I was thinking about time travel this weekend. So. Assume it is theoretically possible to go back in time, for some reason like retaking an exam you failed earlier in the school semester. So post-exam you goes back with your superior knowledge and retakes the exam, and pulls of a passing grade. Good.
Now here's the problem. Even if you directly return to the time you came from, your cells will still have aged a number of hours more than every single other person, and possibly shortening your lifespan in relation to theirs if you go back to redo things often enough. If the time travel machine were to reverse your cellular aging as a part of it's function and prevent this abnormal aging, it would also be reversing neuronal growth, dendritic alterations, and long term potentiation and depression. Hence everything that is responsible for memory formation would be reversed and it would be like the whole thing never happened.
So even if time travel were physically possible, scientists would have to be pretty tricky to find a way around this hypothetical issue. May as well pry the secret of immortality out of the trees first.
Grey Dragon · Sat Jan 14, 2006 @ 05:13pm · 0 Comments |