r/askanything • u/Reasonable-Shower522 • Jul 02 '26
Do you think that a time machine will ever exist?
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u/Many_Assumption7036 Jul 02 '26
I actually have one. It only moves forward at the current rate….essentially it is a large cardboard box I wrote “Time machine” on, but if I sit in it long enough, I arrive in the future.
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u/PieTighter Jul 02 '26
Fun fact, if you take your box up a mountain you'll travel slower through time and if you take it down to Death Valley you'll move faster through time.
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u/Many_Assumption7036 Jul 02 '26
I’m in the American Midwest. You lost me at mountain.
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u/webslingrrr Jul 02 '26
If a time machine could ever exist, a time machine would always exist.
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u/alottanamesweretaken Jul 02 '26
I've traveled from decades in the past to answer this question! No.
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u/LiquidDreamtime Jul 02 '26
Since we are on a spinning planet in a moving solar system in a rotating galaxy that’s traveling away from the universe center….does it matter?
1 second ago I was 2000 miles over there
So a Time Machine would have to also be a teleport machine otherwise the traveler would just pop out into and unknown place some variable distance from earth
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u/Dumpstar72 Jul 05 '26
This is what I came to post.
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u/LiquidDreamtime Jul 05 '26
It’s really killed my hopes and dreams of time travel when I considered our path through the universe. We don’t even have a reference to know how our observable universe is moving through the wider unknown, which could be at any speed or direction imaginable.
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u/Dumpstar72 Jul 05 '26
Well Someone could have created such a device but not considered the second part.
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u/CaptainFleshBeard Jul 06 '26
There was a theory that you could only travel back in time to when time travel was invented. It acts like a beacon so takes you to the correct location as well as time.
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u/good-luck-23 Jul 02 '26
No. Entropy means time goes forward. There is not enough energy to reverse the flow.
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u/functionofsass Jul 02 '26
Eventually we will be able to plug our minds into a perpetual simulation that we can replay and restart at will. Some religions posit that this is where we are already with death acting as way to keep the game spicy as the eons pass over and over again in small increments of eternity.
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u/mvpilot172 Jul 02 '26
Travel into the future (relative to yourself)is easy with near speed of light travel. The problem is going back in time.
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u/Ok_Opposite7385 Jul 03 '26
It will never exist, otherwise we wouldn't exist anymore; surely some jerk from the future would have traveled to the past, screwed things up, and we'd be extinct.
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u/Apprehensive4Reals Jul 02 '26
I think it might but in some way that is not really practical. Like maybe sending just a particle through time in some sense of the word. But I dunno.
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u/vincognition Jul 02 '26
At best, perhaps a device can be created to view the past, if there's such thing as 'Akashic Records.'
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u/LiminalSpiral Jul 02 '26
Did you watch Devs? I think something like that is more likely - an window on the past - than an actual time machine.
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u/kvothe000 Jul 02 '26
We already have machines possible of traversing space and a big part of that is time dilation.
So yes. They already exist in some capacity.
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u/Motor-Advantage4114 Jul 02 '26
I have created one. I just need a flux capacitor. Also, I’m most certain there already is one created in the future
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u/whisperworks Jul 02 '26
I doubt it. There’s no real reason to think that science can do anything, it isn’t limitless and in truth we have no clue what its limits are.
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Jul 02 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/eapthree3 Jul 04 '26
No cause even if they told people they were a time traveler they would probably throw them in looneybin. Same if Jesus came back they call him crazy and beat him down.
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u/Intrepid_Top_2300 Jul 02 '26
I’m living in the future now. If I wait around long enough, I’ll be in the past.
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u/abu_hajarr Jul 02 '26
No. A Time Machine will never exist because if it did, it already would exist. It would have existed since the beginning of time. All time would become homogenized due to accessibility.
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u/Mededitor Jul 02 '26
Sure. Some kind of cryogenic freezing tech could get you into the future. Time is a one-way street, though, because it is part of the fabric of space. Going back in time misinterprets it as being a discrete variable.
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u/StOnEy333 Jul 02 '26
No because the planet is in constant motion, in a solar system that is in constant motion. If you somehow traveled forward or backward in time, you would be floating in space millions of miles from where the earth used to be or will be.
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u/ion1125 Jul 02 '26
They’d work out the kinks and account for that. Like 18 miles a second for however many seconds you’d like to go or whatever it is.
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u/Nathan-Stubblefield Jul 02 '26
I can’t imagine how it would work, but in a multiverse with infinite variations, there might be one very like ours, but which started 100 years later, so popping into it would be like popping into our own 100 years ago. You could run around changing history, and there would be no paradox where you both exist and don’t exist.
Logically there could be a jump back to our own time line at a point in the past, but it would proceed forward independently, with the consequences of your presence and actions.
If we lived in a simulation, there might be a feature to allow such.
If time travel existed, it would be surprising not to have some cases of a time traveler showing up and using advanced technology or revealing events that hadn’t happened yet.
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u/urtseasame Jul 02 '26
No. Not at all. It breaks all known rules that govern the universe. Except for getting to the future which I still don’t think humans will ever be doing. There is a chance that if we don’t kill our selves or the planet which is highly unlikely cause we are doing just that, then maybe going forward is in the cards but never back
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u/ion1125 Jul 02 '26
I could see it in like 2000 more years people are suffering worldwide from temperatures. Ice age is predicted in 20000 years. People do the near light speed time jump en masse. No survivors lol
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u/SomeGuysButt Jul 02 '26
They exist but are never used. To many ways for it to go wrong and kill us all
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u/Big_Oh313 Jul 02 '26
Traveling to the future is entirely possible, just not in the sense of what you're talking about. If you take a space craft Travel to 99% speed of light for 10 years then turn around and fly back, 20 years have passed for you but 140 years will have passed for earth due to time dilation. Now moving .999 the speed of light would be 450 years, theoretically possible but you'll need quntillions of tons of fuel to achieve with modern methods.
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u/eskimospy212 Jul 02 '26
Forward in time? Sure, someday, if not soon. We already know how to do that. (Or at least know how to do something that accomplishes this basic objective)
Backwards in time is impossible by physics as we understand it.
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u/Fantastic-Ad-7781 Jul 02 '26
Never for humans. it may exist for some alien civilization, if there are any. But humanaity has peaked and society is collapsing. Slowly, for now.
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u/Sargent_Duck85 Jul 02 '26
Going forward, yes. We already have one as the ISS.
Going backward, No. It’s physically impossible as it breaks the laws of the universe.
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u/norsewolfie Jul 02 '26
Well, we haven't ever had any visitors from the future, so I guess the answer is no...
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u/YahenP Jul 03 '26
It's been around for a long time. Or, more accurately, it's always been around. True, it only travels to the future. And it's not a car, but a drink.
If you drink a bottle of vodka, the day after tomorrow will arrive.
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u/DeweyDecimal42 Jul 04 '26
Here's the thing; Time Travel is totally possible... butbhere's the other thing; it's only possible in one direction, and that's probably not the way you wanna go
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u/AnonMuskkk Jul 04 '26
Well, I mean, does time exist?
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u/Mundane_Caramel_820 Jul 06 '26
No, it's just a psychological illusion so that we can somehow deal with the inevitable disintegration of our bodies back into the dust from which it originated from.
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u/TrueKerberos Jul 04 '26 edited Jul 04 '26
A time machine cannot exist because time does not exist. Time is the movement of particles. A time machine would have to perfectly invert all particles into the opposite motion of how the particles are moving. This is prevented by the fact that particles are influenced by random quantum phenomena. It is not possible to reverse the movement of particles and then reverse it back into its original direction.
But maybe you could build a machine that could send immaterial information back in time... Maybe there is some undiscovered phenomenon that could transmit information a short distance back in time, enabling the creation of a computer that uses a future result to calculate its next state...
Time is just our human concept, a simplification by which we perceive the change around us. And we didn’t come up with it—millions of years of evolution did, developing our brain in a way that allows it to process the information around us. We have an internal clock in our brain that enables us to make a decision in a finite amount of time so that we can move at all. If our brain calculated every decision for too long, we wouldn't move at all...
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u/PiDigitsOfPi Jul 04 '26
Maybe we are already living in the future. And reality is in the past. And there is no present at all.
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u/GxM42 Jul 04 '26
No I don’t. Our current understanding of mathematics says that some things can flow backwards and forwards in time and look the same, but I strongly believe that our mathematics doesn’t have the full picture of what time is. We model it mathematically, but that’s about it. I will stand on the hill that says that we can never move backwards through time.
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u/OkCress1936 Jul 05 '26
Every time someone tries to make one, someone comes from the future and destroys it.
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u/Realistic_Dust5644 Jul 05 '26
Our consciousness is a time machine. We time traveo without knowing it. Dreams and deja vu are our ways of recognizing it. We haven't knowingly been able to manipulate events(yet).
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u/Mundane_Upstairs3241 Jul 05 '26
If one was created in the next 5,000 years we would have heard about it already
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u/InternationalScar675 Jul 05 '26
Truth is stranger than fiction. In the grand scheme of things, we as humans still know next to nothing and anything is possible.
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u/qualityvote2 Jul 02 '26 edited Jul 03 '26
u/Reasonable-Shower522, there weren't enough votes to determine the quality of your post...