• Question: will it be possible to time travel in the future, or live forever like a vampire?

    Asked by alipali to Ben, Clare, Ezzy, Mario, Sam on 14 Mar 2012. This question was also asked by sammy1, chloe1999, cherryboop.
    • Photo: Elizabeth Pearson

      Elizabeth Pearson answered on 13 Mar 2012:

      Time travel – most unlikely. We might be able to send a particle back, but send a whole person? I doubt it.

      Live forever – again, unlikely. We can stretch out our life spans and improve the length of how long we’re useful. They recently found a jellyfish that can live forever unless it gets killed, but theire much simpler than humans. There’s too much in us to maintiain. I wouldn’t want to live for ever anyway. It would get very boring.

    • Photo: Sam Vinko

      Sam Vinko answered on 13 Mar 2012:

      Remember that we, as living beings, travel through time all of our life! Nothing too strange about that actually, but you were born in the past and some day will die on a day that will be in the future from when you were born.

      As for living forever, I assume you mean not dying of old age. I’m confident we’ll crack that one sooner or later. We don’t know of any intrinsic life-limit for an organism which regenerates – there are some plants which are estimated to be ~100000 years old. Whether this is actually a good idea is another question as we’d run out of space quickly on earth …

    • Photo: Mario Campanelli

      Mario Campanelli answered on 14 Mar 2012:

      no way on both, the first because of the laws of physics, the second because our body was not made for that.

    • Photo: Clare Burrage

      Clare Burrage answered on 18 Mar 2012:

      Time travel isn’t possible, physics seems to have a built in self defense mechanisim which stops anything from traveling back into its own past.
      I don’t think that it’s possible to live forever either. There’s a law in physics that says that in the end everything wants to break down and turn into chaos and disorder (this is the second law of thermodynamics). This is what happens when you die, the finely tuned and complicated organs in your body start to break down and stop working. I don’t think we’ll ever be able to find away around this law in order to live for ever.

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