Society & Culture1 min ago
Time Travel, Teleportation Or Traveling Faster Than The Speed Of Light
73 Answers
Which of these will be achieved first, 2nd and 3rd and what do you base your choices on?
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Teleportation might work in the sense that you could transmit a fractal description of something and make a nearly identical copy at the molecular level but it wouldn't work for anything living. The information might travel at the speed of light but it might take a year to build the object. Time travel would be linked to the speed of light and would take more energy than could be available.
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I blame popular science fiction and pop science, I really do :)
I know we do not know everything, and people can use examples from history to illustrate why we should never say never - but;
As far as I understand these things, the notion of time travel is pretty much impossible, other than the rather mundane observation that we are currently travelling forward through time, an second at a time.
FTL does not seem too likely either. Most speculation revolves around side stepping that limit by use of wormholes etc - but the idea that we could traverse a wormhole is a speculation on a speculation, it seems to me. Personally, I think we are going to have to live with the idea of sub-relatavistic speeds,certainly for the forseeable future.
Immortality - This is not just a question of finding one genetic switch, throwing it and then us all living happily ever after. As a biological machine, we are programmed throughout our whole genetic code for death. From birth, the proteins that form the clear lens of your eye for instance gradually degrade, cross-linking and gradually becoming cloudy and occluded.
Our genetic code is moderated by oncogenes and acted upon by epigenes.Genes rarely work in isolation, so you are talking about whole genetic sequences and complexes. We might be able to live longer, through better diet, less demands on our bodies, better medical interventions, but I seriously doubt we will ever achieve immortality.
And as for teleportation - I actually think this is the least likely - at least for biological materials. Break down the process of what teleportation means for a moment - the usual model is that the body is dissassembled at an atomic level, converted to digital information, held in a buffer, transmitted to the arrival station, then re-assembled, atom for atom, at the other end - instantaneously, with no loss of, for instance, cognitive abilities.
We just cannot even begin to imagine the technology to do this. How do we break down a body at its atomic level? What technology do we employ to scan this? How can we hold the mass of data of trillions of atoms, molecules and cells? What technology is proposed to reassemble at the other end? And how will congition result, since consciousness is an emergent property of biochemistry and electrical activity?
No, I really think that all of these things are likely to remain unfulfilled wishes, plot devices for science fiction, for a very very long time.
I know we do not know everything, and people can use examples from history to illustrate why we should never say never - but;
As far as I understand these things, the notion of time travel is pretty much impossible, other than the rather mundane observation that we are currently travelling forward through time, an second at a time.
FTL does not seem too likely either. Most speculation revolves around side stepping that limit by use of wormholes etc - but the idea that we could traverse a wormhole is a speculation on a speculation, it seems to me. Personally, I think we are going to have to live with the idea of sub-relatavistic speeds,certainly for the forseeable future.
Immortality - This is not just a question of finding one genetic switch, throwing it and then us all living happily ever after. As a biological machine, we are programmed throughout our whole genetic code for death. From birth, the proteins that form the clear lens of your eye for instance gradually degrade, cross-linking and gradually becoming cloudy and occluded.
Our genetic code is moderated by oncogenes and acted upon by epigenes.Genes rarely work in isolation, so you are talking about whole genetic sequences and complexes. We might be able to live longer, through better diet, less demands on our bodies, better medical interventions, but I seriously doubt we will ever achieve immortality.
And as for teleportation - I actually think this is the least likely - at least for biological materials. Break down the process of what teleportation means for a moment - the usual model is that the body is dissassembled at an atomic level, converted to digital information, held in a buffer, transmitted to the arrival station, then re-assembled, atom for atom, at the other end - instantaneously, with no loss of, for instance, cognitive abilities.
We just cannot even begin to imagine the technology to do this. How do we break down a body at its atomic level? What technology do we employ to scan this? How can we hold the mass of data of trillions of atoms, molecules and cells? What technology is proposed to reassemble at the other end? And how will congition result, since consciousness is an emergent property of biochemistry and electrical activity?
No, I really think that all of these things are likely to remain unfulfilled wishes, plot devices for science fiction, for a very very long time.
The Speed of Light will never be exceeded because it is not only the fastest speed in the Universe, it is the only speed in the Universe. "Stationary" objects are travelling through Time at that same speed.
If you move at any speed through Space then you have less speed to move through Time, hence time slows down.
If you move at any speed through Space then you have less speed to move through Time, hence time slows down.
Well let me think on it for a bit and get back to you. But I don't think you've got it right is all.
Not all objects travel at the same speed -- I think you might be thinking of the invariance of "four-dimensional distance" but that is an invariance for any given object rather than for every single object.
Not all objects travel at the same speed -- I think you might be thinking of the invariance of "four-dimensional distance" but that is an invariance for any given object rather than for every single object.
beso's essentially right.
Everything travels at the universal speed of light in spacetime - not in absolute time as there's no such thing.
The consequences of that are that Time travel is possible, in the sense that if your time slows down at speeds significantly closer to the universal speed, then you could return to your original starting point at a time far in the future. But there'd be no going back of course.
Everything travels at the universal speed of light in spacetime - not in absolute time as there's no such thing.
The consequences of that are that Time travel is possible, in the sense that if your time slows down at speeds significantly closer to the universal speed, then you could return to your original starting point at a time far in the future. But there'd be no going back of course.
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