A question about time... (not time travel)... (well.. maybe time travel)

[Rota]

A while back I made this post in a discussion about time travel.

I think I would like to point out something that I've never seen anyone talk about. No discussion of time travel I've ever heard has really talked about this issue. But, it is something I've always thought about, when mulling over the subject of time travel.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44DlSj6bnn4

Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving
And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour,
That's orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it's reckoned,
A sun that is the source of all our power.
The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see
Are moving at a million miles a day
In an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour,
Of the galaxy we call the "Milky Way".

Those numbers are not exactly correct, but the quote conveys the idea I want to share.
1) If you go just one hour into the future, the earth will have moved. If you leave on your time travel trip from New York city, you will reappear in Des Moines, Iowa.
2) But, wait... you wouldn't appear in Des Moines. The Earth has moved almost 70,000 miles farther in it's orbit around the sun. You would reappear nearly 1/3 of the way to the moon, floating in empty space.
3) But, wait... you wouldn't appear toward the moon. The solar system has moved almost 700,000 miles farther in it's orbit through the milky way. You would reappear away from the earth about 4 times farther the moon.

If you travel a year into the future, instead of just an hour, our solar system would be long gone from the place you left. You can't just travel through time. You need to travel through space, too. Have fun calculating the exact "time-space" coordinates of your arrival. If you're off by just a few feet, you can end up appearing in the crust of the earth. That would be instant death. More than likely, you would reappear in the middle of nowhere... literally.

It got me to thinking. We all know that time travel forward ONLY requires speed. If you travel the speed of light, a year can pass for the world, but it will only feel like a moment to you. We also know, from my statement above, that no matter how still we make ourselves, we are moving.

By just standing on the earth, we are hurtling at thousands of miles per second through the universe. The globe could cease it's rotation, and the earth could halt in it's orbit, and sun could stop it's orbit around the milky way. Even if all that came to a complete stop, and we froze in our position in the milky way, our galaxy is still hurtling through the universe at amazing speeds. We are always moving.

Here is my question. We all know time travel forward requires mere speed. Is the combined speed we are traveling on earth, in our solar system, in our galaxy, through the universe... is that the speed we are traveling forward through time? Is the rate of "time" we perceive based solely on the speed we are traveling through the universe?

If this is true, then other galaxies may be traveling at different speeds, and thus aging faster or slower than us. Things like the standard half-life of various chemicals and compounds within these galaxies would be the same as our perception. But, when viewed from our galaxy, it would appear to be faster or slower. Or would inorganic things like those half-lives not be affected by this speed difference?

Scientists have mapped the speed of the expansion of the universe. Everything is moving outward from a universal "center" where the big bang occurred. If everything is moving away from this center, then is there no movement at this core of our universe? Is there no time there, since there is no movement (like a time version of "absolute zero")?


I rambled quite a bit, and I confused myself just a bit. I hope I confused you, too. I look forward to your thoughts.

[Rota]

1 thing.. Wow, thats actually quite thought provoking...

These are the thoughts that keep me up at night.
My brain won't stop with this crap. I think it doesn't want me to sleep.

[Fallbreeze]

I'd echo the wow, there. As for the rest, I could only conjecture. I would hazard to say that other planets and galaxies out there could have different rates of time, because they might base their concept of 'time' within their own galaxy as well, as well as their orbits around their own stellar masses. As for the center, who knows if time would truly 'stand still' or be much slowed or accelerated? I can't believe that even the center would be completely 'zero time, zero movement'.

[webby189]

Maybe time as we know it is just our relative speed. Relative speed would be our total velocity with all factors considered compared to that of an object at rest and the big bang site.

It makes sense when you think how it was been proven that we can speed up our frame of reference (time) when approaching the speed of light.

The one thing I would disagree (with no factual basis of course) is that the big bang site, which you compared to absolute zero, time would actually move forward but at our universal constant.

So at big bang site, it would be that the velocity is at absolute zero. And time T could be derirved as something like

Tm= (Vm - V) Ta

Tm = my time passage
Vm = my velocity
V = veloicty at big bang site (we could get ride of this is we consider it zero)
Ta = time passage at big bang site (aka Universal time constant)

Obv this is a linear relationship which it probably isnt but those are the simpilest to represent.

[Bree Fletcher]

I think... if you were to run the numbers through any sort of hypothetical situation, a lot of those questions would come out to a resounding "YES!" I mean, we have the eqquations for these things, if we would like to assume Einstein is right about them. So, according to them, of course there would eb a seperate sense of time for each planet... star system... galaxy... whatever.

Which just made me think of somethig interesting: Say we were to develop FTL travel and communications. Say we establish colonies in other systems. How in the hell would we manage to coodinate any of the worlds together? A message sent over ten seconds from one might be received over the course of ten years at another. And another would simply receive it too quickly for the equipment to comprehend...

EDIT: "You must spread some rep around..." Ah, shut up, you!

[Rota]

I like that concept, webby. I didn't actually think there would be no time at the core of the universe, but I wanted to put that concept out there for discussion. I like your idea that the speed of time at the universe's core would be the time constant. Every location in the universe would perceive time as a factor of that constant, based on their actual speed.

Unless of course the constant of time is truly what we currently perceive.

[Bree Fletcher]

I like that concept, webby. I didn't actually think there would be no time at the core of the universe, but I wanted to put that concept out there for discussion. I like your idea that the speed of time at the universe's core would be the time constant. Every location in the universe would perceive time as a factor of that constant, based on their actual speed.

Unless of course the constant of time is truly what we currently perceive.

I think that the time constant is as arbitrary as "zero energy level" or "one meter" or "positive and negative." So long as you keep it self-consistant, anything you try to figure with it will work.

[Mismaah]

Well rota, here's my idea

Since the earth solar system etc.. is always moving (at really high speeds), we are aren't moving out of the earth due to gravity so if are time traveling(i don't believe we could time travel), we increase in speed but the gravity will still be there so we won't actually fall off the Earth and get lost in null void

[Rodri]

The more we learn, the more questions arise.

Einstien concluded that the only thing that could travel at the speed of light was light because his exponential mass increase calculations concluded that the exponential curve of mass increase as you approach the speed of light would make even the smallest starting mass increase to infinite mass. So Einstien concluded that the only thing that could travel at the speed of light was light, as it had no mass.

Recent experiments in quantum physics have lead scientists to declare that it appears that light is not only energy, but could also be made of matter. If this is correct, then Einstein's conclusion must be at least partially wrong. All matter, no matter how small the particle is (and we are talking about sub-atomic particles here) have some mass. What we lack is any way to measure that mass. The thing is, if light has mass, even if it is miniscule, the exponential curve that Einstien used would take that mass to infinite mass and thus render it impossible for light to travel at the speed of light.

Sherlock Holmes said in one of the Arthur Conan-Doyle stories that in regard to solving a mystery, given the choice between the impossible and the improbable, he would always opt for the impossible. His reasoning was that the improbable very rarely ever happens but the impossible happens all the time.

[Dawnseeker]

Recent experiments say that light is composed of particles, not necessarily matter. Thus the concept of photons, or zero mass particles that carry energy.

Its worth noting that Einstein's theory tells us that if you travel the speed of light, while a moment may seem to pass for you, years could pass for people traveling at sub-relativistic speeds.

This means that if you time traveled by somehow accelerating to light speed, you couldn't do it while remaining on earth, because the earth is not moving fast enough.

Let's put aside for the moment that an acceleration of 10Gs (approximately the maximum sustainable human G tolerance in a g-suit) would take you over a month to reach light speed, and another month+ to slow down again.

Because Kinetic Energy is a factor of mass and the square of speed (e=ms^2), speed is a much greater determinant of energy than mass. A jet that impacts the ground at 600 mph is essentially vaporized on impact and leaves a significant crater. If your time travel vehicle had only half as much mass but was traveling at light speed, it would have so much energy that any impact would be immeasurably greater and would likely have globally catastrophic consequences. It is likely that if you hit a the earth's crust, the energy release would be enough to leave a crater visible from orbit and the resulting dust cloud, earthquake, and/or tidal wave could wipe out millions of people. Assuming you avoided hitting the ground, friction with the air alone would cause the oxygen to ignite -- possibly causing a chain reaction whereby all the earth's oxygen is burned off in a few seconds -- and almost certainly vaporize any manmade vehicle that could conceivably exist.

Therefore, any time travel vehicle of this ilk would necessarily be a space travel vehicle as well, so as to avoid wiping out humanity by accident. Any astronomer can tell you where the sun will be in a week, a month or a year. The trick would be calculating how your acceleration and speed would alter the flow of time around you. Assuming that, plotting your course should be a simple matter of aiming in that direction. Once back in the solar system, manually piloting the vehicle back to earth should be a comparatively simple task.

And then, voila, you've just time traveled. It stands to reason that creating some type of stasis chamber that halts body function without killing you would be simpler, less risky and have the exact same effect.