A frequent topic of conversation is time travel. The subject interests me so I might discuss some of my theories with you.
Firstly, time is a direct contradiction of any theory about creationism or any ongoing Godly influence. If you accept the existance of time being a continuous stream of snapshots of what can be best described as 'everything physical' then you accept the idea of
causality. The idea of time and causality is the basis for prediction of anything from weather to illness, death and just about every principle ever conceived. They are all based on the repeatable actions resulting in the same outcome. For instance, if I put a slice of bread in the toaster, when the bread pops up it will be toast... not a rabbit.
So now that we've acknowledged the existance of time, 'the past' and the ability to predict, we can consider some interesting aspects to time travel. By the same principles, we can assume that the future is already decided, it just hasn't played itself out yet. That theory can only exist if time is linear. The concept of time slowing down, speeding up or going backwards is whacked and undermines the idea of time in the first place. Some people lend themselves to the idea that time is not linear, but that's not my opinion. So accepting age, time, the past, the ability to predict and the idea of causality in general, we can come to the idea of time travel.
Infact, the idea of time travel is stupid. It can't happen. It would abliterate all concepts of life, the universe and everything. The closest we'll come to time travel is when we refine prediction to such a degree that we can not just accurately predict the weather, but life itself... a simulation of the past and the future. Getting into The Matrix territory here, but The Matrix covered a lot more aspects and not exactly this one. The type of simulation in The Matrix is a personal experience of the world from the individual's perspective... but the main engine includes the (incomplete) formulas for life, the universe and everything... if an action happens, a calculated result will occur. The Matrix is not complete, it uses approximations to fill the gaps, but most importantly it uses the real-time input of humans to create the future so there is interaction between all the users and The Matrix world.
Taking The Matrix engine out of the context of the movie... so unplugging the humans and ignoring the idea that the robots were feeding off the energy the humans generated. Just taking the engine now... the simulation... fixing all the problems, putting exact formulae in to calculate/predict the exact outcome of any action. You would then have a perfect simulation of life and everything to do with it. Then all you would need to do is put a snapshot of existing life into the simulator... a snapshot in time that is. Freeze time, take the instantaneous state of everything in the universe... if you like, mass and energy. Required measurements would be things like 3-dimensional co-ordinate of the physical position of the object with respect to a given reference point and all information about the state of that object. Then the simulator could calculate the next instant of time, then the next instant, then the next instant, etc. It would also be able to reverse that and predict backwards. There's a lot we dont know about the past!
If you were able to use the simulator from an equivalent perspective to that of The Architect in The Matrix, then you'd be able to track things forwards and backwards in time. Look at the things on your table. I have a lot of different things but I'll take one as an example... the plastic power button on my LCD monitor. Where will that be in 50 years? Where will it be in 500000 years? Where was is 10 years ago? Where was it 1000000 years ago? Bits of it would be all over the place. With the simulator, you could trace forwards or bakwards the life of anything! Anything at all. Another use would be the 'what-if' machine as seen in Futurama... which would be a possible application of the simulator if you could wind it back in time and then slightly change the starting state of the simulation then run it forward in real-time.
Where am I going with this? If you think anything like I do, you'll know where I'm going. One argument against the concept of time being linear is that it's a 1-dimensional thing. 1D and 2D can never exist in real life as everything has a width, height and depth (3D) even if one or two of them is very small, all three are always there for everything physical. The concept of time is not 3D, it's 1D. 1D is like the X-axis on a graph... in this case it is the time-axis. The thing about an axis is that it does not join 2 points, it has infinite length (much like this train of thought).
If you can simulate forward and backwards in time with 100.0000...-percent accuracy then you can simulate along the entire breadth of time. The idea of time is that it has no start and no end. But that's not possible. Everything starts somewhere, it can't just go on forever. But using the theory that you can't make nothing out of something or something out of nothing, it cannot possibly start with nothing and then suddenly exist! So does that undermine the idea of causality in the first place? Was everything actually created by God? But then God is some form of life and what happened before there was God? Was God created by an older God? Does time exist only in our memories which were actually implanted exactly 30 seconds ago by the giant tuna (an alternate theory of creation by Jarrod Gibbs)? But that can't be true because each instant of time is infantesimally small, making it impossible to have memories created... just the same as it's theoretically impossibly to create my life simulator because you can only approximate time, never calcluate every instant.
So this theory of infinity. Infinitely big, infinitely long, infinitely small. Can infinity exist? How can it not exist? You can't have discreet values of time, surely... it goes against the basic concept of "continuous".
The moral of this discussion is that time travel is small time... the concepts of life, the universe and everything (especially time itself) are far more of a brain fuck. In the end, what does it matter? Live your life and enjoy what comes your way. Opportunities missed were out of your control anyway, 'cos the outcome came about through an infinite number of factors decided a long long long long time ago... in 'the beginning' (whenever or whatever that was). Live to enjoy and so that others can enjoy.
