@Solitude  
Damn, the soundtrack sounds cool, and the game looks promising.
 
I don’t care if the 3D models look dated. I’m gonna get myself some money and buy the game.

@atalarikt  
Have a look.

@Solitude  
I wanna play that game just for how badass that actually sounds to me.

@Cirrus Light  
Unicron would agree.  

 
@Ebonysdagger  
See The Journeyman Project. Specifically the second game where mankind is using time travel strictly for historical research purposes. Until one of the field agents had to look at humanity at its worst and decided to do something about it.

Maybe I’m thinking about it way too much but all I can think about is how big of a paradox this must be.

@M-DitzyDoo  
We make discoveries that are profound, but our current knowledge is far, far from useless.
 
I think this should be required reading from here out.
 
If our knowledge isn’t useful in investigating new phenomenon, then it wouldn’t be useful at all, would it? After all, science isn’t rehashing things we already know - that’s engineering - science is pressing into the unknown. We use the tools of what we already know to make progress in this field.
 
Yes, we will make tremendous discoveries, but we will only make them because we build off of what we already know, so what we already know won’t just still be useful, it will be how we discover anything new - like time travel.
 
I know people who’ve commented that all the low-hanging fruit have been plucked in science - that it’s difficult to find new things. I don’t think so. All the low-hanging fruit has been plucked, certainly, but we are also now standing on the shoulders of giants, so we can reach higher than ever.
 
We’d be foolish to jump off the giants’ shoulders and try to reach for fruit from the ground.
 
And those giants are only there because they’ve withstood all kinds of extremely critical, ruthless attempts to disprove them over all the years. And eventually, yes, we’ll find something a bit taller - a bit more precise, extending to regions that current theories don’t quite cover (singularities are a big one), but we won’t do it by disregarding what we’ve learned so far. We’ll only do it by building on what we already know, and then pushing a bit farther, and being wrong most of the time, but ever so often, being more right than we were before.

Shit, I’m dumb: This is essentially Kyle Reese and John Connor. ;D

@Cirrus Light  
Except we have nothing to compare it to in order to know what ‘reasonable’ is; no has either traveled through time or recorded an object doing the same. Were time travel possible, it’d probably work on an entirely different universal law than the ones we’ve observed now, meaning observations relative to our own known natural laws are as helpful as cheese in a rodeo. You’d probably rather have cheese than no cheese, but either way it’s not really gonna stop the bull. Every year things ‘we knew were true’ are proven wrong, and these are things we actually have done studies on. So can we really claim to have solid knowledge over such an undocumented field?
 
…now I really need to stop before a mod or the like fusses about going on long winded tangents XD

@M-DitzyDoo  
But there are more and less reasonable/likely ones…

I know I just try to make joke

@Cirrus Light  
Still waiting on that data showing time travel. For all we know what we consider a paradox, the universe doesn’t. The alternate universe theory, while philosophically attractive, has the same amount of hard data behind it as Starswirl’s spell. There’s just no point in saying one form is more correct than the other. It’s like trying to argue ‘best pony’, there is no objective answer XD

Parent of years parent of the years fos

@OneOverTwo  
*And the combination of quantum mechanics and general relativity imply that it might very well be possible. Only time and more science will tell whether it actually is possible or not, though. In the meantime, if you want to transcend time, you can always hop in the supermassive black hole in the center of the galaxy, Sagittarius A. You should even survive crossing the event horizon, for that one - which is where you’ll transcend the flow of time. Then a radial coordinate of space will be what you call “time”, though, and will always flow in one direction (towards the center of the black hole). Fun stuff.
 
iirc, you’ll even live for a few minutes after crossing the event horizon before tidal forces become lethal :q

@OneOverTwo  
Lol, yes. Special and General relativity - as well as common life - have already established those pretty solidly as reality, though (Relativity allows it at an accelerated rate in-between reference frames - common life establishes it pretty solidly at 1 second per second XP).
 
I’m not saying backwards time travel is possible, I’m saying if it’s possible, it’s very unlikely to be any kind other than parallel universe, since other kinds can invoke unresolvable paradoxes.
 
*Special relativity is the only way we can observe certain cosmic rays at the surface that otherwise wouldn’t make it (time dilation), and extremely well-established in particle accelerators, and even recorded on clocks in one experiment with a flown airplane. GR has been likewise confirmed, confirmed by radar signals shot around the solar system detecting gravitational time dilation causing the signals to take a bit longer than they should, and most of all - if GPS satellites didn’t take into account general relativistic time dilation from Earth’s gravity, then they’d be off by ~30,000 feet in one day. There are countless other confirmations, those are just the most striking ones.

@Cirrus Light  
Wouldn’t forwards only time travel also be paradox free?

@M-DitzyDoo  
We have observed and demonstrated the truth of special and general relativity, though, and those theories provide plenty of input on the discussion.
 
And yes, we can still rank the possibility of such things; because although just being self-consistent doesn’t imply that something is true, if something isn’t self-consistent, it can’t be true. Unresolvable paradoxes (such as the grandfather paradox) can’t be true, therefore it can’t work that way. “Banana peel” mechanisms offer some form of a solution, creating self-consistent time loops, but even in the context of time travel of this kind, you can still have unresolvable paradoxes (get a letter from yourself from the past, accidentally get a coffee stain on it, wait until the future, then mail it back to yourself. How old is the letter? How many coffee stains does it have?).
 
The only paradox-free form of time travel is one into parallel universes, parallel universes that are well precedented by the Everett many worlds’ interpretation of quantum mechanics.
 

 
There really isn’t a cop-out for saying that a few minutes of reasoning is on par with years of research…

@Cirrus Light  
We have data on physical phenomena such as the properties of planets and space though. We have zero data on time travel. Until someone can actually demonstrate proof behind their theory, no one theory is more valid than the other. Mankind has been wrong plenty of times with what was considered accepted science, and I’m sure it’s a trend that isn’t stopping anytime soon. In short, there’s never going to be a true theory of time travel till someone actually does it.

@SeraphimDawn  
I don’t know, but my guess would be  
A) It’s a different field of engineering, but still engineering, and  
B) Aerospace is a lot more difficult and intense and by-the-book, with all that entails.

@Cirrus Light  
How easily can an aerospace engineer get into the auto engineering industry?

@M-DitzyDoo  
Eeeeehhh, not really. An aerospace engineer, for example, will have a much better guess as to how going to Mars would work than a layman, so likewise a theoretical physicist who’s been researching closely related topics will probably be closer to reality than someone who’s only put in a few minutes of thought as opposed to years and years of careful research >.>

@Cirrus Light  
Honestly, it doesn’t matter how educated a guess it is when it’s still just a guess, so there isn’t a right answer on how time travel ‘should’ work. Don’t need to take it so seriously XD

@untraceablelarry  
“utterly absurd”  
Why is it that the last three people to disagree with me have used hyperbole to such an extent?
 
Actually, there are quite a number of different theories that invoke multiple universes. I’d suggest you read Brian Greene’s “The Hidden Reality” for a great overview of them. Inflationary cosmology, string theory, no-collapse interpretations of quantum mechanics, an infinite universe, etc. etc.
 
What’s particularly noteworthy is that the Everett Many Worlds’ interpretation would invoke parallel universes of the exact nature required for this kind of time travel.
 
And while time travel isn’t particularly likely, it’s not really unlikely, either.  
Here’s an overview of various methods that might be employed for time travel, as well as a good deal of commentary on them and related phenomenon, | a paper that makes some interesting discoveries about wormholes in the context of a higher-dimensional brane-bulk model, and a similar conclusion for warp drives in a brane-bulk model.
 

 
…Believe me, when I say that time travel is most likely to invoke parallel timelines, It’s a rather educated opinion.

@Keith Mowz  
In that case it would be a purely educational tool more or less I think. Which is actually a good use for time travel and really should be used more often in fiction.

IMO the only realistic time travel idea is a stable time loop that requires you to create both of the temporal anchor points. You can’t travel back into the past unless you made a point in the past to travel back to, and you can’t change the events that lead up to establishing the future travel point and traveling backwards in the first place. If it could be prevented, the only result would be that nothing would travel back to the established point, meaning that time travel would be largely useless for most purposes we like to use it for in fiction.

@M-DitzyDoo  

 
You could have everybody’s memories change, so that NTL Twilight raised Filly Starlight to adulthood and then vanished, one way or another (use this new reality anchor where necessary for the next few events). Starlight, distraught at the loss of her mother, researches time travel to see what happened. When OTL Twilight becomes an alicorn, news travels slowly (if at all, nobody ever seems to notice she’s a princess for some reason), so it takes Starlight a few years to hear about it. She doesn’t make the connection between “purple alicorn” and her mother, but in her research discovers that the Map can greatly amplify her time travel spell, and tries to break in, only to get caught by OTL Twilight and get submitted to friendship. Such friendship includes time travel shenanigans. When they finally get back to her origin story, she realizes it was OTL Twilight who was her mother all along, and many d’awws ensued. She then travels back to the present, determined to find out where NTL Twilight is, and embarks on a quest as the new Element of Magic with the Mane Five to search for her lost mother, resulting in much adventuring.