Run for it, Marty! It’s the Libyans!

Who isn’t obsessed with time travel? The idea that you could go back into time to visit a deceased relative, see if primitive man really looked like the Geico commercials, or go back to middle school and slap yourself for being such a putz with the ladies. . .

Most of us can’t get the DeLorean up to 1.21 gigawatts and will have to settle for daydreaming, but this recent news story described how it may be possible, albeit only with much more scientifically advanced than ourselves.

What a cop-out!

Time Travel Machine Outlined

A new concept for a time machine could possibly enable distant future generations to travel into the past, research now suggests.

Unlike past ideas for time machines, this new concept does not require exotic, theoretical forms of matter. Still, this new idea requires technology far more advanced than anything existing today, and major questions remain as to whether any time machine would ever prove stable enough to enable actual travel back in time.

Time machine researchers often investigate gravity, which essentially arises when matter bends space and time. Time travel research is based on bending space-time so far that time lines actually turn back on themselves to form a loop, technically known as a “closed time-like curve.”

“We know that bending does happen all the time, but we want the bending to be strong enough and to take a special form where the lines of time make closed loops,” said theoretical physicist Amos Ori at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa. “We are trying to find out if it is possible to manipulate space-time to develop in such a way.”

Ori’s latest research suggests time machines are possible without exotic matter, eliminating a barrier to time travel. His work begins with a donut-shaped hole enveloped within a sphere of normal matter.

Inside this donut-shaped vacuum, space-time could get bent upon itself using focused gravitational fields to form a closed time-like curve. To go back in time, a traveler would race around inside the donut, going further back into the past with each lap.
Ori emphasized one significant limitation of this time machine—”it can’t be used to travel to a time before the time machine was constructed.”

More here.

Umm . . . donuts.

Of course they cover themselves with the idea that humans won’t be able to do this for a long, long time, which of course begs the question, if humans in the future are able to figure out time travel – why aren’t there time travelers from the future around now?

Or the even creepier question – what if we are the race spawned by a bunch of time travelers who crash landed in the past on earth and we all have a combined racial memory to build the technology to start ourselves? And if that’s the case, then would that explain the lack of a clear missing link between our supposed simian ancestors and modern man? Did these time travelers crash and supplant the pre-historic dominant Neanderthal race?

Wait a minute – if that’s the case, then how did the original time travelers cum proto-modern humans come about?

Stupid chicken and egg hypothesis.

Besides, if you can only theoretically travel back to the point at which you built the machine, what fun is that?

Good thing I don’t think too deeply about these things.