Forward Time Travel

I find it hard to believe in one linear, locked in, timeline. If I had to create a theory of "time travel" it would be one of "side time;" absolutely everything, from the atomic level on up occupies multiple frames of existence one for each of it's "possibilities," or possible locations. The past or the future are inaccessible but places where certain changes have occurred (possibly futuristic) or haven't occurred (similar to the past) might be available. Of course most of "side time" would be full of slightly alternative physics and vaguely different chemistry and unhealthy stuff of that sort. In many more (an near infinite number really) the only difference would be the slightest difference in your toothpaste formula or how often four leafed clovers occur.

A theory I like is that we all transition between highly similar worlds all the time, our consciousness inhabiting "our" body in each of them. Perhaps they only become inaccessible as the differences pile up and the energy it takes to stick around in that slightly altered consciousness pushes us back to the center of the reality envelope. I'm just making this stuff up based on my favorite SF scenarios but I was once very good at going into a deep (we're talking yogi-like) trance. There was always a fantastic sense of pressure pushing me out of trance that could only be fought for so long. The experience was a lot like people's descriptions of do LSD!

Some fun SF stories: Larry Niven's "All the Myriad Ways" (see a version of the above theories). He also wrote a series about a future civilization using a time travel device to populate a zoo with extinct animals ... except every time the time traveler goes back before the first conception of time traveling technology (HG Wells) he goes into fiction; attempting to bring back a whale nabs Moby Dick, a horse ends up being a unicorn, a dog is a werewolf. It's played nicely for laughs. A lot of Niven's stuff had a great sense of humor.

On a more dour note: "A Great Work of Time" by John Crowley. Cecile Rhodes founds a secret society to use time travel to maintain the British Empire in as static and unending a form as can be managed. The constant adjustments to the time stream create a worn out future that will do nearly anything just to end it all.

For absolute freakout time loop wackiness try "Dinosaur Beach" by Keith Laumer. In the climax the hero gets stuck in a "closed causative loop," basically a Ground Hog Day-like experience where multiple time-line adjustments keep leading back to the same spot (almost) no matter what he does.

Now that I have revealed the inner 14 year old SciFi geek, I'll have to stuff him back in the box he escaped from!

This whole scenario was explored quite thoroughly in Matt Groening's series "Futurama."

GHT said:

That's why I didn't sue when I tried viagra and it didn't work.

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He's here all week.

Hmm. "side time". Makes me think of quantum physics and the endless possible futures there are dependent upon our current thoughts, deeds, and words. My brain hurts.

I'm not sure about cryogenics, but apparently, all the cool kids are doing it.

MikeKardec said:

Some fun SF stories: Larry Niven's "All the Myriad Ways" (see a version of the above theories). He also wrote a series about a future civilization using a time travel device to populate a zoo with extinct animals ... except every time the time traveler goes back before the first conception of time traveling technology (HG Wells) he goes into fiction; attempting to bring back a whale nabs Moby Dick, a horse ends up being a unicorn, a dog is a werewolf. It's played nicely for laughs. A lot of Niven's stuff had a great sense of humor.

On a more dour note: "A Great Work of Time" by John Crowley. Cecile Rhodes founds a secret society to use time travel to maintain the British Empire in as static and unending a form as can be managed. The constant adjustments to the time stream create a worn out future that will do nearly anything just to end it all.

For absolute freakout time loop wackiness try "Dinosaur Beach" by Keith Laumer. In the climax the hero gets stuck in a "closed causative loop," basically a Ground Hog Day-like experience where multiple time-line adjustments keep leading back to the same spot (almost) no matter what he does.

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Thanks for these references. I will soon be at my local library.

This thread is starting to dance around my world... organ and tissue preservation for transplant. The ethics and politics aside, cryopreservation is not such a stretch. Soft tissues have been banked, held at -80 F, then thawed and have remained viable since the 70's. Much of the basic research was done by the US Navy at Bethesda.

The magic bullet at the time was DMSO (dimethyl sulfoxide) - a cryoprotectant that protects the tissue cells from rupturing during freezing. This challenge isn't necessarily thawing, its the freezing process that results in cell damage, so when thawed you have mush (technical term).

Nature's been managing this process forever - just not with us warm-blooded folks. This article describes the case of the Wood Frog (Rana sylvatica) that survives perfectly fine frozen in Canada and Alaska. High concentrations of glucose replace the water and protect the cells... but there's more. No spoiler.

https://owlcation.com/stem/Frozen-Wood-Frogs-and-Adaptations-for-Survival

Since we are travelling at the same speed & direction as time, doesn't that mean that we are forward time travelling already ?
Could time travel to a future that doesn't yet exist be possible ? if so, wouldn't that mean that everything is written in advance & following a predestined path which cannot be altered ?
Imagine travelling to a future but the future isn't already planned & has taken a different path to that you have taken & thus, you're stuck in a temporal & spacial location that has neither a past or future !

Discuss.

In such a case you just mess around for forty-five minutes, then get back into the Tardis and go somewhere else.

Lean'n'mean said:

Since we are travelling at the same speed & direction as time, doesn't that mean that we are forward time travelling already ?
Could time travel to a future that doesn't yet exist be possible ? if so, wouldn't that mean that everything is written in advance & following a predestined path which cannot be altered ?
Imagine travelling to a future but the future isn't already planned & has taken a different path to that you have taken & thus, you're stuck in a temporal & spacial location that has neither a past or future !

Discuss.

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That's why time travel is such a fascinating subject.

Travel to the future is presupposed on the assumption that 'the' timeline' is following a distinct path, whatever that may be.

Anyone can alter their own, as well as others' every minute of every day.

Quantum physics insert: my life goes on the way it does pretty much every day. If I chose, one day, to do something completely outside the realm of what I normally do, and it is to whatever extent harmful to one or more of my charges (students), my life could almost suddenly shoot off in a completely different direction, and my timeline will be altered forever. And depending on what it was I did, someone else's timeline could be affected, as well, including students, families (my own included), and anyone subsequently involved in processing the results of my actions.

That's a pretty extreme example, but it does illustrate the point that free will does indeed exist. We all make choices every minute of every day. Most of us make the same boring choices all the time, thankfully, and don't say and do things that would put our lives spinning out of control. But the potential is always there to either mildly or drastically alter various timelines.

So if you were to travel into the future, let's say your own future, and not someplace on the other side of the world where you've never been before, which timeline will you be on? The simple answer is whichever one you ended up on due to the choices you have made, whether the same ones you always make, drastically different ones you will make, or, and here's a big or, something that happens to you in spite of your every day sameness. Who is to say, if I was time traveling today into the not-to-distant future, that tomorrow I wasn't t-boned on the way to work, either gravely injuring or killing me, and how that affected everyone acquainted with me?

Fascinating subject.

Another examination of forward time-travel by a science-fiction author, (albeit involving no futuristic technology), is in the Spider Robinson short story, The Time Traveler. It concerns an American missionary who early in 1963 had been imprisoned in a Central American country just as a revolution occurred. After being forgotten about for ten years, he is released into the world of 1973. Robinson describes what his character faced was not The Time Traveler's Dilemma, future shock, but instead was The Time Traveler's Second Dilemma, transplant shock. Whereas everyone else had been time traveling forward in time at a rate of one day per day, Robinson's protagonist had effectively traveled forward in time at a rate of 10 years per day. The story went on to describe the difficulties he had in adapting to the social, cultural, and political changes that had occurred in the intervening time.

Similarly, and much more succinctly, I remember there was a Doonesbury strip in the early-mid 1970s where one of Trudeau's characters was sitting at a counter talking with a just-released Vietnam War POW. It ended with the ex-POW saying he was looking forward to watching Ed Sullivan on TV.

I think this says it all: As for me, after reading "The Forever War," the idea of going forward in time got to sound nightmarish, as it did in HG Wells', "The Time Machine".
Who'd want to go forward and find out a meteor strikes the earth a month after you left your time and the Earth now looks like the Moon (right before you die from exposure from being there)?
There's always the possibility of people from the future visiting us now. This movie was an interesting idea along those lines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timescape_(1992_film)
Actually, a guy I know who's into elaborate practical jokes has done stuff like this. He's gotten people together in a perfectly historically accurate car and they'll stop at a gas station, try to pay for gas with old money and gripe about how much gas costs and how they don't recognize anything for sale. He's also gone to a few normal places and acted like it's all amazing, using fake 'cameras' that don't actually exist 'yet', referring to things that are about to happen soon (for example, the eclipse in Oregon) as happening in the far past, trying to plant the bug into anyone he comes across that he might be from the future.

One volume of Spider Robinson's "Tales From Callahan's Bar" series is titled, "Time Travelers Strictly Cash."

Once the soul is gone, they'll only awaken a zombie....

Though if I can have the body of a young Marlon Brando attached to the bottom of my neck now instead a what I got stuck with - yes please!!

Imagine this from a purely philosophical standpoint:

• Someone dies, gets frozen, then somehow they get 'fixed' and woken up.
• Just think of how religion would handle that, especially if there was no memory of bright lights and being in heaven or hell.
• How about the legal aspect? All their worth was long ago given to family. They're now broke!

Plus you'd be in a world as alien to you as ancient Sumeria, with an education and skills centuries out of date.

You'd have your own reality TV show on basic cable within a week.

LizzieMaine said:

You'd have your own reality TV show on basic cable within a week.

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I'd think that many religious people would consider your very existence, post-death (without any recollections of 'Heaven') to be an affront to their beliefs.
I'm not talking smack about religious people, but I am saying it's a given that enough of them would go nuts upon hearing of this, that your life would likely be in jeopardy... again.
I could also see a cult being founded around that as well.
It's an intriguing concept, one that a fiction writer could have a lot of fun with!

MikeKardec said:

Some fun SF stories: Larry Niven's "All the Myriad Ways" (see a version of the above theories). He also wrote a series about a future civilization using a time travel device to populate a zoo with extinct animals ... except every time the time traveler goes back before the first conception of time traveling technology (HG Wells) he goes into fiction; attempting to bring back a whale nabs Moby Dick, a horse ends up being a unicorn, a dog is a werewolf. It's played nicely for laughs. A lot of Niven's stuff had a great sense of humor.

On a more dour note: "A Great Work of Time" by John Crowley. Cecile Rhodes founds a secret society to use time travel to maintain the British Empire in as static and unending a form as can be managed. The constant adjustments to the time stream create a worn out future that will do nearly anything just to end it all.

For absolute freakout time loop wackiness try "Dinosaur Beach" by Keith Laumer. In the climax the hero gets stuck in a "closed causative loop," basically a Ground Hog Day-like experience where multiple time-line adjustments keep leading back to the same spot (almost) no matter what he does.

Click to expand...

Well, I just tried all three of these titles in our local system (Nassau Co., NY) and they don't have any of them. Pfah.

All this makes me want to watch Back to the Future. Again.

But, being serious, don't astronauts travel forward in time several seconds when they're launched into space? Don't recall if I listened to an actual astronaut talk about this or a scientist some time ago.

*space geek leaves room*