"If time travel was possible, I would now have 20.000 "

Does this mean MadMarx has a time machine?

Man, all these people using time machines to go back into the past to use their present knowledge to get rich. Come on! Who wants to be rich in the past? I want to be rich now! You go to the future and gain knowledge such that you can come back to the present to get rich.

http://www.cheapass.com/products/boardgames/cag034.html

I was listening to this crazy radio show once where the talk about alien abductions and psychics and all kinds of stuff. I don't know why I was listening. I guess sometimes it is funny to hear this crazy stuff.

Anyway, they were saying that at the rate of technological progress we are making we should eventually be able to time travel. Therefore, the fact that we haven't met any time travelers was proof positive that some calamitous event was going to happen setting the human race way back or eliminating us altogether. And the funny part is how serious they are about it.

"US Patent No. 1.
Time Machine... think about it. "

Why would I want to disclose a time machine?

If time travel was possible, we would now about it by now, because people would have traveled back in time and told us by now... Unless all the poeple of the future are incredibly selfish, in which case we might be in alot of trouble.

I kinda see time travel working like this: http://xkcd.com/716/

Every time someone invents it, their future self comes back and stops them. Because the future self screwed something up.

"If time travel was possible, we would now about it by now, because people would have traveled back in time and told us by now... Unless all the poeple of the future are incredibly selfish, in which case we might be in alot of trouble."

Except that it would only be able to return to the time it was invented, not earlier

The problem with time machines is that it would be really difficult to keep the thing a secret, sure we could make money on stocks and shares and betting in the short term, and some players on here could win the odd game, but in the longer term, when Time Machines are mass produced - that's when we will have a problem.

For a start we would never finish a game, some idiot would still get himself into a losing position and then refuse to finalise his orders for a millenium, and then go back in time and shot a mod's grandmother if he thought they were going to intervene.

And another thing, we would all know when a time machine had been invented in the future. All we have got to do is look for a spike in the shares of Global Time Machine Inc. When lots of people start buying them we know it's because future people have come back and started to buy their stock.

Time travel is easy. Only last night I got under the duvet of a box spring inner sprung base model of time & space machine that transported me 8 hours into the future in the blink of an eye. Travelling backwards has its difficulties, though.

@Acosmist - lol, I don't know, but if you had one... you could secure US Patent No. 1.

@Octavious

You sleep under your duvet?

@Steevo I do indeed. Is this considered unusual in some parts of the world?

Head under too, or head sticking out?

How about arms?

Generally speaking I find feet sticking out the bottom generally maximises time travel potential

I personally prefer to sleep on top of my duvet...except for my head and arms, those are always securely under the duvet.

I sleep with my duvet wrapped around, and the top of my head (from mid-nose up) sticking out the top

In actuality, I sleep sans duvet, but rather use a quilt and a thin sheet. I keep it pulled up below my chin with all body parts in...even if it's burning up...otherwise I can't sleep because I'm weird like that.

I can't sleep on a bed without a duvet. If its really hot, rather than use a sheet or lie on the bed with nothing, I got and curl up on the floor. For some reason it works.

btw, what happened to this thread?

What thread? Was there a thread here before we arrived?

Yeah, believe it or not!

Oops...

Maybe you should go back in time and head off the derailment.

Back in time is kinda hard though.

Or maybe I could use the duvet method to go forward in time until the time machine is invented, then go back in time and kill whoever thought of the idea of a time machine to begin with, then this thread will never have occurred at all...which means I won't be able to derail it and have to go forward in time to go back in time to stop people from thinking of time machines...

"Except that it would only be able to return to the time it was invented, not earlier "

Oooh, you're using Primer rules!

Anyways, time isn't a dimension in which we can travel about like space. It's just the counting of events. For example, since 1967, we've just been counting the oscillations of a Cesium-133 atom. There's nothing really to suggest that the intervals between oscillations is necessarily constant except that the same rules (physics) governing the oscillations also govern the mechanistic interactions of particles in our brains and consequently our experience of time itself.

Time could stop and start, slow and speed up (although these aren't really logical terms considering they rely on the very existence of time to have any meaning), and we could never notice if it did, because the observation of events and their separation in time require physically similar events to occur within our brain to give us such an experience.

Time doesn't really represent a dimension... given that the laws of physics run perfectly well in reverse, the only reason an arrow of time exists is because of our observation of entropy, and the ever increasing amount of disorder. However, order itself is simply a human label. Any specific arrangement of particles is just as ridiculously improbable, it's just that we call some specific arrangements orderly because they happen to be meaningful to us. It should come as no surprise then that order decreases as a simple matter of probability. We could just as arbitrarily designate useless arrangements of matter as orderly, and we would still find that order tends to decrease in time.

I don't actually believe what I just said, but it's definitely a fun thought to toy around with. =)