MovieChat Forums > Primer (2005) Discussion > The reason time travel cannot happen...

The reason time travel cannot happen...


...is because time, once it has passed, no longer exists. And the future, does not exist. There is only the present. Imagine a pencil tracing a line. And imagine that this pencil, once it traces the line, the mark behind where it currently is at no longer exists...so you would have nowhere to go back to. And you can't go forward on the line, because there is no spot to go forward to, because the pencil has not gotten that far yet. Time is that line. It exists now. You're reading this now. You can come back and read it again in the future, but you can't go back to the point where you first read it, because that point does not exist. There is only the present.

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I think that time travel is possible but not for humans !!!

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Interesting. Can you give me a further explanation please?

Coincidentally, I always thought that if there is a God or Gods, and/or if there are creatures/beings who can live forever, it is because they exist outside of the time stream as we understand it.

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time travel is only available to the observer, NOT the active participant

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Technically speaking, there is no present at all. Light travels at a specific speed, so literally everything you see has already happened in the past. Even as I'm typing these words onto this screen the moment has already passed and is in the past. My fingers moved milliseconds (or whatever is smaller than milliseconds) before the light reaches my eyes and my brain processes the movement. The glow of the laptop takes time to reach my eyes and then my brain has to process it. Everything you see, touch, do, smell, taste, experience is in the past. The "Present" doesn't really exist, it's just a comfortable, tangible thing we use to make sense of what's going on.

As to whether or not we can travel further into the past or into the future, I would tell you to take a close look at Quantum Entanglement, I'm not an expert but it seems to suggest that it's theoretically possible. And actually traveling to the future is possible, that's already been proven. If you get into a spaceship and fly to the moon and back everyone on Earth has aged slightly faster than you, the faster you travel, the more the Universe around you ages while your age progresses at a normal rate. The closer you get to the speed of light the more pronounced this becomes. This is already a proven fact as they've done it bouncing lights off of the moon. I couldn't give you the specifics, but it's there if you google it.

By the way, I am right behind you.

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Then your title is incorrect and you are wrong, cant see into the future either then.

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Wait, what? Were you replying to me?

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LOL my bad, ur saying time travel not possible and youre also saying that it will never happen, so obviously you can see into the future, but my thought is, if time travel isnt possible, then you cant see into the future either.

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LOL, yea that actually makes a lot of sense. I didn't look at it that way.

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In short, time does not exist. I think Dostoyevsky insisted as much as well.



"facts are stupid things" Ronald Reagan

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Not true according to modern physics, which holds that the past, present and future are equally existentially valid.

It's complicated of course. Read a book by David Deutsch or some other prominent physicist if you want more detail.

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Time travel is as real as the water you drink.

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Pretensious

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Did you mean "pretentious"...??

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