented. At some later point, someone else invents the time machine, and the process repeats ad nauseum. The end result is that such temporal wars will be fought until the end of mankind, whenever that is going to be, and the timeline will remain unchanged.

What I said. XD

[Chutney]

Moore's Law was what I was thinking about, Angellus, and apparently it only applies to computing.
It still applies in a way, because of the massive computing required to time travel, but not as much as I thought it did.

edit: maybe it isn't. it says it doubles every two years, where the one I was thinking of doubles in time as the same amount of advancement is made.
better example than before: a 2mhz processor is made in 2 years, then a 3mhz processor is made 4 years later, then a 4mhz processor is made 8 years later, etc etc

[Dwarf]

Moore's Law was what I was thinking about, Angellus, and apparently it only applies to computing.
It still applies in a way, because of the massive computing required to time travel, but not as much as I thought it did.

edit: maybe it isn't. it says it doubles every two years, where the one I was thinking of doubles in time as the same amount of advancement is made.
better example than before: a 2mhz processor is made in 2 years, then a 3mhz processor is made 4 years later, then a 4mhz processor is made 8 years later, etc etc

Well... processors seem to be a bad example, or we'd be in the... 10 MHz range by now?

[chaoticag]

The way scientific knowledge goes is that it doubles every ten years or so. And when I say everything, I mean everything starting from fire and animal domestication.

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[bjlong]

And ever since the invention of the double-bladed razor, disposable razor blades per head double every six months. Which is why we'll have an infinite number of razor blades per head in a few years.

[Frelock]

The problem with Moore's law is that you can only make transistors so small before it becomes impossible to build them without some extremely major jump in technology.  Transistors now a-days are made with atoms.  You can theoretically build a transistor with something like 10 atoms (physically arranging the atoms that way is problematic, but not impossible).  However, to build a transistor smaller than that, you'd have to start using sub-atomic particles. 

Since most electronics run off of electrons (which are sub-atomic particles), you can't build a transistor that funnels electrons using only sub-atomic particles.  So you'd need to start building quantum computers which use quantum particles to transmit information instead of electrons, which we don't even have the theory for yet (as far as I know).  Also, these quantum computers would have to run in a way completely and totally different from any computer we currently can build (seeing as they would be based on different particles).

Also, the speed of a processor is always limited by the speed of light.  You need to send information to different parts of a processor, which can only travel at the speed of light (unless you're talking about entanglement, which would be crazy for such small distances as within a processor).

Though Moore's law has held fast for quite a period of time, we're nearing it's end.  The wiki article estimates its end in something like 2015, which I think is a good estimate, as Intel is supposedly designing a 7nm transistor.

Spoiler: On extrapolating to predict the future: (click to show/hide)

[Earthquake Damage]

The way scientific knowledge goes is that it doubles every ten years or so. And when I say everything, I mean everything starting from fire and animal domestication.

I call bullshit.  We have no useful way of quantifying "scientific knowledge" aside from counting "significant advances/achievements in a given period of time," and that approach is so subjective it makes my ass twitch.