Stephen Hawking: Time travel will happen

[shizzle]

LINKY

Hawking: Time travel will happen
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.

[shizzle]

And then the problems with time travel...

[Fox Mulder]

lol. Never thought of that...

[uglyfemnist]

If you want a trip into the past, you don't need a time machine.
Just go to a conservative party/republican/islamic meeting.

[mkwrk2]

Yeah, some of us writing in this page remember, probably, a worldwide public response to Stanley Kubrick’s “Space Odyssey-2001” in the seventies last century.

What is utterly clear to me, no such a trance-time travel a human body itself can stand physically
(The X-Challenge http://omega.twoday.net/stories/302957/ ).

It is nice to realize these days I was right as it is proven scientifically, sperm has been damaged fatally in no-weight environment space is.

Michael Kerjman

[Nasty Canasta]

If you want a trip into the past, you don't need a time machine.
Just go to a conservative party/republican/islamic meeting.

Or just live in da Penh. If you want to go further back in time just head to a province.

[Felgerkarb]

I would not want to go too far forward in the future...you may end up stuffed in a museum like Dodge in Planet of the Apes.

[connecticuter]

Why would the author want to skip acid? I'm too old for it now, but it was a staple in my early college years. $5 for over eights, beats a movie any day. I lost track of how many times I went to the graveyard with my girlfriend and a group of friends and tripped all night. Those were the days.

[andyinasia]

Why would the author want to skip acid? I'm too old for it now, but it was a staple in my early college years. $5 for over eights, beats a movie any day. I lost track of how many times I went to the graveyard with my girlfriend and a group of friends and tripped all night. Those were the days.

You didn't trip out of your wheelchair.

[Felgerkarb]

Why would the author want to skip acid? I'm too old for it now, but it was a staple in my early college years. $5 for over eights, beats a movie any day. I lost track of how many times I went to the graveyard with my girlfriend and a group of friends and tripped all night. Those were the days.

You are not in Cambodia...you are still tripping...*cue Twilight Zone theme*

[ali baba]

Given the high rates of inflation in most economies traveling to the future at pace will destroy your savings. Traveling backwards on the other hand....

[A Wannted Man]

Can't remember where I read it but theory goes you can't travel back in time before the invention of the time travel machine, causes to many paradoxes.

[connecticuter]

Can't remember where I read it but theory goes you can't travel back in time before the invention of the time travel machine, causes to many paradoxes.

What about worm holes?

[cambod]

Can't remember where I read it but theory goes you can't travel back in time before the invention of the time travel machine, causes to many paradoxes.

That was all explained in detail in the "Back to the Future" movie series.... See how much trouble he got in?

[andyinasia]

Can't remember where I read it but theory goes you can't travel back in time before the invention of the time travel machine, causes to many paradoxes.

That was all explained in detail in the "Back to the Future" movie series.... See how much trouble he got in?

Yeh but Doctor Who finds a way ... leave it to the Brits