"Are Ghosts Time Travellers From The Future?" Topic

I was reading a book that posited this possibility.

Since they can't be seen or communicate in any other way, they make themselves known by moving things around.

I suppose when they become destructive, it's as a result of becoming frustrated that no one is responding to them.

JW

Are Ghosts Time Travellers From The Future?

Only in "Day of the Daleks".

well…that wouldn't explain a lot of it. You would think that if a time traveller from the future would come to our time, why would they end up spending their time in the houses of Joe Schmoe, or in this case, a 43 year old mini gamer who is also an ACW reenactor, instead of recording "real" pertinent information.
Plus…I think time travellers from the future would be a lot smarter than doing things like stealing boxes of minis from my house….it makes me very unappreciative to them and their technology.

If ghosts are time travellers at all wouldn't it make more sense if they were from the past?

Ah, but if you travel far enough into the future it WILL be th past. At least that's what I do.

Mike, if ghosts are time travellers from the past, wouldn't we have read about them in our historical books So they have to be from the future, right?

Or not time travellers at all.

So – a few hundred years in the future, people pay big bucks to use the latest in quantum technology to transport themselves and a length of chain back in time to walk around in dusty deserted movie theatres and castles ?

Why ?

And are Greys what those future "humans" look like when they do materialize? :)

CC

"Ghosts" do not behave like travelers, they seem confused, angry, trapped, compulsive, etc. What little believable evidence we do have of their reality points to disembodied spirits, i.e. evidence for some kind of post mortal existence….

1066.us

Or non-human existence… that is promoted to some quasi-physical existence by the presence of a suitable 'viewer'.
If I were to believe in such things I'd be inclined to think ghosts/angels/fairies/'mystery' animals/UFOs… are all a manifestation of the same phenomena, and require the presence of a human in order to take place at all.

There are no ghosts, and there are no time travelers.

Time travel would be incredibly difficult, because you must travel in both time AND SPACE. The Earth is constantly spinning; it's constantly moving around the Sun; the Solar System is constantly moving through our Galaxy; and our Galaxy is constantly moving through the Universe.

Even if I were to travel back in time *1 second*, I would also have to travel in *space* or I'd wind up somewhere I wo9uldn't want to be.

Think about it – at the equator, the surface of the Earth is spinning at a little over 1000 miles per hour, or almost 1500 feet *per second*.

And the Earth is traveling around the Sun at 67,000 miles per hour, or almost 19 miles *per second*.

I don't recall the speed of the Solar System through the Galaxy, or of the Galaxy through the Universe, but they're huge numbers.

On top of all this, all of these speeds are in different planes.

And, on top of that, the surface of the Earth is constantly changing. Land rises and falls, or is submerged. An open field becomes a forest, and vice versa. A sea becomes a mountain, or a desert.

Even in modern times, what was once an open field might now be a skyscraper.

So, unless you make some extraordinarily precise calculations, odds are you'll wind up drifting in space somewhere when you make your jump.

Even if you manage to land on the Earth, unless there's some kind of "displacement sphere" as in the Terminator films, you're likely to wind up inside the Earth or a rock or a tree or a building. Imagine materializing in the middle of a swarm of gnats. Are those gnats now merged with your body? Even the atoms of the air would have to be pushed aside or somehow incorporated into your form.

The only plausible means of time travel would be using the time machine as a reference point in both space and time (0, 0, 0, 0), but many of the above risks and problems would still exist.

In short, I don't think we'll ever see time travel as it's depicted in fiction.

As for ghosts, some "theories" posit that they arise wherever there was great tragedy, or incredible stress, or whatever. Then surely there would be swarms of ghosts around the site of the World Trade Center. And what about the 150,000 tsunami victims?

The same goes for psychics – not a single psychic or astrologer predicted either 9/11 or the twunami. Oops!

I love how psychics open their place all day, instead of only when people are about to show up. You would think . . .

CC

Heh!

Do they look anything like this?

picture
picture

CC

No ghosts, no time travel, no complex theories needed. Unless you're talking about a pulp scenario or something.

Maybe they're disfuctional teenagers from the future who dress up in tricorn hats and bed sheets and then prance up and down in front of the superstitious primatives for a laugh.

Maybe all eras exist on a parellel plane so that we only die in our existing world and don't continue any further forward, but do continue to exist in a past that is visited by the future.

As far as where they wind up, it's possible it hasn't been perfected yet, which would explain their anger, frustration, etc.

You'd be ticked off, too, if you were aiming for Angelina's bedroom and wound up in Murphy's closet. :-)

jpattern: Well, people are occasionally found in out of the way places, like that guy who was found in the ice. Was that in the Italian Alps?

re ". . . they arise wherever there is a great tragedy . . . "

The first time I was at Gettysburg, I didn't have time to stop other than to see the electric map, but drove out on the road that fronts the Cemetary Hill line, about dusk on an August evening, and there was an eerie silence that gave a very chilling feeling. It was a feeling of total quiet with a whispering in the wind, when there wasn't any wind.

Almost all cemetaries give off this aura. What causes it, if not some remaining presence of the dead?

I've never been to the World Trade Center site, but I'd have to believe people who have been there get this same feeling.

JW

Rupertc

Why not? For a cheap thrill. I know I'd do it, if I could.

And on the off chance they did wind up in Angelina's bedrooom.

JW

"…there was an eerie silence that gave a very chilling feeling. It was a feeling of total quiet with a whispering in the wind, when there wasn't any wind. Almost all cemetaries give off this aura. What causes it, if not some remaining presence of the dead?"

It's purely subjective, Jack. Nothing gives us a sense of our own mortality like a cemetery. Don't confuse what you bring to the experience with the cemetery "giving off an aura." I could blindfold you and put you in an empty field, but tell you that it was a cemetery, and you'd feel the same thing.

Or, taking the opposite tack, most people who visit the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (The Wall) in DC feel the same hushed, reverent "aura", including me, yet no one is buried in or around the Memorial. It's "just" a bunch of names inscribed on a black wall; its power comes from the memories and the sense of comradeship and loss that *we* bring to the experience. (Thanks again to all those who served with honor in that war.)

I too have a hard time supporting ghosts or time travel.

Based upon the concept that time passing is no longera cocept of preception when you die, then you might have to support the notion that your next experince upon death would be judgement day. If you do not support that conception of time awareness ending then you beleif would differ.

I don't recall the speed of the Solar System through the Galaxy, or of the Galaxy through the Universe, but they're huge numbers.

Think of the entire universe as a bursting firework, or series of them (since there is probably more than one Big Bang in more than one place). If you could observe this happening in a matter of seconds, burst to oblivion, it would be possible to trace any given particle from its emergence to the point where it blinks out of existence. Each particle is a galaxy, and moving in on it you see the solar systems within each, and the individual planetary bodies and suns. Our own planet is part of "the BB", and has already traced a path at incredible speed from its point of emergence. One day, it will cease to be. Meanwhile, at any point along that path, a Time Traveler could insert himself, which implies total capability to enter and remove oneself from time (which has nothing whatsoever to do with the biological time of the traveler's body).

There's geisha assassin figure from Black Orc with a fan in one hand and a dagger in the other. Probably not quite what you wanted.

Wow, M the Mad this reminds me of the BS sessions we had in High School (usually after copious amounts of dope).

The problem with your analogy is that the firework flaming bits are expanding into pre-existing space. The expanding Universe has the space expanding too.

jpattern2 hits the nail on the head. If we build a time machine to go 1 second back in time we will have "whooshed" ourselves 19 miles away. If we try to go back much farther we end up off the planet. It's not that hard to understand.

Ralph

No no no. You're looking at this all wrong. You go in and out of TIME. When out, you are able to see the entire thing as an instant, or take as long as you please, i.e. slow it all down or speed it up. Can't you see that? The word "No" can be speeded up so that you don't register it at all with the human ear, or slowed down to span all eternity, and then it just forms part of the "background" (microwave) "white noise" filling the void of space. How long it takes to say the word "No" is all a function of TIME. Take yourself out of TIME and you are master of it, totally and eternally. Yet your own body has its own bioligical "clock" always ticking away. To the universe locked in TIME, you are immortal.

"No no no. You're looking at this all wrong."

Apparently.

"Can't you see that?"

Apparently not.

Ralph (who doesn't go IN or OUT of time but slides along WITH it)

"Take yourself out of TIME and you are master of it, totally and eternally."

Ah, I see, like DVR, or Tivo. Knowing my luck, I'd make a VHS time machine, and the Universe would run on Beta.

M the Mad, if you step OUT of TIME, you still need to know WHERE to step back IN, NOT just WHEN.

crhkrebs

But we're living in the computer age now. It'd be a simple enough calculation to determine earth's position at the time of transport and where it was at the time aimed for.

Come on guys, don't grow up on me. Where's that wide-eyed wonder? Would you agree if I let you pick Catherine Zeta Jones' bedroom, instead?

You'll see. The naysayers claimed we'd never fly, and now we've got the space shuttle and have landed probes on Mars.

Not to mention The Hub . . . well, I said I wouldn't mention it, didn't I?

JW

"Where's that wide-eyed wonder?"

Oh, I still have that. But I'm saving it for the year 2001, when we all have hovercars, or at least jetpacks.

:)

I think that ghosts are travellers from the future who refuse to show themselves in case we get some primitive impulse to eat them. And because we are so incredibly backward they can't find our restrooms which makes them pretty cranky because they have to walk all the way back to their hidden time ship everytime they have a full bladder. They do wonder why we have so many uncomfortable white porcelain chairs, with watery holes in them, stuffed into tiny smelly rooms though. Their historians assume that they must be of some religious significance.

Yes! They are THE time travelers:

link

And they can move ultra-fast while everyone else is almost standing still.

CC

See . . . its true!!!

"They find they are on the university grounds, but time is moving extremely slowly."
link

CC

They must have left something behind, 'cause these kids are now running around while the rest of us are standing still:

link

CC

M the Mad, if you step OUT of TIME, you still need to know WHERE to step back IN, NOT just WHEN.

Precisely. The two go together, in fact they are not TWO, but one and the same thing. "Where" = "When"….

Actually, ghosts are reenactors walking on battle fields near dusk. The "ghosts" look angry because some fool jumped out of a bush, scared the cr@p out of them, and snapped their picture with a bright flash. I don't have a clue how many ghost hunter scrap books my mug is in.

The house and street photos are just the result of having too many beers after the scare and wandering into the wrong house or having the wife kick me out for being too drunk….