Verified answer

Theoretically, if you time travel into the future, then you would be missing, because the "latest" you has traveled into the future. Now, if you go into the past to kill yourself, then the future you will also die, but then if the past you dies, then the future you should never have been able to travel (since you died previously). This is the paradox and the reasoning for why we will probably never travel into the past, but possibly into the future (for brief periods of time).

I don't really have the cognitive capacity to understand infinity as anything more than a circle. :)

It has been confirmed that the effects of relativistic and gravitational time dilation can cause a traveller who starts at and returns to a point of origin that remains stationary, to arrive at a time farther in the future in that reference frame than their subjective elapsed time would indicate (a constrained form of time travel into the future).

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Type 1 Chronoverse

The timeline is consistent and can never be changed. One does not have any control and winds up becoming part of the timeline.

Type 2 Chronoverse

The timeline is flexible and is subject to change.

Type 3 Chronoverse

The timeline cannot be altered but instead constantly splinters into all possible alternatives

Type 4 Chronoverse

The timeline can be altered but not before a certain point

In this universe you cannot travel to a point in time before Chronal technology has been built

Type 5 Chronoverse

The timeline can be altered but not before a certain point

In this universe you cannot travel to a point in time before you were born

Type 6 Chronoverse

The timeline cannot be altered because it no longer exists

Type 7 Chronoverse

Time travel to the past is possible but not to the future

The future doesn't exist yet thus there is nothing to visit

http://beyondheroes2.tripod.com/chronoverse.htm

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If we hold general relativity to be true, which most scientist do, then if you "travelled into" the future, you wouldn't be "missing" at all. You would just experience all of the time between your starting point and your ending point at a much faster pace than everyone else. This is the part of general relativity that actually allows for time travel (forward at least, backwards is logically impossible by all scientific theories).

Let's say you wanted to travel 100 years into the future. Using the laws of general relativity, you should theoretically be able to accellerate your body to a speed at or near the speed of light so that time shortens for you as compared to the rest of the earth's observers. Basically, you could live what seemed like 10 seconds to you but that 10 seconds seems like 100 years to everyone else. So, you haven't LEPT into the future, you have just lived out 100 years of history in 10 seconds, and if another human being was able to "see" you do this (which is also impossible by the boundries of the theory, because if they could watch you, then they would have the same point of reference as you and thus see you as normal because they would be accelerating at the same speed), you would just look like someone moving in super fast forward, to the point that you would actually look like light itself.

Of course, this is practically impossible since accelerating you body enough to make any significant difference would likely tear it to shreds, but if you could find out a way to overcome that, time travel into the future is certainly possible.

I believe yes you would be missing from history at the time you left until the time you had arrived.

No you wouldn't. Personally I do believe anything like that can every happen because of the grandfather paradox. If you were to go back in time to kill your grandfather, then does that mean you would die? That would mean that you wouldn't have existed at all for you even to go back in time to do it. So fundamentally that would mean you would be unable to do so. A little confusing but I understand what it means.

Ther are many different theories of time travel, each possibly having different outcomes.

Part one: Future travel

1) Assuming Einsteins Space-Time Relativity Mode you would exist in all the time in between.

2) Using the sliding universes model you might find two of you in the new timeline.

3) With Godellian time travel you might not exist in intervening time between the jump.

4) With the computer game model you can decide later what happened in the unexperienced time.

Part two: Reverse Time Travel

If we assume that at the quantum level that many ebbs and flows of possible futures are made until a stable future is generated, we might assume that unstable futures are rewound and rubbed out before or during the rewriting.

If we applied this to macro scale time travel, once you went back in time the future would have not happened yet.

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Some Specific Information related to time travel:

Space-Time Relativity

Einstein's Relativity allows for time to move forward at different rates, thus allowing easily for movement forward in time, including almost instantanious passing of years as if frozen in time. If somehow we were to travel faster than light we might flip over into a tachyon universe and possibly go back in time compared to our perspective moving through a universe where the slowest possible speed is C (the speed of light).

If we couild pass back into our universe by moving slower than C, we would find ourselves tranlated vast distances faster than we could have travelled at C. In such cases there would be a time-space frame where we would have travelled back in time.

Quantum Vacuum

At the quantum level or "plank scale" every possibility is equally likely including moving forward or backward in time. In practice our universe has a leaning for time to flow more in one direction than the other. At our macro scale sleight backwashes in the flow of time are not noticed.

General Background Info:

There are a number of ideas of how time travel might opperate.

My understanding is that ones that don't have parallel universes often have the problem of time machines colliding where you time machine can't leave because when you that would have left is on it's way back and clogging the time tunnel.

I think "Godellian" time travel gets around this sort of problem, but winds up with scenarios where the time travel already happened.

E.g. You read a letter from your grandfather on how to build a time machine. You go back in time, marry your grandmother and then write the letter.

Another explanation assumes that the world is like a computer game that allows past eevents to be made up as long ans they gel with the current known facts.

Time travel into the past in theoretically impossible.

You time travel into the future anytime you move. Scientists put an atomic clock on an airplane, and kept one on earth. The airplane one came back a few seconds late, even though it kept time perfectly on the plane. If you travel very fast, time to you will seem the same while time on earth will pass quicker in comparison.

You wouldn't be missing from history, you'd just be moving really really fast. You can't hop from one point in time to another according to current knowledge.

i think you would we missing from when you left to when you arrive and if you were to kill your past self the future you will never exist

I think you could go *back* in time if you could travel faster than the speed of light.

Personally, though, I believe that we will never be able to travel in time because no one's ever come back to tell us they did it!

You can't travel like that. Slow day at middle school ?

I did that once, and had to go back and undo it.