Why Time Travel Is Impossible

58 comments

  1. Shows a complete lack of knowledge in science. Go study some special relativity – please.

  2. Eh, cute, but shows no knowledge about why time travel is actually impossible.

  3. Sen Baskerville

    Even if you were to move with the earth as you traveled through time, jumping from one spot in relative to the universe to another would mean that you’ve traveled faster than the speed of light. Enjoy tearing your space/time fabric a new asshole.

  4. Cute, how you 3 seem to know all about time travel. The impossible is only impossible until someone proves it possible.

  5. You know, i thought the reason time travel is impossible is because the Universe is already HERE and NOW, so there’s nowhere (or “nowhen”) else to go.

  6. Ello ello

    im the doctor… what you seam to be missing is that if you create a time machine remember to make sure it’s a space ship.

  7. @the doctor: is your “spaceship” bigger on the inside? 🙂

  8. BlackChicken2020

    I actually cringe when I read these comments.

  9. @randompasserby

    if you’re going to be smarmy, make sure you spell spatial right you fool

  10. for the first guys

    this is the knowledge, the existing knowledge u know only makes this easier for u to think..how if juz you travel through time in the current position, theres no other you moving or doing ur life in between,, nothing..

  11. @count chocula

    btw its not “spatial” relativity but special relativity, genious.

  12. is time travel possible.

    some say it is ,some say it isnt.
    but rather then discussing if or if not possible.. lets leave that to the ppl that have studied for it.

    i would rather know that if time travel is possible 1, where( when ) will u go?
    2,how will u prefent a paradox?
    3,who would u do? and why?

  13. Just a common man

    Did anyone get what was implied in it? If you time travel back or forward 6 months, but didn’t create a teleporter, then, you would actually be travelling at the same position and hence, since earth rotates around the sun in one year, the earth would be at the opposite direction of the orbit where you are. And you die. 😀

  14. sickstringsamurai

    Hawking said travelling to the past is impossible, travelling into future is possible, but with a price – you can’t ever go back to ‘your time’, in addition, you’re not really travelling into the future in the classical sense, but you rather create a difference between the speed of your time in relation to the outside time speed.

  15. Here is why time travel is impossible, if oyu go back in time and kill your self then you never existed which means you never went back in time, which means you never killed your self.

  16. I know space travel is possible! I am, myself, from a far far future!

    Sorry for the poor English! In my time we all speak arabic.

  17. (assuming backwards timetravel is possible which I dont really have a strong opinion about) I think that any time paradox will fix itself. if you go back in time and kill yourself, there will more changes than just you being dead, which will lead to some change in the past which will eventually (well is wouldn’t take any time, but after enough changes) reach a “bootstrap”(cant think of the better term) or where it causes itself

  18. alienhybridforreal

    if backwards time travel is ever discovered as possible and effected at some future time, i’m surprised no one ever came back and let us know up to this point in time : )

  19. If time travel (backwards) is possible at all, it must be at “read only” mode – no changes possible.

  20. lolzz 🙂

  21. At the point a time machine is invented, one can only travel back to the point of the existence/creation of the time machine. Say, time machine was invented and turned ON in 2010, December 31st. Wait 5 years, step into machine and voila you can travel back from the time you entered to anytime since the machine has been left ON. Doesn’t make any sense to be able to travel back before the existence of the time machine. Hopefully this address “alienhybridforreal” statement.

  22. This comic describes what no one else seems to realize. Great find.

  23. Meh. The cartoon doesn’t show that time travel is impossible, it shows that it will kill you.
    If you saw a video of some guy who jumps off the Eiffel tower and goes splat, would you conclude that jumping off high buildings is impossible? Same thing. Things that kill you aren’t impossible, they’re just deadly.
    And there have been some time travel stories that address the ‘moving in space’ problem as well. The problem would only occur when “teleporting” through time, if you time travel by slowing or speeding up your passage through time you should get dragged along with the Earth just like the rest of us.

  24. Everyone realizes that this is a comic, right? Way too serious……

  25. you people are fucking retarded! ITS A CARTOON!! its not a foukin space/time journal by stephen hawkins its a funny lil comic strip made for humour so congradulations guys that mock the auther you have proven to the world that you have no life whatsoever and would rather debate the realms of possabilities of star trek than to just fucking laugh! get the joke! and move on

  26. The title of this clever cartoon should really be “Why Time Travel is inpractical”.

  27. alienhybridforreal

    What I wrote was meant to be a bit comical to go along with the cartoon theme post. But, on the premise that an actual time ‘machine’ is created, what stinkyjames wrote makes sense in that a send and receive device is required to complete the time circuit, coinciding with Hawking’s wormhole theory. On the other hand, if the ability to traverse time is ever discovered, I don’t dimiss the possibility that the method might be so unorthodox to current understanding and conceptualization that devices at both ends may not be necessary. But that’s just my thoughts, and I certainly don’t have any degree of expertise in the field. Although, if I was granted one self-gratifying wish, it would be the ability to traverse time freely, just to be able to see it all. Aaron and Kamo2x, didn’t mean to get to serious here 🙂

  28. ok, the comic only represents the deadly situation if you time travel at the wrong time of year. the earth may move, but next year, it will be in the same spot, on the same day, more or less. also, the universe expands, but not in a relative sense, since you expand with it. you will be in the same place on earth, if measuring earth as an absolute point, and the universe as relative.

    another issue is that time travel into the future is possible, as we are already doing it. the question is, how fast? and speeding up or slowing down time has already been proven, and worked out by einstien. it changes in the presence of strong gravity, or acceleration. so that only leaves the matter of time travelling to the past, and good luck proving if anything is really impossible. even a paradox doesn’t disprove it, because one model of timetravel has time travel as a ‘rewrite’ of the past, in that the cause for the person time travelling, cannot be undone, even if time traveller prevents his past self from doing it a second time (say killing his past self). it means the person’s life span loops once, but the past self goes a new, divergent path, becoming a different person, with different experiences, and a straight path on the timeline.

    someone also brought up the issue of moving faster than light, as a reason it couldn’t be done, but that is old news. there are particles that move apparently instantaniously, or too fast to measure, whereas light has a measurable, predictable speed. there are also particles that exist simultaniously in two places at once.

    there’s also string theory, that has all kinds of crazy ideas about multi dimentions, time and space being interchangable things, etc. some theories have a movement in space effecting a movement in time, which coincides with the evidence concerning accelleration affecting the speed of time.

    and by the way, time travel may already exist, for all you know. under certain models for time travel, you would change, along with any changes a time a time traveller makes. so look for someone who never makes any mistakes (they corrected them) or seems to have rediculously good luck. that’s your guy.

    have fun with that, folks. hope i didn’t twist your noodle too much.

  29. what “sickstringsamurai” is correct, but what if we manage to travel to another dimension instead of time period… it has been proven that other dimensions exist. so why not travel to another dimension which is in the time period you want to visit. Only we “know” how to time travel, but we don’t know how to travel to other dimensions…

  30. hahaha! indeed

  31. But Dr. Who has a space AND time machine. HA!

  32. I love lost.

  33. Once they make the time travel machine, Las Vegas will go bankcrupt… lol.

    Soendoro Soetanto

  34. Time Travet is not only possible, but it IS, as we ‘SPEAK’, HAPPENING!

    TIME: Is a human construct of a linear distance between two points, subjectively nominated and “travelled.”. One can only BE in their own time at ANY given time.

    TRAVEL: Is a human construct of the linear distance (km) an object can go, at a nominated, measured and regulated propulsion (speed, kp/h), to reach a certain point in space away from the starting point (frm Here to There & There to Here).

    Theafore(are)forementioned: it is impossible to even BEGIN to believe that a human would EVER walk on the Moon in 1776

    IMPOSSIBLE!!!

    But less than 200yrs later. . .

  35. So, he went back 3 weeks? But for some reason the Earth is no where it was 3 weeks ago?

  36. guys its a comic. just let it be. please

  37. Pragmatic_Procrastinator

    We are all time-travelers … traveling to the future… in real-time. ^_^

  38. 1st of all time travel is 100% posible, if there is no law against it, its posible, and there is no law against time travel, and second of all you dont know were ud end up if u did time travel because there is no absolute point of relativity

  39. There are only 2 possibilities to time travel: invent a machine to see the past (like watching a documentary) or send yourself within an energy cocoon with no possible material interaction. I think only the first one is feasible.

    The popular paradox of one killing himself or his father is, of course, absurd, for the simple fact that the same molecules (those from the future and those in the past) cannot be TWICE in the universe at the same time. There would be more molecules in the past than in the future and this would be against the Law of Conservation of Matter. Thus material interaction is impossible and nobody can change the past.
    That’s the reason why nobody from the future can “appear”, say ‘hello’ or leave a message.

    But we can watch what happened (who killed Kennedy or Marilyn Monroe; what was first: the hen or the egg, etc) like in a 3D-movie because light is beyond space and time (at the speed of light, time = 0, right?) and interacts with our eyes and brain. A time machine would do just that: go “back” in time and enable us to monitor the past. All crimes would be solved. Deceptions and lies uncovered. And history books re-written.

    Time travel itself is just that: perfect science fiction.

  40. what are you guys talking about, of course it’s possible, my grandma still living back in the 50’s.

  41. I think that we will never be able to travel in time, cause if we ever invent something that would enable us to do so, someone would’ve come to the present from the future by now.

  42. I time travel to the future all the time. I travel at a rate of 60 seconds per minute, 60 minutes per hour.

  43. Despite all the “Laws” and “Theories” that we have created, I think anything can be included in the Possible. It used to be thought of as a dreamers notion that a person could actually travel to the moon, or fly, or make light without fire. As people take greater looks into the possibility of the imposssible, the more we find is actually possible.

  44. Ahh yes… Time travel.

    If your going “forward” in time, its relatively (hehe) easy. All you have to do is go really, really fast. People that fly a lot compound fractions of a nanosecond of traveled future time over the course of their life. Astronauts gain that in one take off. If you can travel 98% the speed of light you gain a substantial amount of traveled future time. One day traveling at this speed equals one earth year.

    Backwards. I’m not sure. But it would probably take all the energy in our solar system.

  45. This is without a doubt the most logical place to debate the plausibility of time travel. I can’t think of a better place than a cartoon page on a pop-culture referencing, porn-streaming, comedic blog. I just hope all those dumb ass scientists look up from their textbooks long enough to catch some quick girl on girl action and also take a look at all of your input. Don’t worry though, as long as we keep abstract debates like this one up, the everlasting question of time travel will soon be resolved.

  46. Time travel is possible, but only “to” the future, and you’re not going to foward in time exactly, you take a spaceship, travel very far away, and then travel back to where you started, and you’ll noticed time has progressed faster then while you were traveling, for instance, let’s say, you start at earth, and you went to IOK-10 (a place very, very far away) in 10 years time, when you get back (meaning, 20 years pass) to earth, you’ll notice that earth is waaayyy older that those 20 years, like in their time, 60 years would’ve have passed.
    I can’t explain how this works, since I’m still 16 and are not THAT far into these kind of things, but for one thing I’m sure, “Time travel”, in a sense, is possible, but it isn’t really time travelling, it’s more like time progression in a part of space and another part of space, and the amount of distance and time that it takes to go to one and another.

  47. Time is a matter of perception. Time is instantaneous. Just like how a tree doesn’t make a sound if nobody is around to hear it, time wouldn’t exist if there weren’t living beings to experience it. Our minds basically slow time down based on our perception of time. By changing our rate of perception, we travel through time at different what feel like different speeds. An example would be dreaming and there are drugs you can take. So that isn’t a traditional understanding of time travel, but we are traveling forward in time constantly.

    As for traditional time travel, Anon basically said it. The twin paradox. Traveling backwards in time is so far not possibly, even theoretically. There are some scientist who say its possible with circulating light beams.

  48. Not if traveling backwards in time creates a tangent in a non-linear time stream.

  49. False. The solar system is moving, the galaxies are moving. the earth wouldn’t be in the same spot of space every year. the rest of what you say is true. people have it in their mind that time travel will be a machine that just zaps you through time but it’d have to be a much more complicated apparatus.

  50. This is a fact, back-time travel is impossible. Compare it to a water tap, you can regulate the flow of the water and possibly even stop it (big bang) but can not be reversed. can you take the water who came out in the sink and reverse it all molecules exactly where they been!

  51. Even way more complicated than that to locate the earth into space vs time! Cause the way stars moving inside the galaxy and the movement of the galaxy itself!

  52. I can teach you to travel 60 seconds into the future. C’mon, give it a try. Only takes a minute.

  53. Hawkins has been wrong a few times before so maybe he is wrong about time travel.

  54. Hawking has been right several times and then denying his ideas for no reason at all, also. Sometimes I don’t quite get him.

  55. Due to the fact that there is no such thing as aboslute space you would in fact end up quite a lot further away than this cartoon depicts!

  56. This cartoon doesn’t explain why time travel is impossible, it just explains why it’s impractical.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *