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[Eagleon]

There's no doubt that work on science is accelerating, though. And honestly there's a lot of improvement to be had just in the way we use computing power, never mind making things smaller and more powerful. The way programmers are nowadays, they just throw around pointers and integers and floating points where bitfields will do, rabble rabble, kids etc.

I'd get into the singularity and crap, but that'd be derailing the thread.

Just because we haven't seen time travellers doesn't mean time travel is impossible, nor does it mean the world will be destroyed. There are a couple possibilities that preclude either, such as time travel accessing/creating parallel dimensions, time travel destroying sections of time ahead of the destination entirely (which would mean time travel would only exist from the perspective of the time traveller and whoever he convinces he's from the future, so unless it's already been invented or the traveller is in the loony bin/government custody, there are no time travellers), time travel only being possible with a receiving device, and time travel just never being bothered with to our era, which although seems unlikely, we have no way of predicting what our motives will be in the future.

Although I do think there's a good possibility that we will destroy ourselves with a biological or nanomolecular weapon in the nearish future, considering how commonplace the tools to create both are becoming.

[Dvergar]

Using the same logic, some thinker came up with

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Ten years after Moravec first published the simulation argument (and 3 years after its update in Moravec's second full pop science book), the philosopher Nick Bostrom investigated the possibility that we may be living in a simulation.[1] A simplified version of his argument proceeds as such:

i. It is possible that a civilization could create a computer simulation which contains individuals with artificial intelligence.
ii. Such a civilization would likely run many—say billions—of these simulations (just for fun; for research, etc.)
iii. A simulated individual inside the simulation wouldn’t necessarily know that it’s inside a simulation—it’s just going about its daily business in what it considers to be the "real world."
Then the ultimate question is—if one accepts that theses 1, 2, and 3 are at least possible— which of the following is more likely?


a. We are the one civilization which develops AI simulations and happens not to be in one itself? Or,
b. We are one of the many (billions) of simulations that has run? (Remember point iii.)
In greater detail, his argument attempts to prove the trichotomy, that:

either
intelligent races will never reach a level of technology where they can run simulations of reality so detailed they can be mistaken for reality (or this is impossible in principle); or
races who do reach such a level do not tend to run such simulations; or
we are almost certainly living in such a simulation.
Bostrom's argument uses the premise that given sufficiently advanced technology, it is possible to simulate entire inhabited planets or even larger habitats or even entire universes as quantum simulations in time/space pockets, including all the people on them, on a computer, and that simulated people can be fully conscious, and are as much persons as non-simulated people.

A particular case provided in the original paper poses the scenario where we assume that the human race could reach such a technological level without destroying themselves in the process (i.e. we deny the first hypothesis); and that once we reached such a level we would still be interested in history, the past, and our ancestors, and that there would be no legal or moral strictures on running such simulations (we deny the second hypothesis)—then

it is likely that we would run a very large number of so-called ancestor simulations to study our past;
and that, by the same line of reasoning, many of these simulations would in turn run other sub-simulations, and so on;
and that given the fact that right now it is impossible to tell whether we are living in one of the vast number of simulations or the original ancestor universe, the likelihood is that the former is true.

I am ashamed for quoting wikipedia, but whatever

[Aqizzar]

Whenever I think about what humans would do with time machines, I remember that we humans are as much masters of trolling as we are science.  I can absolutely guarantee that if time travel ever became possible, given the unlimited time and possibility of the future, somehow, someway, some cheesedick would go back to the beginning of humanity or the planet or the universe and unmake everything just for kicks.

We're humans, we do that.

I believe the fact that we've never seen proof of a real time traveler from the future is proof that time travel is either impossible or discrete, because otherwise we wouldn't exist at all.

[redacted123]

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[Angellus]

Whenever I think about what humans would do with time machines, I remember that we humans are as much masters of trolling as we are science.  I can absolutely guarantee that if time travel ever became possible, given the unlimited time and possibility of the future, somehow, someway, some cheesedick would go back to the beginning of humanity or the planet or the universe and unmake everything just for kicks.

We're humans, we do that.

I believe the fact that we've never seen proof of a real time traveler from the future is proof that time travel is either impossible or discrete, because otherwise we wouldn't exist at all.

It would be the new way of suicide, only it is a one-time show for the whole of humanity. Since we're still here, it should not be possible.

[Jualin]

If what this video says about the higher dimensions holds true, maybe we will never succeed in making a 4th dimensional time machine, instead only inventing a 5th dimensional time machine. By sheer luck or by the virtue of probability, maybe this will be a dimension that nobody ever visits with the intent to screw it up irrevocably. Maybe the only time travelers we ever get are time tourists.

Or maybe time machines can only bring us back to the date of their completion, and not one second further.

Perhaps there is some multi-dimensional agency policing time travel so nobody travels back in time just to appear before a gathering of people, with the intent to empty their bladder on something important.

Maybe the best anyone can do is merely see back in time, but be otherwise unable to act.

Maybe we aren't here in spite of time travelers, but because of them.

Time travel and the future of the human race is not necessarily exclusive.

[qwertyuiopas]

I personally prefer the timeline branch explainaton, at least on the main line that creates the first time machine.

[Rashilul]

Or maybe time machines can only bring us back to the date of their completion, and not one second further.

This is what it is.

[redacted123]

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[Chutney]

Stany I was too lazy to parse your block of text so forgive me if you already mention it, but if the parallel universes time travel thingy were true, why aren't we receiving time travelers from parallel universes? I mean, if you figure that there are billions of people popping through time at any given moment (maybe many of them the same person?) eventually they'll pop into our universe, unless time travel can only happen from our universe.
Which means that no other universe could ever have time machines so if you time traveled you'd be stuck there forever

[Phantom]

Ahem, if time travel or chrono travel was invented, time would be messed up. Someone could have stopped John Wilkes Booth from killing Lincoln, or they could have stopped Harvey Oswald, there would be time paradoxes, we could be our own grand parents, some evil fuck could even have been hitler by time travelling.

If time travel was real, a bunch of disasters would have been blocked. Why would people from the future say they were from the future any way?

[Gorjo MacGrymm]

i cant decide if the OP of this thread makes me want to laugh or hammer nails into my head.


I know which one most of you probably prefer tho........

[qwertyuiopas]

Hari Seldon, a character in Asimov's Foundation series had a similar problem, though with a few million times more intelligence backing it up: One(Or in this case, countless, but at least 10) critical assumption overlooked because of perspective(In the book, it was something not even the readers would notice until the last few pages of the last book, but here, ANYONE can find a flaw), and that (any) one flaw, when revealed, voids all of the precious work(or not, in the work of fiction, because it DID help, and DID lead to the discovery of the flaw in a situation where the solution is evident and relatively easy)...

[Jualin]

Ahem, if time travel or chrono travel was invented, time would be messed up. Someone could have stopped John Wilkes Booth from killing Lincoln, or they could have stopped Harvey Oswald, there would be time paradoxes, we could be our own grand parents, some evil fuck could even have been hitler by time travelling.

If time travel was real, a bunch of disasters would have been blocked. Why would people from the future say they were from the future any way?

Let's say, hypothetically, that my first theory in my first post was correct. Now let's assume the number of alternate timelines if infinite.

Infinity is a funny thing. If you assign each parallel timeline off to infinity a number n, and then have each timeline send a time traveler to the n+1 parallel timeline, you'll only leave one universe open, the very first one. If you instead have the nth timeline send its time traveler to the 2n timeline, and continue on for each and every other timeline, then there will still be one time traveler from each timeline in another timeline, but in this latter case there will now still be infinity timelines where no time travelers are visiting (excluding the local population).

Now here's something we haven't even covered: How exactly does one navigate in time? How do you suppose it even looks?  As far as I've seen, nobody has even suggested how we may navigate in time, let alone travel in it...

But, in perfect honesty, this is yet another way of saying "We don't know what we don't know." Hypothetically, the number of things we don't know could be infinite. In reality? Maybe some weird and completely arbitrary number. Like 42.

[Phantom]

I also say; "This is complete dogshit."
Seriously, you can't base the future on some invention being created. And if we interfere with the past, we interfere with many outcomes. And people wouldn't believe you anyways if you just walked around saying your from the future.