A link between time travel and the stars?

enjoytheview

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Recently i was told a time travel theory which seems somewhat plausible, yet i cant seem to apply it or explain it in such a way that can make it seem true to me.. The theory goes something like this..

Due to the fact that the Earth gets its light from stars, you can use the stars to see into the past. If you can fly up to a star (ignoring the fact that people don't currently fly to stars) and the light from that star takes x years to reach the earth, then at that star, you will see the Earth x years in the past. I've also heard a similar theory which took into account the time it takes to fly to the star, which said that if it takes x years for light from that star to hit the Earth and you take y years to fly to that star, given that x>y you will see into the past x-y years from the year in which you left the Earth.


I've looked it up a lot using google and other search engines but never managed to find anything written online that even bears a slight resemblance to this theory. Has anyone else heard this or anything similar? and does it make any sense? I'm having a lot of trouble comprehending the whole thing as being true
 
I would say it has nothing to do with stars at all.

If you were (somehow) able to travel much faster than light, and look at Earth from, say 1000 light years away, with an incredibly powerful telescope, you would be seeing light that reflected off the Earth 1000-n years ago, where n is the number of years it took you to fly out there. If you could resolve that light well enough to see images, you would indeed see into the past.

But there are many parts of that that are impossible and/or ludicrously difficult.
 
yeah makes sense. I doubt anyone would waste years of their time building such a fast rocket, ridiculously strong telescope and so forth, only to look at the past and watch themselves building a fast rocket and ridiculous telescope all over again.
 
That's solid. If you fly to a star 35 light years away at an average speed of .5C, You'll get there 70 years later and turn around and see what the Earth's sun looked like 35 years ago. But you don't really need to leave home to do that. You can stay at home, then when you're 35 turn on a video camera. When you're 70 watch the tape. :)
 
Since you can't go faster than light, you couldn't see into your own past on Earth. But you could conceivably set up cameras at various light years distance away and just start recording -- then, if something happens on Earth, you can view the tapes to see what happened. It would just take awhile for the data to get back to Earth.

But on that point, it would be far, far easier to just set up cameras in orbit -- you get complete recording of everything on the surface, and at the best possible resolution, and you don't have to wait years for the data to get back to you.

I read an interesting, if implausible, sci-fi story where scientists in the future figured out how to get pictures out of walls -- the light hitting the paint of normal walls was somehow recorded in the altered paint structure. It would have caused havoc, of course.
 
Beerina said:
I read an interesting, if implausible, sci-fi story where scientists in the future figured out how to get pictures out of walls -- the light hitting the paint of normal walls was somehow recorded in the altered paint structure. It would have caused havoc, of course.
Click to expand...

Well, people already complain about near-ubiquitous cameras...
 
Everything you see happened in the past. It takes time for the light reflected to reach your eyes. If you get far enough away from something, it could have happened years ago. The light we see coming from a star that is 40 light-years away was emitted 40 years ago, so we aren't seeing that star as it is, but rather as it was 40 years ago. The situation is the same from the star's perspective.
 
Thats not time travel. I can see where you are going with it, but that is just viewing not travelling. And even that will be an image so distorted by time and space that anything particularly interesting you might have wanted to look at is now unviewable due to it being so small in the grander scheme of things and so little light reflecting it over such a great distance.

But as someone stated, just seeing something is the same thing because you will be seeing what happened split nanoseconds before in that direction.

An interesting perspective, but nothing more.
 
Agreed. To me, there seems to be two interpretations of time. One is the time of day, which is only a method of organizing time to an exact science for people on this planet. Another is the actual entity of time itself - as the dictionary's first definition puts it: indefinite and continuous duration regarded as that in which events succeed one another. In other words, this kind of "time" is constant, and cannot be manipulated by any means we posess or have witnessed.

Let's say, for example, that you were to hop aboard a plane that could travel at the same exact speed as the earth's roational velocity. You could therefore, by traveling in the right vector, continuously stay at, say, 8:30, indefinately. But "time" is not standing still for you. You are still experiencing time as though it was still moving.

In fact, regarding this theory, whenever you take a step, you are "traveling in time," - by the first definition I gave, because your location is being displaced - abeit only by a foot or so.
 
For the fun of it, going about 87% the speed of light your time is down to ½ of that on earth, go about 99% it is now 7 times slower.

Paul

:) :) :)
 
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