Hawking: Time travel will happen

Mon May 03, 2010 6:22 am » by **Germanpils**

There's something very comforting when a scientist as well regarded as Stephen Hawking admits to keeping quiet for fear of "being labeled a crank."

Thankfully, he seems to have conquered his fears in a new documentary series for the Discovery Channel, in which he has already considered how man might truly conquer space. Or, indeed, how spacemen might come down to our meager Earth and dismember us as so much fast food.

Hawking has already warned in his documentary that we should be very wary about making contact with beings from out there. "If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn't turn out very well for the Native Americans," he said in "Stephen Hawking's Universe."

But, as he presented his latest ideas about what travel in the future might resemble, he reportedly admitted that he had kept quiet on the subject for fear of being labeled a heretic by the scientific community.

Thrusting off his heretical shackles, he reportedly suggested that spaceships will one day be so fast that we won't know whether we've come or gone. Hawking suggests that Einstein's theories of relativity will become as relatively obsolete as, who knows, the home phone. He posits that, at some point when we're all long gone, a day on a spaceship traveling at 650 million miles per hour would be akin to one year on Earth.

Please don't expect me to check his math. I can barely total up my savings at Safeway. However, somehow one can imagine that technology will follow an inevitable path toward the unimaginable, a path that will change humanity even more profoundly than the laptop has changed love lives.

He does reportedly stress, however, that time travel will only be performed in a forward motion. Which, sadly, excludes a sudden reality show re-enactment of Mark Twain's "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court."

Naturally, there is something stunningly attractive about the very idea of being able to skip generations by, well, flying through them. Imagine if some lucky humans had managed to avoid acid, platform boots, or the entire works of the Captain and Tennille. How might this have affected contemporary culture and the way it is promulgated onward by those who seem to know no better?

There is surely nothing remotely cranky or heretical about Hawking's prognostications. The only sadness is that so many of us will not be able to benefit from such exalted science.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-20003 ... icksArea.0

"His theory states that you'll only be able to time travel forward, not back.

dunno what to think of it

Mon May 03, 2010 6:57 am » by **sockpuppet**

Damn, at least get creative with your spam.

Mon May 03, 2010 7:26 am » by **Ironshroom**

cool post OP!

damn i think i just got hit over the head with the irony bat with that spam.

Fri May 07, 2010 9:15 am » by **Cee420**

Time traveling is not real. period.

.."time traveling" isn't real cause "time" is NOTHING physical ..we live an experience in the NOW-moment. ..our planet (like all celestial objects also do) moves through space, is in constant movement and leaves no physical "time" behind it. period.
Only way we can "go" back in time ..is in our memories ..but physically it is impossible

"traveling to future" is just as impossiple cause IT HASN'T BEEN CREATED YET!! ..the only real time where we live is the Now.

:flop:

Fri May 07, 2010 9:24 am » by **jetxvii**

cee420 wrote:Time traveling is not real. period.

.."time traveling" isn't real cause "time" is NOTHING physical ..we live an experience in the NOW-moment. ..our planet (like all celestial objects also do) moves through space, is in constant movement and leaves no physical "time" behind it. period.
Only way we can "go" back in time ..is in our memories ..but physically it is impossible

"traveling to future" is just as impossiple cause IT HASN'T BEEN CREATED YET!! ..the only real time where we live is the Now.

you know I might have to agree with you on that one, I think alot of the universe deal with consciousness or I should say what we understand as consciousness.

like when you die, you never truly die..

I honestly am not scared to die because I think the next realm of existence is going to be excellent.

same could be said for time, I don't think a human carbon based creature can travel through time "at this moment in history" without some extremely advanced breakthrough in physics and technology to bend reality and the time space fabric or be able to survive and travel through that is not going to be easy, after all we do not have the power of the creator that made this universe, look at the LHC we are barely starting to learn how to think we may know how to microscopical big bangs, and this thing is 17 miles long, how are we to gain the power to make a wormhole to travel through? maybe in 1 million years.

but then again maybe there is more than one way to travel through time in this life and the next?