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- Oct 13, 2018
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A couple of decades ago, I was a staff member of theshadowlands.net. During that time, I wrote a monthly column, which generally had some fairly well-collected thoughts about a particular aspect of the paranormal, sometimes including my own experiences to illustrate both what I meant and why I approached a topic the way I did. They were all well and good, and some have even aged fairly well, but I also had a number of ideas that never really gelled enough to write about, or that had gelled extremely well but I lacked enough specialized knowledge to reconcile with competing observations and information. I more or less filed them away, as I stopped looking into the paranormal entirely and therefore didn’t have any way to ever improve them.
Two years ago, I started listening to various horror channels on YouTube. One thing several readers do is to compile stories from Reddit and other forums and present themed reading of people’s stories. Most of these are not paranormal, but rather terrifying things that have happened to them. Nevertheless, a fair number of shows are out there with purely paranormal themes, and I happened to listen to a great many of them while building things in Minecraft. That eventually led me to start thinking about old things again, and then to this very forum.
The community here is vastly different from the shadowlands. Back then, there wasn’t much to be gained from rambling on with half-finished ideas, but it occurred to me yesterday that this community has enough diversity of thought and experience that it would be at least interesting to see what the community thought of some of my ramblings.
Note: This isn’t a knock on theshadowlands. The staff there was (and probably is) fantastic. It was just a different environment compared to this one.
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The concept of time travel bothers me. A lot. We’re moving through space at a hell of a clip. The Earth turns at about 1,000 mph. We’re orbiting the sun at about 67,000 mph. We’re shooting through space as a stellar system at about 43,000 mph. And as you increase the view scale, you see more and more movement – orbiting the galactic core, moving through the local group, the local cluster, super cluster, etc. All that speed though space is linked to the passage of time. We not only know this theoretically, we were able to calculate it with the astronauts who went to the moon.
So let’s talk time travel. There are schools of thought pro and con. To me, the issue isn’t traveling through time, but traveling through space. I’m going to look at it through the lens of going to get the mail. For the sake of nice, round numbers, let’s say my walk from the front door to the mailbox is 100 feet. Walking at about 3mph, it’ll take around 23 second to get there. I take 4 seconds to pop the door open and grab the mail (not lingering because I know the driving habits of the people around here), and another 23 seconds to get back to the front door. So in 50 seconds I got back to my starting point, right?
Nope. Because in those 50 seconds:
· The earth rotated such that I’m actually 73,350 feet (13.9 MILES) from where I started
· The Earth moved around the sun 4,913,300 feet (930.5 MILES)
· The entire solar system moved 3,153,350 feet (597 MILES)
· And so on
So if I were able to move back in time 50 seconds, I would also have to move about 1500 miles in space to be at the same coordinates where I stated. 50 seconds. That’s less than a minute. When people talk time travel, it’s often in much larger increments of time. Want to go back in time to kill Hitler as he read his rejection from the Vienna School of Fine Arts in 1907? Well, it’s not just the time bridge you’d need to cross, but you’d need to find a way to move well in excess of 106 billion miles to get to the proper location in space. We can reach any point on the Earth’s surface in a 24-hour time window only if we leverage the resources of a nation such as the US, and with a substantial amount of lead time and preparation – and that’s moving with the normal, forward flow of time. So with that in mind, perhaps plenty of people have invented a way to move through time, only to find themselves helpless in the cold near-vacuum of space.
Except that line of reasoning is not compatible with observations made right here on Earth.
I’m quite certain every regular on this site has read about stories from people who have seen past events play out before them. Civil War sites in the US in particular have a common history of this type of phenomenon. Beyond that, nearly everyone has experienced déjà vu. I’ve been able to accurately narrate entire series of events, as they happened, in front of groups of people from dreams I’d had previously months or years before. Statistically speaking, I can hardly be unique in that regard, as there are many historical tales or people making accurate predictions of specific events many years or lifetimes ahead of their occurrence.
So that bothers me. I'm obviously not an expert in any of the fields of study that would be required to piece these things together, but I'm also not intellectually lazy enough to simply dismiss all of these things as flights of fancy and coincidence. I have an idea that this is directly related to the concept of perception, as in we don't have the ability to [yet] to perceive some fundamental things about our universe, so we can't hope to build an accurate model of what's truly around us.
I do hate to leave it at that, though. But then, the title says it all, these are rambling thoughts, not finished ones. Perhaps not even very well organized ones.
But at any rate, what could you folks add or subtract from these?
A couple of decades ago, I was a staff member of theshadowlands.net. During that time, I wrote a monthly column, which generally had some fairly well-collected thoughts about a particular aspect of the paranormal, sometimes including my own experiences to illustrate both what I meant and why I approached a topic the way I did. They were all well and good, and some have even aged fairly well, but I also had a number of ideas that never really gelled enough to write about, or that had gelled extremely well but I lacked enough specialized knowledge to reconcile with competing observations and information. I more or less filed them away, as I stopped looking into the paranormal entirely and therefore didn’t have any way to ever improve them.
Two years ago, I started listening to various horror channels on YouTube. One thing several readers do is to compile stories from Reddit and other forums and present themed reading of people’s stories. Most of these are not paranormal, but rather terrifying things that have happened to them. Nevertheless, a fair number of shows are out there with purely paranormal themes, and I happened to listen to a great many of them while building things in Minecraft. That eventually led me to start thinking about old things again, and then to this very forum.
The community here is vastly different from the shadowlands. Back then, there wasn’t much to be gained from rambling on with half-finished ideas, but it occurred to me yesterday that this community has enough diversity of thought and experience that it would be at least interesting to see what the community thought of some of my ramblings.
Note: This isn’t a knock on theshadowlands. The staff there was (and probably is) fantastic. It was just a different environment compared to this one.
[/Header]
The concept of time travel bothers me. A lot. We’re moving through space at a hell of a clip. The Earth turns at about 1,000 mph. We’re orbiting the sun at about 67,000 mph. We’re shooting through space as a stellar system at about 43,000 mph. And as you increase the view scale, you see more and more movement – orbiting the galactic core, moving through the local group, the local cluster, super cluster, etc. All that speed though space is linked to the passage of time. We not only know this theoretically, we were able to calculate it with the astronauts who went to the moon.
So let’s talk time travel. There are schools of thought pro and con. To me, the issue isn’t traveling through time, but traveling through space. I’m going to look at it through the lens of going to get the mail. For the sake of nice, round numbers, let’s say my walk from the front door to the mailbox is 100 feet. Walking at about 3mph, it’ll take around 23 second to get there. I take 4 seconds to pop the door open and grab the mail (not lingering because I know the driving habits of the people around here), and another 23 seconds to get back to the front door. So in 50 seconds I got back to my starting point, right?
Nope. Because in those 50 seconds:
· The earth rotated such that I’m actually 73,350 feet (13.9 MILES) from where I started
· The Earth moved around the sun 4,913,300 feet (930.5 MILES)
· The entire solar system moved 3,153,350 feet (597 MILES)
· And so on
So if I were able to move back in time 50 seconds, I would also have to move about 1500 miles in space to be at the same coordinates where I stated. 50 seconds. That’s less than a minute. When people talk time travel, it’s often in much larger increments of time. Want to go back in time to kill Hitler as he read his rejection from the Vienna School of Fine Arts in 1907? Well, it’s not just the time bridge you’d need to cross, but you’d need to find a way to move well in excess of 106 billion miles to get to the proper location in space. We can reach any point on the Earth’s surface in a 24-hour time window only if we leverage the resources of a nation such as the US, and with a substantial amount of lead time and preparation – and that’s moving with the normal, forward flow of time. So with that in mind, perhaps plenty of people have invented a way to move through time, only to find themselves helpless in the cold near-vacuum of space.
Except that line of reasoning is not compatible with observations made right here on Earth.
I’m quite certain every regular on this site has read about stories from people who have seen past events play out before them. Civil War sites in the US in particular have a common history of this type of phenomenon. Beyond that, nearly everyone has experienced déjà vu. I’ve been able to accurately narrate entire series of events, as they happened, in front of groups of people from dreams I’d had previously months or years before. Statistically speaking, I can hardly be unique in that regard, as there are many historical tales or people making accurate predictions of specific events many years or lifetimes ahead of their occurrence.
So that bothers me. I'm obviously not an expert in any of the fields of study that would be required to piece these things together, but I'm also not intellectually lazy enough to simply dismiss all of these things as flights of fancy and coincidence. I have an idea that this is directly related to the concept of perception, as in we don't have the ability to [yet] to perceive some fundamental things about our universe, so we can't hope to build an accurate model of what's truly around us.
I do hate to leave it at that, though. But then, the title says it all, these are rambling thoughts, not finished ones. Perhaps not even very well organized ones.
But at any rate, what could you folks add or subtract from these?