• Question: Can time traveling exist

    Asked by to Anna, Elaine, Fiona, Kevin, Darren on 16 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Zhiming Darren Tan

      Zhiming Darren Tan answered on 16 Jun 2014:

      I assume you mean travelling backwards in time. It seems potentially paradoxical, so it’s up to people who claim to be able to do time travel to back up their claims with good reason.

    • Photo: Kevin O'Dell

      Kevin O'Dell answered on 16 Jun 2014:

      Let us suppose that you could make a time portal and travel back in time, and for whatever reason you arrive in a place where your ancestors lived a couple of hundred years ago. You’re so excited to meet your 20 year old great great great great grandmother (or grandfather) and give her (or him) a huge hug. Unfortunately your great great great great grandfather (or grandmother) gets insanely jealous and attacks you, and in the resulting melee he (or she) suffers a fatal injury and dies before he (or she) becomes a parent. Therefore your great great great grandmother (or grandfather) would never have existed, and neither would you.
      If you didn’t exist then you couldn’t travel back in time and accidentally kill your great great great great grandfather (or grandmother), so you would exist and so on and so on and so on.

    • Photo: Elaine Cloutman-Green

      Elaine Cloutman-Green answered on 19 Jun 2014:

      Yes. You are currently travelling forward at one day per day. We do not know a way of changing that relative to your frame of existence. We could ask a time traveler from the future if we could find one but they seem to be a bit thin on the ground which rather argues against it being possible.

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