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In reply to the discussion: If Time Travel Is Possible, How Is It That We Haven't Met Any Time Travelers? [View all]hunter
(38,310 posts)In other words, "now" shapes both the future and the past, and neither is any place you can visit.
You are free to change either the future or the past, but so is every other little bit of matter-energy in the universe, and this all collapses into a consensus of "now" which is the only thing that actually exists. There are probable pasts, and probable futures, but there isn't any "there" in the past or future to go to.
Wherever you are going, here you are, and wherever you've been, here you are. From our forward leaning cultural perspective which models the past as something immutable, an anchor of sorts in an incomprehensibly fluid universe, we say "Wherever you go, there you are."
This is a consequence of all things being energy. Energy doesn't experience time. You are energy, everything is energy, and it's all moving at the speed of light, which is the only "speed" of anything, no slower, no faster. What we see as energy, and what we see as mass, is all about perspective and relativity. The three dimensional universe + time we perceive is not the canvas upon which this universe is written.
Our perspective is a consequence of our genes and our evolution. There's no reason for minds like ours to comprehend anything not directly related to the propagation of our genes. Most of us have minds flexible enough to get beyond the simple model of a flat earth and a dome of the heavens; we can understand that the earth is spherical, and our planet is orbiting the sun, which orbits the central mass of the galaxy, etc., etc., etc. with all sorts of complications. But it's incredibly difficult for us to grasp non-intuitive things like how all the math of quantum physics, Special Relativity, Maxwell's Equations, etc., etc., fits together. There are various models of the universe, some better than others, but still no "Universal Theory of Everything," which may be beyond minds like ours for the simple reason that the universe is very big and we are very small.