by Chris Matyszczyk

There's something very comforting when a scientist as well regarded as Stephen Hawking admits to keeping quiet for fear of "being labeled a crank."
Thankfully, he seems to have conquered his fears in a new documentary series for the Discovery Channel, in which he has already considered how man might truly conquer space. Or, indeed, how spacemen might come down to our meager Earth and dismember us as so much fast food.
Hawking has already warned in his documentary that we should be very wary about making contact with beings from out there. "If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn't turn out very well for the Native Americans," he said in "Stephen Hawking's Universe."
But, as he presented his latest ideas about what travel in the future might resemble, he reportedly admitted that he had kept quiet on the subject for fear of being labeled a heretic by the scientific community.

Thrusting off his heretical shackles, he reportedly suggested that spaceships will one day be so fast that we won't know whether we've come or gone. Hawking suggests that Einstein's theories of relativity will become as relatively obsolete as, who knows, the home phone. He posits that, at some point when we're all long gone, a day on a spaceship traveling at 650 million miles per hour would be akin to one year on Earth.
Please don't expect me to check his math. I can barely total up my savings at Safeway. However, somehow one can imagine that technology will follow an inevitable path toward the unimaginable, a path that will change humanity even more profoundly than the laptop has changed love lives.
He does reportedly stress, however, that time travel will only be performed in a forward motion. Which, sadly, excludes a sudden reality show re-enactment of Mark Twain's "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court."
[EDITED FOR COMPLIANCE]
http://news.cnet.com/8301...49-71.html

We'll see if we survive long enough to get there.

My wife and I watched this the other night. It was fascinating. We both love how Mr. Hawking always gets his point across, no matter how encompassing the subject matter is.

Anyway, we were , so that shit was bad ass.

Does he explain in laymen's terms how we would get past the E=MC^2 limitation in which the approach of the speed of light , by virtue of the equation, causes the object traveling to require infinite energy to obtain that speed due to the fact it would also obtain infinite mass?

I don't understand all the complicated math either, but I know the US Navy has tested Einsteins theory out on automic clocks (one on the ground) and one on an airplane and discovered the warping of relative time to be completely accurate to within the specifications of Einstein's equation. Moreover, our GPS navigation systems take his equation into account, and if they hadn't, we'd be missing turns left and right on our TomToms.

My take is that if an advance species---hell, even if *we* discovered the ability to travel backwards through time, future generations of us or aliens would already be here in the present [their past].


I remember my roomate in college and I had a conversatio about this once, and we were trying to come up with ways to even spot such 'future people'. One way, I postulated was perhaps they didn't have any 'seams' in their clothing? Seams are rather unsightly to a future loving minimalist aren't they?

...so we started looking for people without seams in clothing that day.










Let yourself be open and life will be easier. A spoon of salt in a glass of water makes the water undrinkable. A spoon of salt in a lake is almost unnoticed.--The Buddha


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[Edited 5/6/10 20:42pm]

Well given that there are 11-dimentions, infinite parallel universes and that we move through those universes with a single thought (M-theory or Superstring Theory), then time ain't nothing but a thing. Bring on the black holes the ultimate super-slide.
[Edited 5/6/10 23:30pm]

JerseyKRS said:

When I read "My wife and I watched this other night".... I already knew you guys were stoned

bboy87 said:

Shut up.

I think this is key, and in my mind means time travel is impossible!
[Edited 5/10/10 17:27pm]

NDRU said:

What are you talking about, I travel through time in a forward motion every day!

PunkMistress said:

true, and I already seem to hurtling through it as Hawking describes, faster & faster with each day!

TheVoid said:

i don't agree with Mr. Hawking.

first of all, i don't think time flowws in a linear fashion, and secondly i don't think black holes are necessarily 'wormholes'.

but, he is the expert. hope i am wrong!

Aren't we all traveling forward through time?

What good is it if you can't get back?

SUPRMAN said:

I agree with this.

Genesia said:

Exactly!

Time flows slower inside a moving object. This has been known since Einstein... (theory of relativity, time dilation) but that's not time travel.

He did not mention Element 115 did he?

Time is a trick!!



The language that Einstein and Hawking speak is foreign to me. I've not watched the recent Hawking's programs, but I've watched some on Einstein's theories and they boggle my mind. I can't imagine having that "vision".

I'M POSTING FROM THE YEAR 2022! Glad to see the org started leaving threads open indefinitely!

P.S. My copy of Crystal Ball finally arrived.

Ace said:

Nothinbutjoy said:

"Fate is a joke! And as I once read on a wall, in a truck-stop bathroom in Barstow, 'The joke is in your hands.' ...Oh my God, I just got that!"

Ace said:

Who cares?

XxAxX said:

If time isn't linear (which actually gives us a four dimensional, not three dimensional reality) the how does time flow, move . . . ?

SUPRMAN said:

I've thought about this, and it's just confusing.

The more I think about time the more it seems it doesn't exist at all. We move through a geographic world, but time itself just seems to be a reference to me, rather than an actual thing. That's why we can move bac & forth, up & down, in & out, but can only move one direction through time

Actually, come to think of it, the other dimensions don't move either fuck it, my brain hurts

NDRU said:

Time definitely exists just like height, depth and width.
You are not at the same point in time and space as you were this morning, or even a second ago. To complicate it further, the earth and the solar system not only move in a circular orbit but up and down also (in a 86 million year cycle.)
IF time didn't exist, then going back in time would not be possible because if you left earth traveled back in time to find you at a younger age, you would need a time reference to do that. You would need a time reference to know that even traveled back in time and not to another dimension or reality.

SUPRMAN said:

SUPRMAN said:

right, so it exists, but only as a measurement. Time itself does not flow (like inches don't move back & forth either), things flow.

And the fact that Hawking suggests that traveling back in time is not possible, it makes me think time does not really exist as a thing, but only as a concept

Matter exists, and that is why you can travel back & forth on it, but time does not exist as matter, and what it measures is also not matter-based, but rather is simply a relationship. That is why in this physical reality you can only move one direction through it.
[Edited 5/11/10 16:34pm]

NDRU said:

Time I think is more than a relationship. IF I move myself from one location to another, I've also moved in time. I am not where I was five minutes ago.
You can't travel back and forth on height, depth and width either. They are just as conceptual and real as time.
Why does traveling backward in time have to exist for time to exist? Why can't it be one way?

paintsprayer said:

I agree.

JustErin said:

Wow, this is ironic. Once time travel was possible, SUPRMAN went into the future to leave a banana peel outside JustErin's door.