Stephen Hawking has stated that if time travel were possible then why don’t we see visitors from the future visiting us now?

We live in three and a half dimensions, 1= Length, 2=Width, 3= Depth, 3 1/2= the forward direction of time. If we were capable of traveling backward in time we would be able to travel through the 4th dimension of time.

In the last hundred years with the help of Albert Einstein we have come to understand that speed can slow time down to the point that if you were able to go faster than the speed of light you could travel backwards in time. Although breaking the speed of light with any mass is currently considered impossible.

We do know from calibrated atomic clocks that even a trip on a supersonic airliner can slow time down (albeit fractionally: microseconds).        

Many of the worlds leading scientists think that time travel might be possible within 200 years.

Considering the speed of time is not consistent, the possibility exists that we will discover a way to time-travel backwards.

Thinking outside the Box

In the future, if we overcome the problems with time travel without having to use velocity to go faster than the speed of light (faster than Light travel with any Mass is currently considered impossible), would this stationary form of time travel, such as depicted by H. G. Wells "The Time Machine" allow future time travelers to visit us on Earth?

The answer right now would be no, unless it was a very short time in the past and even then Speed or Distance becomes a problem.

H. G. Wells vision of time travel

Wells Time Machine encounters a problem with Speed.

In Wells version the machine travels through time while sitting stationary in the same location.

If Wells version becomes possible to slide backward in time, the speed of the traveler must also be taken into account as earth is traveling through space at about 872,400 Miles per hour, (this speed of the earth through space will be explained later in this paper). Going backward where 1 second on the time travelers watch equaled 1 second in reverse on earth, the Wells time machine is traveling 872,400 Miles per hour (in reverse). Speeding up the time traveled (backward time momentum) for the time machine where 1 second of the time traveler equaled about 12 minute in reverse on the earth. The speed of the time machine and the earth, solar system...through space from the travelers perpective would equal the speed of light! As stated earlier, faster than Light travel with any Mass is currently considered impossible, this should also apply for the time machine in reverse.

To go back in time only one year by H. G. Wells version would require a minimum of 16 days of traveling trough time from the perspective of the pilot of the time machine. 10 years would require 160 days and traveling 100 years in the past would require about 4.4 years of actual time travel from the time machine pilots perspective.

So if the Well’s version of time travel becomes possible in 200 years it is unlikely that attempts will be made to travel this far back in time as it would take close to 9 years of traveling through time for a 200 year future time machine to reach the present. Also problems are likely to occur if in the time machine travels through any object that occupies the same position that the time machine does, such as a mouse or bird wandering into the location the stationary time machine travels time through. 

Wells version travels through time in forward or reverse. Another scenario would be to warp time and thus travel around time without having to proceed back through it. An example would be to take a paper and draw the letter X in the bottom left corner and the letter Y in the top right corner. Draw a line from the X (present) to Y (past), Wells version must travel across this line to go back in time.  Now lift both corners of the paper and touch the X and the Y together leaving middle of the paper hanging down. If point X is the future and point Y is the past, we have warped time to cross over it and not through it, thus allowing instantaneous major jumps into the past. This is a Time-Warp.   

Time Warp has no problem with Speed but it does with Distance.

Distance: The enemy of Stationary Warp Time Travel

As it stands, the Earth is spinning at over a thousand miles per hour. So if a Time-Pilot warped time to cross back in time one hour  they would essentially end up 1000 miles away from their start point. These Time Warp happens instantaneously whether it was a warp of one second or one million years as there is no line to travel if you warp time.

In this scenario, we must also factor in the orbit of the Earth has moved 66,640 mile around the Sun in the same hour.

So their initial (instantaneous) warp of an hour backward in time has left them about 67,640 miles from the original location.

Time-Warp version of time travel

Time-Warp start point Kennedy Space Center 7 P.M.	Time-Warp Destination end point 6 P.M. (one hour earlier and 67,640 miles from Earth)

Factoring in the speed of the Sun around the Galaxy for the same hour, we would find them another 504,000 miles away.

Now they are 571,640 miles from the initial point.

Factoring the speed of the Milky Way Galaxy heading towards the Andromeda Galaxy could add another 150,000 Miles of distance per hour for a total distance of 721,640 miles.

Furthermore, our entire Local Group is hurtling toward the center of the Virgo cluster at one million miles per hour. Now they are 1,721,640 Miles away.

The Virgo Cluster, along with several other large clusters, are in turn speeding towards a gigantic unseen mass named The Great Attractor at about 1,342,000 Mph.

Hypercluster Attraction

The Great Attractor is far bigger than a galaxy. In the terminology of astronomers, there are clusters of galaxies containing maybe hundreds of galaxies, and superclusters containing many clusters. The Great Attractor is a hypercluster of Galaxies and possibly dark matter.

Now the Time Traveler should be 3,063,640 miles away.

Of course not all of these velocities are in the same direction and some will cancel out others.

CBR to the Rescue

In relation to the background heat of the Universe (our wall paper of the Universe for lack of a better term) called cosmic microwave background radiation (CBR) the Earth is moving at 872,400 Miles per Hour. So we have essentially cancelled out the differing velocities and directions by checking our (earths) speed in relation to the CBR. The warp time traveler warping back in time to one hour before is in reality approximately just under One million miles away from the Earth.

If they decided to warp ahead or back in time by one day the traveler would be 20,937,600 Miles away.

Time Warping a month into the past or future would place them 628,128,000 miles away.

A whole year warp forward or backward in time would place them about 7.6 Billion miles from Earth. Although each of these warps was instantaneous.

The fastest manmade object is Voyager 1, which is heading out of the Solar System and traveling at a speed of 320 million miles per year.  This translates into 38,582 Miles per hour. If the time traveler only warped back one hour in time, they would have to multiply this current velocity of Voyager 1 by 22 times just to get back to Earth in one hour to see themselves leave.

In other words there might be time warp travelers but unless they have overcome the distances encountered in Warp Time Travel with special high velocity engines on their machines they would essentially be lost in space, unless they warped back through time in the opposite direction of time to get back to their original time and close proximity to Earth.

Yet if they Warped from 30 days in the future to our present, ending up located far off in deep space and transmitting a communications signal towards Earth, that signal would travel at 669,600,000 miles per hour (speed of light), quick enough to make up for the distance. So if they travelled a month in the past, even if they were unable to be here in person their transmission (communications) signal would take only about one hour to reach on earth.

Lets assume someone discovers this form of Stationary Warp Time Travel in 100 years (2101) and they decide to warp back to 2001. They would travel here instantaneously, however, they would end up 762,652,080,000 miles (762 billion miles away) it would take 1138.96 hours (47 days) for us to receive a signal traveling at the speed of light from that distance.

Quad T (TTTT= Terrestrial Time-Traveler Transmission)

If this was the case in that a Warp Time Traveler might travel back in time but not be able to physically get close to Earth, then our SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) could be picking up their communications signals from quite a distance away, without it being Extra Terrestrial in origin but a Quad T signal (TTTT= Terrestrial Time-Traveler Transmission). A Quad T signal could be triangulated to determine distance and extrapolated to determine how much Time was Traveled by the Time Pilot. In essence a Quad T signal would allow us to determine when Time Travel will become possible, the further the distance, the further in the future they have warped from. If the SETI Quad T signal was within Earths past plane of travel in relation to the cosmic microwave background radiation (CBR), this would make the signal a likely Quad T message and not Alien in origin.  

If this form of Stationary Warp Time Travel (Stationary in relation to the cosmic microwave background radiation) works, it could be applied to space exploration making time warps while Space moves to you or away from you. If it was as simple as basing your warps on the cosmic microwave background radiation (CBR), you might wait for the planet Jupiter to align with the downward direction in time so if you warped 17.4 days into the past you would end up close to Jupiter, that is only if the calculations were done correctly, this would equal a distance of 365 million miles (the minimum distance to Jupiter from the Earth). Basically Jupiter would end up at the same point in space 17 days after the Earth was at that same point. A problem with this scenario is that space exists in x-y-z axis and the Jupiter scenario only works on an x-y flat surface. Most likely the traveler would end up in empty space about the same distance from the Sun that Jupiter is but not in the orbital plane of Jupiter. Not the easiest way to get from Point A to Point B unless they intersect with each other and those aren’t very good odds in space.

It may be possible that Time Travelers may be limited in the amount of Time they can warp back, thus, at some point down the road SETI may begin to pick up a signal that turns out not to be Alien but a distant Quad T.

If there was no limit on the amount of Time Travelled, these explorers could warp back to a point close to another star system in the past or future, even other galaxies or close to the beginning of the Universe to see how it happened! In that case though they might be far away from the beginning as the CBE location they started at would be the approximate location for all the warps, but as Universe is expanding then that original CBE point might be close to the big bang event 15 or so billion years ago, when all CBE points were near the Big Bang. Of course they would have to warp forward to the time they left to meet back up to Earth. Even a slight discrepancy in any distance travelled in the past may amount for a large error on the return trip stranding these time travelers with no means of getting back to Earth at any time.

How close to the Big Bang

Could a Warp Time Traveler get to the beginning of the Big Bang? If we looked at the universe even at the young age of 1000 years old it would be likely that the Time Machine would appear at a time when particles of the universe were so close together that the machine would materialize within these particles, destroying the machine.

Could the Traveler go past the Big Bang.

Since this Warp version means you travel around time we could avoid the problem with materializing within a mass and set our time destination prior to the Big Bang and the beginning of the Universe. The problem with this scenario is that time itself was formed with the Big Bang and our present physical laws of the Universe would be non-existent, thus the physical properties of the Time-Warp ship could not be held together for even a microsecond and how do you warp time to before time began? So we can only go so far back in time without major problems arising.

SETI "Wow!" signal in 1977 could be from a Warp Time Traveler

If any discrepancy of distances traveled at a destination warp point were an issue for returning to the original warp point, then the traveler may need to flash a quick communication message towards earth and warp back to the original time to meet back up with the Earth point so as not to lose the original location of Earth. SETI did pick up the "Wow" signal at the Ohio State Radio Observatory in 1977. The term "Wow" came from the scientist that marked the comment next to the signal on the paper with “Wow!” However, none of this signal was detected again and could not be confirmed with other means. Thus even triangulation to determine the distance and original location could not be determined.

Could it be that the Wow signal was a Quad T signal test (TTTT= Terrestrial [Warp] Time-Traveler Transmission)?

The Wow signal could have been a test but we were not meant to understand the test as we might construe the signal as being extraterrestrial, which in 1977 would have unnecessarily caused a major change in thinking about many different ideas within society.

The fact that SETI has yet to detect and confirm any other signals like this may indicate that this form of Warp Time Travel is not possible in the future and Wow was just a natural blip from space. A Time Traveler from our future would surely know how to transmit a signal that SETI could detect. However, we may only begin to receive Quad T signals when the warp time travelers feel that our time has arrived when we can comprehend that the Quad T signals are human in origin even though the distances of transmission may be quite distant from our solar system.

If a warp was made 1,000,000 years in the past and the time-craft transmitted a signal from this location, which would be 7,626,520,800,000,000 miles away, it would take 1,297 years for a transmission from the time craft to be received on Earth. Of course there would be no technology on the Earth 1,000,000 years ago to receive any signal like this.

We must understand that if SETI confirms a distant signal outside of the solar system with intelligence in the signal, it may not indicate Alien life. There is a possibility that it is a Quad T and human in origin and these Time Travelers will only transmit communications when they know we are prepared to comprehend that a distant signal might mot be Extra Terrestrial.

When one reviews the mathematical odds of life to randomly occur (Spontaneous Generation) elsewhere in the Universe leading to Alien Life you will find odds that are beyond improbable. The mathematical odds that we will discover a way to time travel (H. G. Wells version) or warp time travel are much more likely than finding life in Solar Systems outside of our own.

Life in our own Solar System?

The reason I bring this up is that we should expect to find life within our own solar system, however this life will have it's origin from Earth.

Astrophysicist, Hugh Ross, Ph.D., MSc. point out the following on life in the Solar System:

Paradox’s minimised.

This Warp Time Travel would allow for time travel but without vast improvements in thrust for spacecraft, these travelers would be unable to visit Earth in the past and physically change the future such as killing their grandfather before the traveler was born.

A Distant Time Traveler could send a communications signal to earth to warn of impending natural disasters to allow the present time to evacuate large population bases to ensure those many lives aren’t lost. The question must then be asked, “What if one of those saved lives kills the grandfather of the time traveler?” So we haven’t eliminated fully the Warp Time Traveler paradoxes. 

Inner Planet Exploration

In a one second warp backward or forward in time, a stationary time travel craft would warp over 242 miles in that one second. This could place the time traveler 242 miles deep under the Earths surface allowing quick trips to obtain materials from the planets core. Although, this would probably end in disaster as materializing within rock would destroy the entire time craft.

If warp time travel ever becomes possible the computers will be busy making calculations to ensure they don’t end up inside some other mass in the past or future. 

“Houston, we have cleared the planet”

That same one second of warp in time, when calculated properly, could also place the time warp craft in Earth Orbit and may be one of the more useful features of warp time travel, allowing the building of super-sized Space Craft on Earths surface where construction is much less expensive and accessible by many construction workers and machines without the problem of eventually thrusting (rocketing) something that large into space. Right now the costs of assembling the Alpha Station in space is enormous and has to be shared by multiple countries. Warp Time Travel could mean that the Giant Spaceships of Science Fiction could one day become a reality. 

I include a quote below that easily sums up the paper.

This material is Copyright © 2001, by Guy Cramer, All Rights Reserved.
This material cannot be reproduced in any form without the expressed written permission of the Author. Whole Copies may be printed for personal use; no changes are to be made to the content, names or references.

 Reference for Life in the Solar System:

-Hugh Ross, Ph.D., "The Creator and the Cosmos", Copyright 1993 by Reasons to Believe. Revised edition, copyright 1995. NavPress, p.154-155.