Inertial Invites on Nostr: nprofile1q…32cpy Spatial navigation is a pretty easy problem to solve, particularly ...
nprofile1qy2hwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnddaehgu3wwp6kyqpqy0emt2wlpsezcnmxtyrpf33qe7gwy5u8yzssvv6uw53em0k32t7qz32cpy (nprofile…2cpy)
Spatial navigation is a pretty easy problem to solve, particularly if you've figured out temporal navigation. I'm pretty sure the math is straightforward, if perhaps complex. We can predict with reasonable accuracy where locations on the Earth will be in the future, so going backwards isn't really all that difficult. The spatial navigation frequently gets swept under the rug by time travel fiction, but I think that's at least partially because it's not the interesting problem in time travel.
Really, if time travel is possible, the interesting application wouldn't be going back in time, it would be moving instantaneously. If you can travel even slightly forward in time at a "speed" faster than is experienced by the non-traveller, you can break all kinds of what we think of as fundamental laws of physics. No need to worry about violating causality if you can move faster than the speed of light, for instance. It would revolutionize telecommunications and computers. Even if it's expensive, that's a soluble problem. Eventually, travel becomes instantaneous because you simply travel through time rather than space. The last thing you'd worry about is the spatial navigation. That's trivial by comparison.
And then of course there's the ability to slow time, which necessarily follows. Pretty much everything becomes instantaneous. Basically, if you can travel through time at all, the game is over. You no longer have to worry about time limits for anything. Which means you accelerate the curve of history essentially infinitely, and if there's an end, you hit it immediately, if that makes any sense at all.
So there's a decent chance that, if anyone figured out time travel, everything would end. No going backward required. Would it be like being on the edge of a black hole, where from the perspective of an outsider you get sucked in and crushed, but from your perspective things continue without any change? Are we living in the endgame of time travel right now and we just will never see it because we can't experience time in any other way than forward? Or would time simply stop at that moment, so we can only know that it hasn't happened yet?
Maybe time travel is a bit like being able to rise "above" our three-dimensional existence and view it as an outsider, as Flatland hints at. But it could be that our existence is tied to the system in which we find ourselves, and we can no more step outside it than we can make ourselves two-dimensional. Maybe the best we can do is be able to measure it from the inside, the way we've been able to measure gravitational lensing. Maybe it's perfectly possible, but we can't do it. I don't know.
Thanks for making me think about it though 🙂
Spatial navigation is a pretty easy problem to solve, particularly if you've figured out temporal navigation. I'm pretty sure the math is straightforward, if perhaps complex. We can predict with reasonable accuracy where locations on the Earth will be in the future, so going backwards isn't really all that difficult. The spatial navigation frequently gets swept under the rug by time travel fiction, but I think that's at least partially because it's not the interesting problem in time travel.
Really, if time travel is possible, the interesting application wouldn't be going back in time, it would be moving instantaneously. If you can travel even slightly forward in time at a "speed" faster than is experienced by the non-traveller, you can break all kinds of what we think of as fundamental laws of physics. No need to worry about violating causality if you can move faster than the speed of light, for instance. It would revolutionize telecommunications and computers. Even if it's expensive, that's a soluble problem. Eventually, travel becomes instantaneous because you simply travel through time rather than space. The last thing you'd worry about is the spatial navigation. That's trivial by comparison.
And then of course there's the ability to slow time, which necessarily follows. Pretty much everything becomes instantaneous. Basically, if you can travel through time at all, the game is over. You no longer have to worry about time limits for anything. Which means you accelerate the curve of history essentially infinitely, and if there's an end, you hit it immediately, if that makes any sense at all.
So there's a decent chance that, if anyone figured out time travel, everything would end. No going backward required. Would it be like being on the edge of a black hole, where from the perspective of an outsider you get sucked in and crushed, but from your perspective things continue without any change? Are we living in the endgame of time travel right now and we just will never see it because we can't experience time in any other way than forward? Or would time simply stop at that moment, so we can only know that it hasn't happened yet?
Maybe time travel is a bit like being able to rise "above" our three-dimensional existence and view it as an outsider, as Flatland hints at. But it could be that our existence is tied to the system in which we find ourselves, and we can no more step outside it than we can make ourselves two-dimensional. Maybe the best we can do is be able to measure it from the inside, the way we've been able to measure gravitational lensing. Maybe it's perfectly possible, but we can't do it. I don't know.
Thanks for making me think about it though 🙂