• Question: Do you think time travel could ever be invented?

    Asked by James Sideras to Samuel, Richard, Nikolai, Nicki, Cristiane on 16 Mar 2015.
    • Photo: Nikolai Adamski

      Nikolai Adamski answered on 16 Mar 2015:

      Well, “ever” is a really long time, so I would say yes. Personally, I have no idea how we could even try to travel through time, but then again, we are doing things today that people not too long ago would have thought to be impossible (or at least very, very difficult). I think that we as a people have proven throughout our short history that (almost) anything is possible if we want it to happen. It will not happen today, and probably not in the next 50 or 100 years (or even longer), but eventually….why not? 🙂

    • Photo: Samuel Ellis

      Samuel Ellis answered on 16 Mar 2015:

      Like Nikolai said, it is very hard to say something won’t ever happen. At the moment we don’t have any technology which could be used for time travel, but maybe something new will be discovered way in the future.

      The one thing that makes me sceptical is that if time travel is invented in the future, wouldn’t we be visited by time travellers from the future nowadays? For example, the famous scientist Steven Hawking once held a party for time travellers, and none showed up. Then again, maybe time travellers have really strict rules to make sure we don’t know they visit! 🙂

    • Photo: Richard Simons

      Richard Simons answered on 16 Mar 2015:

      There are a couple of awkward / fun questions here:

      What does ‘ever’ mean when we can manipulate time? We’re really very poorly equipped to discuss time travel because we’ve never needed to develop the language to do so. If something happens in the ‘future’, but you’ve opened a connection from there to here, is it not also happening now?

      Secondly, if we say that it’s theoretically possible, will our civilisation last long enough to find the answer. There’s really nothing special about our civilisation other than the fact that we exist, and that seems a bit of an unstable position within itself; maybe we’ll go on to populate the universe, maybe that’s a bad idea, maybe we won’t have a choice. There’s a great article on something called the ‘Fermi Paradox’, which discusses our chances as a civilisation and discusses why we haven’t had any alien visitors.
      http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi-paradox.html

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