this post was submitted on 06 Dec 2023
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No Stupid Questions

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Given the fact that data is an electric circuit of ones and zeros, flowing at the speed of light, could we technically send information across time?

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[–] Knusper@feddit.de 13 points 2 years ago (7 children)

Well, I'm going to give the party-pooper response, even though science fiction and pop-science love to fantasize differently:

The past and the future are theoretical concepts. They don't actually exist in the sense that you can 'send' something to them.
Obviously, you can write data to a hard drive and then read it out after a week has passed, but presumably that is not what you had in mind.

But that's also the essence of the time travel that the theory of general relativity allows. You can travel forwards more slowly along the time axis by travelling more quickly on the space axis (close to the speed of light), which means you might just need to spend 5 perceived years to end up in the year 2200.
Similarly, you could take a hard drive onto this journey and it wouldn't have fallen apart in that time.

Travelling back in time makes no sense in general relativity. You would need to reverse causality for that, which is on an entirely different level from merely slowing causality down.

General relativity would mathematically allow for the existence of wormholes, but that's pushing the theory to extremes where it might simply not be applicable to reality anymore. We certainly have no actual evidence for wormholes.

[–] Bizarroland@kbin.social 1 points 2 years ago (3 children)

And you wouldn't have to reverse causality to travel backwards in time. You would just have to travel faster than the speed of light.

If you can travel faster than the speed of light then you can arrive at a destination before you left.

Alternatively, you would need to generate some sort of negative energy and then enter into a wormhole with the negative energy. As you cross the perihelion of the wormhole there is a possibility that rather than being crushed and destroyed and by the unimaginable cosmic forces you are experiencing that the negative energy would cancel it out and you would be able to travel through the wormhole to any point between the moment that you entered it and the moment that it was created.

Both of these statements come with the caveat that these are based on theories and so my ability to explain them is limited not only by my understanding of the theory but also my ability to explain the information that I have, and there is the possibility that even though these are somewhat plausible scenarios once you overcome the massive gap between where we are and where we would have to be to implement them, there is a chance that a new better mathematical theory will replace this information and prove it to be completely and totally false.

[–] Knusper@feddit.de 1 points 2 years ago

And you wouldn't have to reverse causality to travel backwards in time. You would just have to travel faster than the speed of light.

If you can travel faster than the speed of light then you can arrive at a destination before you left.

I know practically nothing about all the wormhole theories, because I just don't consider them relevant, but from a logical standpoint, the above does not feel correct to me.

The thing is, you would arrive at your destination before the light would arrive there from where you started. So, you could take out your telescope and potentially watch your own launch.

But that doesn't actually put you into the past. It just looks like it when looking into the direction you came from. Light from the other direction will look like you've fast-forwarded through time, because you now get more recent imagery.

I don't have another explanation why someone might think, this might put you into the past...

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