Our best shot at meeting time travellers is to found a religion. If time travel were invented today, trillions, even quadrillions, would be invested into visiting Jesus or Mohammad.
To really prime the pump, our Prophet should claim to have been visited by time travelers much as Mary or Mohammad were visited by angels.
You're missing a very simple explanation for why no time travelers: no means of creating time travel allows one to go back to a time before the time-travel device/system was created. What makes this plausible is that every speculative time-travel scheme yet proposed by physicists has had this feature. E.g., tachyons for communicating with the past using a "tachyon reflector" receding from us at either a great velocity or great distance, wormholes where one end has been accelerated to near-lightspeed and then returned, Tipler cylinders, etc.
I'd love time travel to become reality, however, after a long time considering the subject I realised why it cannot succeed.
A 'working' time machine, unlike Dr Who's imaginary TARDIS, will not be able to carry sufficient fuel to take the craft to any destination more than a few thousandths of a second <> because the Earth orbits at ~around 30kps, meaning a time machine cannot materialise at it's starting point on the planet, < or > in time.
Given we are considering time travel of years < or > a successful time travel machine would materialise in empty space. It cannot 'rescue' itself by almost immediately trying to return to it's starting time because the moment it materialises it 1. May possess the momentum p it had when it began its journey. 2. It 'will' gain a momentum p+ when the surrounding gravity fields at it's arrival point provide it with gravitational energy.
This means that if the traveller attempts to return to it's starting point, it will return to a different point in space from whence it started. Depending on the panic-period before they realise the danger, they will almost certainly still materialise in the wrong place.
In short, even a successful time travel test of mnore than several nanoseconds will result in disaster. Hence, dissapointed though I am, time travellers will never visit anyone.
I'd love time travel to become reality, however, after a long time considering the subject I realised why it cannot succeed.
A 'working' time machine, unlike Dr Who's imaginary TARDIS, will not be able to carry sufficient fuel to take the craft to any destination more than a few thousandths of a second <> because the Earth orbits at ~around 30kps, meaning a time machine cannot materialise at it's starting point on the planet, < or > in time.
Given we are considering time travel of years < or > a successful time travel machine would materialise in empty space. It cannot 'rescue' itself by almost immediately trying to return to it's starting time because the moment it materialises it 1. May possess the momentum p it had when it began its journey. 2. It 'will' gain a momentum p+ when the surrounding gravity fields at it's arrival point provide it with gravitational energy.
This means that if the traveller attempts to return to it's starting point, it will return to a different point in space from whence it started. Depending on the panic-period before they realise the danger, they will almost certainly still materialise in the wrong place.
In short, even a successful time travel test of mnore than several nanoseconds will result in disaster. Hence, dissapointed though I am, time travellers will never visit anyone.
Suppose we had a way to travel 100,000 years back in time today, at the cost of a billion dollars.
Would we be trading stone spears for goat skins? No.
The economy as of then is negligible compared to the cost.
Would we do it for prestige/science value? Like the moon landings. Quite possibly.
Would we go mining on a massive scale? Could we dig more than a billion dollars of gold or oil out of the fresh untouched mines? Maybe?
Nanotech and AI make setting up a base Much easier. Our current economy is negligable to them. They would have little reason to get involved.
But sending a single nanomachine back to near the big bang, to build a dyson sphere around the first stars. That is something that would likely work out. The amount of energy that a galaxy burns over 10 billion years is large, even compared to the energy needed for time travel. And given self replicating nanotech, only a dustspeck sized nanobot need go back in time.
If you are sending stuff back in time, and the technology of time travel doesn't make going back further much harder, then going back as far as possible makes sense. After all, waiting is easy.
Societies might also want to go back in time for charitable reasons, ie the past is where most of the suffering and death is.
Interesting read!! Not my area of expertise for sure but I wonder if anyone in this field considers that humans will continue to evolve and that we may not be quite the same in thousands of years. Maybe our brains will be better repositories of knowledge, for example.
A constant conundrum, the time travel paradox, to those of us who toiled in science fiction. Although I question the economic benefit benchmark. Surely this is a preoccupation of our current mindset and not the only reason to do or create anything new. Our only human motive being profit. Or is this perhaps an explanation. Some God minded individual went back in time to create this reality for his own financial benefit. 🙄
Our best shot at meeting time travellers is to found a religion. If time travel were invented today, trillions, even quadrillions, would be invested into visiting Jesus or Mohammad.
To really prime the pump, our Prophet should claim to have been visited by time travelers much as Mary or Mohammad were visited by angels.
You're missing a very simple explanation for why no time travelers: no means of creating time travel allows one to go back to a time before the time-travel device/system was created. What makes this plausible is that every speculative time-travel scheme yet proposed by physicists has had this feature. E.g., tachyons for communicating with the past using a "tachyon reflector" receding from us at either a great velocity or great distance, wormholes where one end has been accelerated to near-lightspeed and then returned, Tipler cylinders, etc.
I'd love time travel to become reality, however, after a long time considering the subject I realised why it cannot succeed.
A 'working' time machine, unlike Dr Who's imaginary TARDIS, will not be able to carry sufficient fuel to take the craft to any destination more than a few thousandths of a second <> because the Earth orbits at ~around 30kps, meaning a time machine cannot materialise at it's starting point on the planet, < or > in time.
Given we are considering time travel of years < or > a successful time travel machine would materialise in empty space. It cannot 'rescue' itself by almost immediately trying to return to it's starting time because the moment it materialises it 1. May possess the momentum p it had when it began its journey. 2. It 'will' gain a momentum p+ when the surrounding gravity fields at it's arrival point provide it with gravitational energy.
This means that if the traveller attempts to return to it's starting point, it will return to a different point in space from whence it started. Depending on the panic-period before they realise the danger, they will almost certainly still materialise in the wrong place.
In short, even a successful time travel test of mnore than several nanoseconds will result in disaster. Hence, dissapointed though I am, time travellers will never visit anyone.
I'd love time travel to become reality, however, after a long time considering the subject I realised why it cannot succeed.
A 'working' time machine, unlike Dr Who's imaginary TARDIS, will not be able to carry sufficient fuel to take the craft to any destination more than a few thousandths of a second <> because the Earth orbits at ~around 30kps, meaning a time machine cannot materialise at it's starting point on the planet, < or > in time.
Given we are considering time travel of years < or > a successful time travel machine would materialise in empty space. It cannot 'rescue' itself by almost immediately trying to return to it's starting time because the moment it materialises it 1. May possess the momentum p it had when it began its journey. 2. It 'will' gain a momentum p+ when the surrounding gravity fields at it's arrival point provide it with gravitational energy.
This means that if the traveller attempts to return to it's starting point, it will return to a different point in space from whence it started. Depending on the panic-period before they realise the danger, they will almost certainly still materialise in the wrong place.
In short, even a successful time travel test of mnore than several nanoseconds will result in disaster. Hence, dissapointed though I am, time travellers will never visit anyone.
Suppose we had a way to travel 100,000 years back in time today, at the cost of a billion dollars.
Would we be trading stone spears for goat skins? No.
The economy as of then is negligible compared to the cost.
Would we do it for prestige/science value? Like the moon landings. Quite possibly.
Would we go mining on a massive scale? Could we dig more than a billion dollars of gold or oil out of the fresh untouched mines? Maybe?
Nanotech and AI make setting up a base Much easier. Our current economy is negligable to them. They would have little reason to get involved.
But sending a single nanomachine back to near the big bang, to build a dyson sphere around the first stars. That is something that would likely work out. The amount of energy that a galaxy burns over 10 billion years is large, even compared to the energy needed for time travel. And given self replicating nanotech, only a dustspeck sized nanobot need go back in time.
If you are sending stuff back in time, and the technology of time travel doesn't make going back further much harder, then going back as far as possible makes sense. After all, waiting is easy.
Societies might also want to go back in time for charitable reasons, ie the past is where most of the suffering and death is.
Interesting read!! Not my area of expertise for sure but I wonder if anyone in this field considers that humans will continue to evolve and that we may not be quite the same in thousands of years. Maybe our brains will be better repositories of knowledge, for example.
A constant conundrum, the time travel paradox, to those of us who toiled in science fiction. Although I question the economic benefit benchmark. Surely this is a preoccupation of our current mindset and not the only reason to do or create anything new. Our only human motive being profit. Or is this perhaps an explanation. Some God minded individual went back in time to create this reality for his own financial benefit. 🙄