Does the fact that we still haven't been visited by anyone from the future anytime in the past or present prove that time travel is simply not possible?
Show me the holes!
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it could be that time travel is only possible in the forward only motion. this prevents travelers from messing things up.image getting in a time machine and just going back 10 minutes and meeting yourself.
shareNo.
Time travel may very well be invented at some point, but it will then prove to be essentially useless. Pretty much every time travel story and movie ever done ignores the fact that you are only traveling in time; you remain in the same place in the other three dimensions.
Stop to think about it. The Earth is not stationary. It's rotating at about 1,000 miles per hour. It's revolving around the sun at hundreds of miles per second. The sun is in an arm of the Milky Way galaxy which is itself rotating. And the Milky Way galaxy is retreating from the center of the universe as a result of the big bang.
If someone were to travel through time, even for just a second, they would come out in space and die almost immediately because the position in the universe that they were in the second before is no longer occupied by the Earth.
To make time travel worth it at all you would also have to be able to travel incredible distances instantaneously through the other three dimensions, too.
"My name is Paikea Apirana, and I come from a long line of chiefs stretching all the way back to the Whale Rider."
Yes. This tends to be ignored in most time travel movies, but a true time travel machine would also have to be a space ship.
This wouldn't hold true for time travel through manufactured worm holes. You'd simply(!) anchor each end of the worm hole at the appropriate points in spacetime.
Also, from a scriptwriting point of view, I would respond simply that Doc Brown's Delorean automatically calculated the precise point in SPACEtime needed to travel back in time 30 years... it just wasn't explicitly stated in the movie. I mean who REALLY knows how a 'flux capacitor' works? ;)
I'll just give you two thoughts.
1) The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
2) What absence?
Have you not heard of UFOs? What about the Nazi Bell?
There are peculiar things happening in the Universe, but most people don't want to hear about it, they want to think everything is materialistic, explainable by simple mechanics, and completely fitting in a nihilistic, narrow-minded worldview.
Let me ask you something; would you really make your 'time travelling' known, if you were able to visit the past, for example? Would you go to the Dark Ages and proclaim "Hey, I am a witch, please burn me on a stake!"?
(Same thing as revealing what you are really doing - people wouldn't believe you, and they would either burn you at stake or drug you and lock you up in a mental hospital).
There are many reasons, why time travelers wouldn't reveal themselves, and in fact, would go to GREAT lengths to hide their ability to travel through time (other than the default speed).
I am sure you can think of many of them.
Therefore, even if there were 50 000 visitors every year, you would NEVER learn or know about it. You might be passing time travelers every day on the street and not be the wiser.
How would you know otherwise?
Therefore, even if there is 'absence' of them in your life, you can be sure it's planned, and if there were zillions of time travelers, you would simply never know about it.
Therefore, you can't know that there IS any absence.
No, they might just have a policy of not making themselves openly known to us.
shareNow that you're on to us, you've sealed your fate. Records from my time now show that LivingMCM mysteriously disappeared on September 1st, 2018. It's too bad since in the original timeline, you went on to win Powerball in three months.
shareI have foiled your plan, for it is now September 2 and I have not disappeared yet.
shareIf I was a time traveller from the future I would certainly avoid the 20th/21st century. Nothing pleasant to see here.
shareCarl Sagan offered up a few explanations about why haven't encountered time travelers from the future.
"One of Hawking's arguments in the conjecture is that we are not awash in thousands of time travelers from the future, and therefore time travel is impossible. This argument I find very dubious, and it reminds me very much of the argument that there cannot be intelligences elsewhere in space, because otherwise the Earth would be awash in aliens. I can think half a dozen ways in which we could not be awash in time travelers, and still time travel is possible.
Such as?
First of all, it might be that you can build a time machine to go into the future, but not into the past, and we don't know about it because we haven't yet invented that time machine. Secondly, it might be that time travel into the past is possible, but they haven't gotten to our time yet, they're very far in the future and the further back in time you go, the more expensive it is. Thirdly, maybe backward time travel is possible, but only up to the moment that time travel is invented. We haven't invented it yet, so they can't come to us. They can come to as far back as whatever it would be, say A.D. 2300, but not further back in time.
Then there's the possibility that they're here alright, but we don't see them. They have perfect invisibility cloaks or something. If they have such highly developed technology, then why not? Then there's the possibility that they're here and we do see them, but we call them something else—UFOs or ghosts or hobgoblins or fairies or something like that. Finally, there's the possibility that time travel is perfectly possible, but it requires a great advance in our technology, and human civilization will destroy itself before time travelers invent it.
I'm sure there are other possibilities as well, but if you just think of that range of possibilities, I don't think the fact that we're not obviously being visited by time travelers shows that time travel is impossible."