Seeing the past: A somewhat realistic idea

[Zageron]

Personally, I'm completely against the belief that time travel will ever be possible. However, I think that viewing the past will!

Topic:
Think of it this way.
- Scientists develop warp speed, or a speed that surpasses that of light. (In the aspect of human flesh being torn to shreds at such a high speed let us say that we create a robot, space ship, strong enough to withstand the pressures of warp.)
- Scientists also develop a telescope powerful enough to see earth from a great distance, and at a great resolution (enough to see individual grains of rice).

Now, travelling at faster than the speed of light one would be racing against the time it takes for an image, light, to reach it's destination. So let us say this robot was equipped with the warp drive, and telescope.

It is then sent in a single direction for 20,000 light years. (Of course traveling at faster than the speed of light means it would reach it's destination MUCH sooner. Let us say... 20 years.)

Discussion:
Do you think that this telescope equipped robot could then capture footage, if aimed directly at earth, of things that happened 20,000 years in the past?

Now if you say yes, you would also say it is pointless because after seeing 20,000 years of time 20,000 years has passed, making the information gathered useless to it's original "gatherers". (Seeing as they are dead 19,9xx odd years)
But, what if the robot could travel at warp speed, back toward earth, keeping a direct focus on the activities of earth's light. By doing so it could capture footage at... 1,000 times the speed. When it returned home it could simply be slowed down by 1,000 times.

Of course the camera, or recording device, would have to be able to record about 3,000 frames per second, ... I could go on about this but you get the point.

Ideas? Disagreements? Do you think it would work? (Of course lets presume that no obstacles or obstructions get in the way of earth's light or the robots trajectory.)

[Afrombean]

Re: Seeing the past: A somewhat realistic idea

First of all, unless I'm mistaken, the entire concept of "warp drive" as you put it bypasses all of the forces that would do damage to a human partaking in it. There is no wind resistance in warp speed. In fact, there isn't any resistance; you would just pass through solid objects. Or rather, the objects shape in space would bend around you as you pass by. Seriously, didn't you ever wonder how they maneuvered around planets on Star Trek? They simply don't have to, because the planet bends around the space craft, and the coolest thing about it is that living things on the planet would be totally unaware of it as well, because they would be bent in precisely the same way. Another analogy I like for thinking about the concept of this sort of movement is the proposed way that the ship on Futurama moves. I believe what they said was a joke, but I feel it makes sense in this case. Basically, the ship doesn't move at all, it's the Universe that moves around the ship. Basically, the ship pulls the universe over itself to "move" and this allows the mass of the ship to be propelled almost like a galactic maglev with 0 resistance.

That said, of course if it can move 20,000 light years away in less than 20,000 years, it would be picking up light that "happened" before it had left. However, I wouldn't go as far as to say that this light would be of any use, because the distance and/or speed required to see anything interesting (how about the time of the dinosaurs?) would be so far or so fast that I wouldn't expect light to travel that far with any clarity. You can't just say "oh but it can see a grain of rice from 20,000 light years away" because it doesn't work like that. Furthermore, ****ING CLOUDS YOU GOT XRAY SPECS ON THAT THING OR WHAT

Oh and as far as time travel, they say that it is possible to time travel, even to the past. I'm a bit skeptical, myself, but they say that powerful lazers and **** bend space in such a way that it's possible if you have enough of them in a certain array or something. Personally, the only kind of time travel I feel is really possible would be to jump forward in time, but even then, I don't know if it would be possible for humans (or any matter really) to survive a jump like that in tact.

[Afrobean]

Re: Seeing the past: A somewhat realistic idea

Faster than light travel, for one thing, won't happen, especially for humans. Also, light that has left our planet would be incredibly hard to piece together to find anything in detail -- we're so tiny, and the light would be so dispersed that it'd be hard to get much detail from the patchwork.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive

It's theoretical, but the concept does exist, and if practically applied, a human would have no problem traveling inside of a vehicle making use of that form of travel.

For those who don't understand that article or are too lazy: basically you're propelled within a "bubble" of spacetime, and in this way, relativistic laws no longer apply globally (ie in relation to the inside of the "bubble" versus the outside of it), but still apply locally within the "bubble". In this way, faster than light speeds are possible without completely obliterating the matter of whatever is being accelerated to that speed (although light within the "bubble" would still travel faster in relation to the other matter inside the "bubble"). It's also worth noticing: inside the bubble, it would feel as though you're not moving at all. You could go from 0 mph to faster than the speed of light and back again 100 times per second and you wouldn't notice a difference at all (although, looking to the outside of the bubble would probably give you wicked motion sickness in that case).

When we look at the sky or see galaxies years ago via their light, that kind of detail is derived from objects of massive scale. The pictures we see of even our own Milky Way are actually derived from artists' impressions or other pieces of information from other galaxies with similar characteristics and other spectroscopy-oriented tests. It would take an ABSURD amount of time to send a probe out far enough to take pictures of our galaxy and then relay the data back.

Actually I think they really have a way of seeing the galaxy from outside of it. Something to do with light or reflecting or something.

So given that, it's extremely unlikely that we'd ever be able to look back in time at our own Earth in the way you describe, merely because we wouldn't be able to gather the relevant light, simply put. Unless there are multiple alien planets able to capture bits and pieces of Earth's light from long ago, and then somehow those aliens were able to piece together the information and relay it to Earthlings, we'd have no way of looking back into the past.

That wouldn't be looking back on the past, it would be recorded history.

[Afrobean]

Re: Seeing the past: A somewhat realistic idea

Well whatever, history is past -- semantics irrelevant here. My point is that we wouldn't be able to see that kind of history.

As for the Alcubierre thing, lol, that generally gets shat on from every possible angle. It's a cool idea but it violates too many laws. Even with respect to space, there's more evidence supporting that the speed of light is pretty much the limit. Every other test done so far to try to prove otherwise, even in simple, simulated environments, has always failed, and the data shows that if you have mass, you can't reach the speed of light (but you can approach it) because then we're talking about infinite energy/mass here. You can also graph this and see the pretty little asymptote via Einstein's equations.

Did you read the article?

You DON'T reach the speed of light. This isn't like using rocket fuel to propel yourself forward. You are basically inside a bubble, motionless. You are not accelerating. You are not moving. You are not going the speed of light. But to those not inside the bubble, you WOULD be going the speed of light. But for you inside the bubble, you would just be sitting there, not even being able to feel the travel of the immense distance you'd be traveling.

You know the law of relativity that you yourself just cited? Do you understand what it means at all? You're not traveling faster than the speed of light, because the light inside of the bubble is still going faster than you are. It's about relativity, seriously. Relative to the light outside of the bubble, you'd be going ****ing fast as **** bitch tit, but relative to the light within the bubble with you, you're a slow ****er.

[Relambrien]

Re: Seeing the past: A somewhat realistic idea

I'm really not well-educated on the whole "faster-than-light travel and its relation to time travel" subject, so forgive me if I say something stupid.

Would extra dimensions (ala string theory) allow for faster-than-light travel? For instance, moving through an extra dimension at below the speed of light, to a location far enough away that you arrive before light does, traveling through our conventional space?

There's a diagram attached since I don't think I explained that well. Basically, could such a thing theoretically be possible? And if so, how could that be used in terms of time travel, or "seeing the past?"

[Afrobean]

Re: Seeing the past: A somewhat realistic idea

I don't like the idea of discussing travel through the 4th dimension using wormholes. Obviously, it would be something LIKE that, but to call it simply "wormhole" would be problematic, for precisely the reason you stated.

And if you're going to make an example of travel through the 4th dimension allowing for instantaneous movement between distant points, go watch Event Horizon right now.

"What's the shortest distance between two points?"
"A straight line."
"Wrong. The shortest distance between two points is zero."

I just love that concept. The shortest distance between two points is a bend through the 4th dimension in which point A is equal to point B, even if point A and B are billions of light years apart within our three dimensions.

Oh my, I seem to have gone off on a tangent. Time travel to the past. Yes. I do believe what GasesAreFluids said about "accelerating one of the wormhole ends". I've definitely heard of that before, and the idea of it being limited by the first trip is something else worth noticing. I wish I could remember what the special I saw about the lasers was called. I think they had a whole bunch of this kind of **** on it, like "warp drive" and all this kind of stuff. Oh well, no big deal.

What do you guys think of temporal paradox in practical application in real life? Or rather, I should say, assuming time travel to the past is possible, how do you think temporal paradoxes would affect things? Personally, to me, it seems almost like this backwards time travel would skew off along another branch, and time would "continue" from that point, while at the "same time" the time that the original time traveler left from would "continue" on as though the time traveler's changes to history had never happened (because, according to the timeline of that branch of the time, it DIDN'T ever happen). Now, I'm a big fan of time travel fiction and I love the idea of how different fictions deal with paradoxes, but I really don't think any of them are very accurate to how things would work in real life. Then again, now that I think about it, the way they handle it in DragonBall Z is pretty much EXACTLY like what I described. Oh well; it's still not a very popular model (typically the "paradox = destroyed Universe" idea holds strong I think, even though, if this were the case, and time travel were real, then theoretically, this time right now wouldn't exist either due to all of timespace having been erased from existence at some point during the possibly infinite time line). And you know, if you look at things from the perspective of multiple additional dimensions (perhaps most easily explained by this video), this seems most logical. As time travel into the past goes back and changes things, there would simply be a branch off of the "standard" timeline. This is just a different representation of the same "reality", same everything, except a difference of event in the past causing a shift. Or maybe this is the fifth dimension here...? I forget... it's been a while for me, but anyway, I'm talking about the point where there is an infinite number of branches corresponding to each possible event in all of time, and each point of different possible event creates a new branch, leading to an infinitely infinite number of possible total outcomes.

Ok, I'm beginning to notice that I'm just kind of flowing out my writing without real direction, so I'm just gonna end the post now. Maybe I should get some sleep...

ps one more thing I have to add: the reason why warp drive style travel would not "rape [your] particles" is because you simply aren't going the speed of light. I don't know how else to describe it. It's almost like you would exist within your own local "Universe". The laws of physics and such still apply within your local "Universe", but because of the "Universe" is in and of itself, laws of physics of the outside Universe have no real pull on its own local laws. At least, that's how I'm understanding it.

[Turboyoshi]

Re: Seeing the past: A somewhat realistic idea

On a related note: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tachyon

From my knowledge, as something approaches light speed, its mass becomes 0 doesn't it? So if this theoretical particle travels faster than the speed of light, then what would its mass be?

On another related note, i once tried to solve Einstein's E=mc2 problem when a particle is traveling past the speed of light, and i ended up with imaginary energy. So does this mean that Tachyons are therefore imaginary?

[ledwix]

Re: Seeing the past: A somewhat realistic idea

Actually, mass becomes increasingly greater as you approach light speed, if my memory serves me correctly. This is why it is theoretically impossible to get an object to travel at that speed, because as it hit the speed of light, its mass would be infinite, and so would the energy required to get it to that speed. This is also why we consider objects that move at the speed of light, such as photons and gravitons, to be massless particles. Also, I thought time travel was only possible in the forward direction, not to the past, because of the breakdown in the equations for general relativity.

[Forlorn Radiance]

Re: Seeing the past: A somewhat realistic idea

Actually, mass becomes increasingly greater as you approach light speed, if my memory serves me correctly. This is why it is theoretically impossible to get an object to travel at that speed, because as it hit the speed of light, its mass would be infinite, and so would the energy required to get it to that speed. This is also why we consider objects that move at the speed of light, such as photons and gravitons, to be massless particles. Also, I thought time travel was only possible in the forward direction, not to the past, because of the breakdown in the equations for general relativity.

Nicely put. E=mc^2 can tell us that an electron (which moves NEAR the speed of light) would need an amount of energy equivalent to all the energy produced from every star in the universe since the beginning of time to get it to light speed. That being said, if you could get enough energy, anything is really possible.

On a side note, the "window dimension" idea seems much more likely to me. Lets say that time travel is possible. If people from the future, no matter how distant managed it, wouldn't we have some traces of them now? Its much more easy to believe that time travel would also affect space, and thusly thrust us into an alternate dimension. The past (time) we see, may not, or more likely than not, would not be anything of any great relevance.

[Reach]

Re: Seeing the past: A somewhat realistic idea

You don't need to violate any laws to break the speed of light. That is, traveling a larger distance per unit time than light does not violate general relativity or anything else (general relativity contains faster than light solutions). This has been done with photons and atoms on several occasions using more than one method; however, actually getting them to transmit information can be tricky (though teleportation of information has been performed). Moving faster than light locally is impossible, but we don't need to worry about that at all.

Although Alcubierre's method works fine in theory for faster than light travel, it's a practical impossibility. It'll never work, so we're going to have to come up with a far more efficient method of performing a similar feat.

As for the original idea, yea, it's possible. Don't confuse this idea with time travel since it doesn't have anything to do with it. Whenever you look at things in space you're looking at old light, and the farther away you look the farther into the past you're peering. So assuming you could actually pull all of that off >_>

[Zageron]

Re: Seeing the past: A somewhat realistic idea

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3811785.stm

Covers teleportation. I believe that Teleportation stations, to transit around the world, will be available to the general public in 40 - 60 years.

So? Where do we go from there? If we can teleport these particles from here to there, why can't we teleport your, however many, particles?
I was under the impression that teleportation was faster than, if not equal to, the speed of light. Or is it the speed of electricity. (How fast is that?)

Edit:
Electricity travels at the rate of 186,300 miles[300,000km/s] per second (the speed of light).

Edit2:
Pardon me. The energy of electricity, travels at the speed of light. While electricity doesn't technically move at all.
http://amasci.com/miscon/speed.html (Accuracy?)

[Reach]

Re: Seeing the past: A somewhat realistic idea

The above done by Rainer Blatt was over a distance of maybe a millimeter.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal...ature05136.pdf is a more recent account of teleportation that takes it to lengths of half a meter using a different technique. Quantum state teleportation doesn't allow superluminal transmission though. Very recent advancements, including some stuff by Blatt and Ashton Bradley propose methods that avoid quantum entanglement all together. Literally particles disappearing and then appearing elsewhere, so it could get interesting. Though it's kind of irrelevant when it comes to the actual thread topic XD

I'm assuming the thread creator was being hypothetical and assumed the ability to perform the faster than c feat. Yea, it's possible but sure, a practical impossiblity at the moment, given we can't even get our space ships to get to speeds of mph in the 6 digits.

[N.T.M.]

Re: Seeing the past: A somewhat realistic idea

Excluding the possibility of this being applied to reality, I'm not really confident that the whole theory is even accurate.

It just doesn't seem to add up in my opinion.

[devonin]

Re: Seeing the past: A somewhat realistic idea

Excluding the possibility of this being applied to reality, I'm not really confident that the whole theory is even accurate.

It just doesn't seem to add up in my opinion.

Mod Stuff: Welcome to Critical Thinking Always nice to see new faces posting. However, one of the defining qualities of a CT post is that it needs to explain any claims it makes, and back them up with sound reasoning. I'm quite curious in fact to discover what precisely about Zageron's theory doesn't add up for you.

Devonin Stuff: Frankly I think it is really specious to try and argue what is essentially the really shady kind of time travel to the future (If I going at close to light speed out and back, more time has passed on Earth than passed for me [This is actually already happening, the guy who has spent the most time in space out of everyone is like, 0.01 seconds younger than the rest of the word] thus by some standards of definition, I've travelled to the future, even though I can't "get back" afterwards) can be adapted to become viewing the past, simply by taking some pictures out the back of your spaceship as you travel.

I mean, I actually think it would be more difficult to build a telescopic camera capable of taking clear and distinct photos of earth while you move away from it near the speed of light, while it rotates on its axis, and revolves around the sun in its orbit, than it would to build a sufficiently fast craft.

I mean, something needs to be going, what, 18,000mph in order to be in orbit around the earth? (I seem to recall that it's 5 miles per second to orbit, could be wrong about that) That's an awful lot of spin, once you're away from the earth, to try and take useful pictures.

[N.T.M.]

Re: Seeing the past: A somewhat realistic idea

Mod Stuff: Welcome to Critical Thinking Always nice to see new faces posting. However, one of the defining qualities of a CT post is that it needs to explain any claims it makes, and back them up with sound reasoning. I'm quite curious in fact to discover what precisely about Zageron's theory doesn't add up for you.

Devonin Stuff: Frankly I think it is really specious to try and argue what is essentially the really shady kind of time travel to the future (If I going at close to light speed out and back, more time has passed on Earth than passed for me [This is actually already happening, the guy who has spent the most time in space out of everyone is like, 0.01 seconds younger than the rest of the word] thus by some standards of definition, I've travelled to the future, even though I can't "get back" afterwards) can be adapted to become viewing the past, simply by taking some pictures out the back of your spaceship as you travel.

I mean, I actually think it would be more difficult to build a telescopic camera capable of taking clear and distinct photos of earth while you move away from it near the speed of light, while it rotates on its axis, and revolves around the sun in its orbit, than it would to build a sufficiently fast craft.

I mean, something needs to be going, what, 18,000mph in order to be in orbit around the earth? (I seem to recall that it's 5 miles per second to orbit, could be wrong about that) That's an awful lot of spin, once you're away from the earth, to try and take useful pictures.

Thanks for the welcome .

I should have been more clear then. I know I'm no expert on the matter. I just always viewed time more as a line of relativity than something that can actually be "crossed". As in exceeding light speed shouldn't have any affect on that object's time, because time itself is really nothing. I just don't understand that part.

I don't know much about his theory though, so I'll have to look into it further. The whole concept is very intreaging.