I have a couple of small beefs with the time traveler convention that some crazy kids at M.I.T. are cooking up. The ‘M’ as I understand it, stands for Massachusetts. But that’s not my beef.
A little info about the convention. They are having the one and only time traveler convention because
Time travelers from all eras could meet at a specific place at a specific time, and they could make as many repeat visits as they wanted.
Beef Number 1: Why would real time travelers bother coming to an event to meet with people from our era that don’t have time travel? “Whoa, so you guys don’t have time travel? What’s that like?” Wouldn’t seeing the great battles of history, documenting the real story of the JFK assasination, witnessing the life of Jesus or trading stocks with foreknowledge of market fluxuations be a more interesting/lucrative use of the time travel mechanism?
I certainly think so. Then again I guess even those things would get old and stale if time travel were possible, so a boring convention with the temporal displacement challenged from our era would seem exciting. So would watching carpet rot in accelerated time I guess.
Beef Number 2: Isn’t allowing people who aren’t time travelers attend a “time traveler convention” a little misleading? Sure, from a certain point of view we are all traveling forward in time, but c’mon. We aren’t time travelers in the strictest sense, that we are in time, but y’know, out of sequence. Like showing up the day of the test to tell yourself the answers to the MCAT you failed that kept you out of med school.
Beef Number 3: They ask for some sort of proof from alleged time travelers that they are actually time travelers like a cure for cancer or some nonsense like that. Wouldn’t that violate causality or wreak havok with temporal prime directve? YEAH, it would! Wouldn’t just the sudden appearance of the time machine loaded with people be enough proof? You’d think.
So attend the silly ‘time traveler’ convention if you must. Just don’t blame me if you get there and its just a bunch of present day geeks wrapped in aluminum foil talking about causality and temporal prime directives.
First!
Hooray! Bow to my firstness!
Hi Monkey!:)
Can I go back and drown little Mikey Moore lack a sack of kitten?
Could I at least bitch-slap him on the playground? Tell him Dems eat puppies and killed Santa Claus?
Oops.
…like a sack of kittens?
My bad.
Plus there’s the fact that time relativity only allows for future time travel, not past.
this post is gives me a headache
They’ve just announced a change to the scheduled meetings. The first will be on May 7 this year. The followup will be on April 13 this year. Ya’ll need to plan ahead.
I put stuff into a time machine all the time. Not only does it beep one minute later -but my food comes out hot!
I don’t see how any of these absurd claims are possible. A close examination of the equations will show that the closer something gets to the speed of light, the more massive it appears to be. The theory is that time travel is possible when one goes faster than the speed of light. If something gets heavier the faster it goes, then it’s harder to move. I think the kooks around here are full of it. Nobel-prized physicist wore a Kerry-Edwards pin for his campus paper photo. Some genius…
Chase,
You’re the first person I’ve met/heard from that agrees with me on this, that is, that time travel is only possible going forward, not backward. Thanks for helping not to think I’m completely crazy!
Leuthen, I do believe the thought came from Einstein himself. I don’t remember if it was the general or special theory of relativity, but it was one of them.
I traveled ahead and attended the convention. It pretty much sucked, so I advised all my time travel buddies not to show up.
First of all, if someone on this site could time travel, I guess they would have “First” on every single comment section.
Second, if someone proved they were a time traveler by revealing a cure for cancer, could the organizers of the event save causality by not revealing the cure or allowing it to be used, even to benefit themselves? Wouldn’t they then be considered horrible people for letting millions suffer and die when they know of a cure?
Third, if there were time travelers, wouldn’t you think one of them would think “hey that is a great idea”? Then, wouldn’t they go back about 5 years ago and plan their own one and only time traveler convention and get all the credit? Then, at that point, wouldn’t this convention, if they even had it, be like that lame second Woodstock?
I have a similar beef.
You know in the movie The Time Machine (the old one not the new one) where the hero puts his little prototype time machine on the table and sends it off into the future and it disappears? Well… if it is traveling forward in time only at an accelerated rate it would, necessarily have to pass through each and every second of the future (only at an accelerated rate). Then… it wouldn’t disappear since it is in each and every second of the future. So… if the reality of the situation were really depicted in the movie then he would have pushed the little lever forward and nothing would have apparently happened and his friends would have laughed at him and said he was a kook, but he would have know what really happened.
Hah! I time traveled back and got the first post ever!
Unfortunatly my quanta destablized before I could patent the time machine, and once I got back I had never invented it in the first place.
I’ve always theorized that forward time travel is theoretically possible, but that we’ll never go backwards, but for a much simpler, pragmatic reason.
If backward time travel were ever to be found possible, then where are all the people from the future?
BTW, did anybody ever read Douglas Adams “other” books? I’m thinking of “Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency.”
He had fun with time travel in that.
As I remember it, this guy was at a dinner party and made a salt shaker disappear and reappear in a hundreds of years old clay vase (impossible to get into it). He did it by excusing himself from the room with the shaker in his pocket, traveled back in time to the place where the vase was made, and had the salt shaker put in by the potter.
Forget all that prime directive nonsense. If we’re going to talk about time travel, lighten up, and enjoy the ride!
You guys don’t get it, it is a trap. they want to sucker time travellers to their meeting, so they can jump them and take their time machines away.
Of course, them all being a bunch of MIT nerds, they will flail away with their fists while the time traveller will stand there saying “what’s hitting me, is that a swarm of mosquitos? You call this a party? There’s not even any juma juice here.”
What kind of cool time traveler would ever want to go visit a bunch of drugged-up lefty tards at MIT?
If you don’t think they’re drugged-up lefty tards, then you haven’t read the page that is linked to.
Chase,
I didn’t realize that. Thanks for the info. I’ll have to do my research on this one.
2 things:
“Not an MIT student… I promise” hinted at an awareness of the Relativity Weight Loss Plan:
Since objects approaching the speed of light would approach infinite mass, obviously the way to reduce mass is to be very, very… v e r y s l o w
The, of course, there’s the ultimate problem with time travel: gas prices. Since travel through time is /also/ travel through space–well, it is if y6ou wanna land anywhere recognizable–then you’re gonna need a lotta cash and a lotta gas stations along the way, no matter what kinda car you drive.
Just consider: the solar system (let’s not worry about measly lil distances /within/ the solar system as the earth wends its way around the sun) is traveling through space, along with an expanding milky way and the universe as a whole, at a rather high rate of speed away from its present location all the time, every minute of every hour of…
Just think of the Monty Python “Galaxy Song.” The information it gives is a fairly accurate approximation of astronomical values, including the “million miles a day” value for the distance the solar system–including our wee planet–travels in a day.
Hmmm, so traveling forwards (or backwards, assuming that’s a possibility) one year would mean also traveling approximately 365 /million/ miles in distance.
Oops. There went my vacation money. Gas is just too expensive to waste on time travel.
You do the math for longer time periods.
What if you don’t know jack shit about physics compared to someone eight trillion years in the future? And what if they’ve built a computer that has a bunch of computers simultaneously input the electronic configuration, mass, and acceleration of every particle in the universe so that they can play the model backwards and discover that back when Earth existed some kids had the idea of throwing a time traveler’s convention?
I’m just kidding. Who cares? But also, who knows?
Mostly, the idea of creating a party that exists through all of eternity (with non-zero probability, despite how infinitesimal!) solely because of the way you phrased the invitations is really f***ing cool.
Tomorrow is Saturday. I was hoping to eat some hamburgers in the courtyard with my friends. And now we can all eat hamburgers in the courtyard together and make a national publicity stunt out of a barbeque.
Lighten up, nerds 😛