Completely Conjecture: Timelines.

Warning, lots of geometry terminology inside.


Also interesting to look at: [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjsgoXvnStY ]

There's been lots of science fiction written about the subject of time- something which we perceive to be linear and irreversible.

I have several questions, though:

If time is linear, could we wrap this line around another dimension and make it circular? Everything would repeat, ultimately- and the trick would be creating a chord across the timeline and then travelling across it.
If that's not possible, than bringing two points that are not adjacent to one-another close enough together through some sort of compression would work too, right?

If we can't work silly tricks on time, how can we manipulate it, then?

We operate in a three-dimensional cross-section of the four-dimensional timeline which is theoretically a part of the fifth-dimensional plane of our universe which is a cross-section of the sixth-dimensional volume that encompasses the possible universes that our universe could've been....

That's heavy.

The trick, then, would be something that can achieve interaction (or perhaps observation only, if our actions can change the "direction" our line travels in the "plane") on a dimensional scale >4. What I mean by that is something that affects not only time (and our perception of it) but also something that affects probability and what is "possible".

If you want to be a hoss about this, then you need to go one dimension further and utilize something that manipulates (with extreme accuracy and precision) the starting conditions of the universe (or our position on whatever axes you might choose to define that dimension in).

This is complex.

Furthermore, is this possible within the constraints of our peasant-tier 3-dimensional selves?

How would one go about constructing something that acts on more dimensions than it was built in?

Would it be possible to manipulate higher dimensions from our currently observable one?

If we make choices that influence what timeline we participate in (assuming free will is correctly abstracted and not "simple electro-chemical reactions"), how would one go about "crossing" between higher dimensions (or would they be other timelines?) and/or collapsing them into something observable?

There's another idea posed by Michael Crichton's Timeline, which suggests something like an infinite number of universes are intertwined in a rather large and tortuous multiverse which encompasses all of possibility. Actions in one universe affect the outcome of another, which affects the outcome of another, and so forth.

In one case, traveling laterally across the multiversial "plane" permits time travel in the sense that if a parallel universe started 10 years later and followed the exact same developmental path, you could cross to the same "absolute" point in time and be ten years "behind" relative to "your" time.

More scare-quotes, as usual. Food for thought.

What is our universe?

What is "time"? Space-time?

Would you "time-travel", given the opportunity?

Completely Conjecture:

Wow, that's one long post, sir.

Thought-provoking, though.

Here's some food for thought:

(keep in mind that this is all more or less a giant what-if...)


A premise not entirely clear in the text: Humanity (with a capital H) shares a collective (un)conscious(ness).


Also not entirely clear: I'm misusing quotation marks to provide an emphasis indicating that the word means something that may or may not be what it means "normally".

We're dreaming, right now. When we "go to sleep", we're actually waking from our dream-state. Our "reality" is so precise and tangible specifically because it is a construct of the mind- and our "dreams" tend to be less "real", because we cannot create or perceive with such acuity.

That's difficult to understand.

What I mean by all that is: We're awake when we're "asleep". We're dreaming when we're "awake". We perceive more reality while "awake" because we can create more reality than we can while "asleep".

To impose more thought-constructs:

"Lucid Dreaming" is the coming-to-terms with what is otherwise a "difficult reality"- that is, when we realize how "unreal" the situation is, we acknowledge it and maintain a more specific mastery of our control of reality.

When we're "awake", we're experiencing a construct of what we surmise reality to be. That is why it's so realistic, has "rules" that may or may not be based entirely what we think we perceive.

Another twist:


Humanity's not a bunch of individuals- rather, we're one giant supercomputer, a la Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, where our "awake" and "asleep" cycles are the individual cycles of the super-computer's fluctuating number of processors/storage-units.

All the facts we "know" are defined. The "abstractions" that we make (honor?) are declared but not defined in an absolute fashion. When we "learn", we're adding to the items that we can import. Our daily lives are cycles of code/build/debug/reboot. Sleep cycles are our reprieve from "computing" whilst participating in the giant distributed-cloud-of-computers that is "our known universe".

Food for thought, and somewhat ridiculous, I'll admit.

Here are a few question, though:

What is reality? What is real? What isn't?