Backwards Time Travel May Not Be a Good Idea

Here is a bit more in depth info on conceptually what would happen:

To understand the implications of relativistic backward time travel, Nemiroff ran the numbers for a very simple case. In his thought experiment, a spaceship would start on a launching pad on Earth, travel at five times the speed of light to a planet about 10 light-years away, then turn around to return home to a landing pad not far from the liftoff site. (Other proposed methods of time travel, such as traveling through a wormhole in curved space-time, were not addressed in the study.)

It turned out that a pair of ghost-ships, one with negative mass and one with positive mass, the researchers speculate, must appear out of thin air.

Five years after embarking, Earthlings would see a very strange apparition: Because the light from the spaceship travels slower than the spaceship itself, after the vessel returned and sat on the landing pad, Earthlings would see images of the spaceship on its way out and another doppelganger spaceship on its way back.

Eight years later, things would look even odder: An image of the spaceship sitting on the landing pad would still be visible, as would two images (perhaps like holograms) of the spaceship on its outbound and return flights. Only this time, both of those images would look farther away, as if the spaceship was traveling backward in time.

He makes an interesting point about how we see things in terms of when the light reaches us.  However, this may make things confusing and there may be unintended consequences so I would avoid for now.

And below is a related and interesting theoretical video about time travel..enjoy!

thanks to livescience.com for the great info



7 Comments

  1. Erik Oberndorfer said:

    But if you go back in time and change something then when you get to the present there will be no need for you to every go so you won’t. If you did travel backwards in time we’d already not know cause your effect has already happen in this present

  2. Scott Howard said:

    time isnt a linear line theres multiple differant timelines time branches off from each and every action creating a multitude of branched outcomes to time travel without altering the future one must find a timeline not linked to their future but to a differant past that has a differant future or its future has not been decided like it stopped at one moment because nothing was done to decide its futre leaving it at a perpetual loop until its future is decided

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