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I can't imagine a greater human achievement than time travel.

• wladimir 16y ago
  The good thing about time travel is that it would make FTL space travel possible as well.
  • Pyrodogg 16y ago
    Every time I think of possible FTL travel now I remember that it takes light about 8 minutes to get from our sun to the earth. If we ever do get to FTL travel, we really need to figure out the FT part or we still aren't going to be going anywhere too quickly. Edit: And as soon as I typed that out I remembered relativity effects, and my brain hurts.
  • lallysingh 16y ago
    In the general case, time travel is only good for making terrible, terrible science fiction plots. However, FTL is well justified. Even with various limitations (e.g. you can only use it for instant communications, or only robots can travel), it'd be an utterly fantastic leap for mankind.
  • arethuza 16y ago
    The implications for computing might be interesting as well... (Charlie Stross mentions this in some of his stories).
    • sorbus 16y ago
      To anyone who might not be familiar with the applications of timelike paths in computers: it's the quickest way to the singularity. Basically, you get a computer and wire its output (in the future) to its input (in the present or past). Depending on how time travel works, this either gives you an infinite amount of computational power (actually an infinite amount of time to perform operations in, but it looks rather similar to outside viewers) or a way to quickly find the conditions under which a program returns the input as output (which gives you instantaneous protein folding, factoring of large primes, and so on, if you design your programs properly. If you don't, it gives you a good way to find buffer overflows and other failure conditions). Of course, both of those would look pretty much exactly the same to outside viewers.
• dexen 16y ago
  But don't they say, ``There is no future in time travel.''? ;-)