Again, I'm not talking about experiencing something in a different space-time. That's not what I'm talking about here. The show I saw wasn't addressing relativity at all.

I'm talking about experiencing time through our own brains. For example, when you flash a bunch of cards with a cartoon drawing, you're brain is not seeing page 1, then page 2, then page 2, etc. You're brain is seeing a drawing move on the page--we experience time that way.

Certain birds precieve the fluttering of pages differently than we do. Their brains are just designed to see the flashing of the paper differently--more quickly.

It's the same time we're both experiencing, but we perceive things in that time differently. A nat would fly in front of the bird and the bird would immediately snatch it---a sloth, however, wouldn't even register it. Same time--brains are wired differently to experience that time.

You'd have to see the show to understand. It was fascinating. I never realized before then that animals perceive time differently.

OK, let's pretend that vivid's penis is moving from his city to yours.

As his penis picks up speed it starts to swell. If you want his penis to be at your doorstep immediately--then his penis would swell to well larger than the size of the earth, and he'd need a TON of gasoline to get to your doorstep.

I don't think he is proposing to get around it, in the OP he says only forward time travel will be possible--the trip to Jupiter scenario you mentioned earlier

The spaceship will not end up in the past, it will end up in the relative future.

Twin paradox!

Astronaut shoots off towards some distant planet at some superfast speed close to the speed of light and then comes back to Earth.

We on earth are watching. From our point of view (if we could see the astronaut inside his spaceship from earth), we'd see things moving slower for him... he'd be in slow motion...

So by the time he came back, less time would have passed for him than for us. We'd have aged 50 years, he'd have aged maybe 5 months.

BUT!!!! Motion is relative! From the astronaut's point of view, he's not moving. We on Earth are moving away from him. So the same logic applies from his point of view. So when he gets back to earth, he'd have aged 50 years, and we'd have aged 5 months.

How can this be????

http://en.wikipedia.org/w...in_paradox

Ahhhhh..
Then that is very possible within the next few generations.

You could do that with an ion drive, though the 30 minute scenario might not be possible.


What really depresses me is that according Bryson (who got his material from actual physicist and scientists), a human being will never, EVER reach the edge of our own solar system if he travelled in a spaceship originating from earth. It would take, according to him, given our current possible scenarios with the technology we can imagine, thousands of years.

I'm more optimistic than that, but Bryson didn't make this stuff up--he researched it and only eloquently deliver the message by real scientists.

Actually, NDRU, in the Ender series by Orson Scott Card, Ender Wiggen travels from planetary system to planetary system, and as a result, only 10 years has moved for him when on earth at least 70 years had passed by. As a result, his savings account and investment accounts swelled. He was a mega rich by the time he stepped off his spaceship.

YAY TIME TRAVEL!

Our solar system or our galaxy (or to the next star)? I'm pretty sure we already sent something outside of our solar system

But yeah, it's pretty depressing. I have little hope that we'll meet aliens in our lifetime without some insane breakthrough like wormholes because stars are just too damn far apart.

Maybe it's good, they'd most likely find our brains delicious if we did meet.

We sent voyager 1 and 2 passed pluto (at that time a planet).

But it's still in the keiper(sp?) belt, and will not reach the ort cloud (the true end of our solar system) for about 10,000 years. We are nowhere even close to the edge of our solar system, which is almost one light year from the sun.

yes, but he also had Jane managing his investments

gotcha, I was only thinking about Pluto

You read the books!?!?!?!?



Oh NDRU, you had me at 'hello'

I'm on #3 right now

Xenocide is pretty good (are you following the original books or the ones that also follow Bean, the "Shadow of the Hegemen"?"

I'm assuming you're following the original and reading Xenocide.
I liked Xenocide.
Children of the Mind I actually didn't like very much--too much going on in it.

But, the 'bean' series which follows the ender series (even in timeline) are said to be just as good as book 1 and book2 (my favorite book was Speaker for the Dead--I've yet to read the ones about bean).

yeah I'm on Xenocide. I have heard the series doesn't totally hold up, so I am not sure if I'll continue after this one

But yeah Speaker was really great, the best of the three that I have read.

Whether time exists on the physical level or not, would that really affect our ability to travel through it the way Hawking is suggesting? There are lots of things that don't "exist" in and of themselves in the universe, but they do "exist" in the sense that we use them as a measure or gauge. In that sense, we could make a trip through what we perceive as time, right?

i disagree with hawkings that time travel can somehow be accomplished through a 'wormhole' at the center of a black hole. imo, that makes no sense. a black hole, like it's opposite the supernova, is an annihilative environment. i doubt anyone could survive being sucked into that massive gravity sinkhole.

but i've been thinking. imo time does not 'flow', nor 'move' nor actually exist. so, imo traveling through time is not possible. however change does exist.

assuming that 'change' leaves "quantum tracks" in the universe (if only in the form of radiation emitted at the time of change?) maybe it could be possible to use a kind of 'quantum' leap to jump from one point in the track to another.

assuming time does not exist, then everything that ever happened and everything that ever will happen are right here, right now. it might just be a matter of figuring out the how of leaping into a specific quantum track, where an event has either ocurred, or not occurred.

okay. sorry, that's all i got

Wouldn't it be disappointing if we met aliens and the only difference between us was that they had ridges on their foreheads and talked about "honor" every other sentence?