Time Travel Is Possible: How to Send a Message to the Past

[C C]

http://www.theepochtimes.com/n3/1037968-...-the-past/

EXCERPT: ...If one day a time machine is built based on Dr. Mallett’s design, what may happen when the switch is flipped? A message from the future could instantly appear.

The time machine would only be able to send information along the timeline from when the machine is first turned on until when it is turned off. So, if it stays on for 100 years, binary messages could be sent to any time within those 100 years. Someone from the future may know that the machine will be activated on a given date and send a message through to that time.

In a BBC-Discovery Channel documentary featuring Dr. Mallett’s work, the narrator said that with time travel, “At stake is nothing less than what it means to be a human being.”

If we could go back in time and fix all the suffering of the world, if we could go back and prevent the bad things that happen in our lives, what would that do for personal growth and wisdom? How would our society change?...

[Yazata]

I'm not totally convinced that pastward time travel is impossible. (Futureward time travel is something we seemingly can't help doing.)

Those who argue that pastward time travel is impossible typically cite the time-travel paradoxes, insisting that logical contradictions are impossible in principle. (Hawking has made that argument, I believe.)

But I'm inclined to wonder whether these difficulties are really logical paradoxes, or whether they are more along the line of causal anomalies.

If I time-travel into the past and murder my father so that I'm never born, we have an individual (me) appearing from out of nowhere, insisting he's a time traveler from a future that is subsequently observed to never happen, and commits the murder. The difficulty there is in providing a causal explanation for my inexplicable appearance, for my genetic relationship to the man I killed, and so on.

Even if we choose not to resort to the old science fiction idea of alternative time-lines (which don't seem impossible in principle), I still don't see what's paradoxical about this situation. Inexplicable perhaps, events happening with no preceeding causation perhaps, but paradoxical?