Lifeboat Foundation

Granted, we’re not very good at it. We’re only moving in one direction at a fixed rate — but we’re never in the same moment twice. And while time’s arrow seemingly puts spacetime second helpings out of reach, humans have a habit of breaking the rules.

What if we could do an about-face and discover what came before? Or push past our present pace to see what comes next? Astrophysicist Ron Mallett from the University of Connecticut says he’s got the theoretical receipts to take on time travel.

Wondering how to build a time machine? It takes just 4e²Q=X easy steps! Simple, right?

Time travel movies have different rules about what happens when you start messing around with the timeline. If you’ve ever wondered which ones make the most sense, we may now have an answer. According to experiments using a quantum time travel simulator, reality is more or less “self-healing,” so changes made to the past won’t drastically alter the future you came from – at least, in the quantum realm.

The classic Back to the Future rules of time travel say that whatever you change in the past can have huge effects on the future. That’s why Marty McFly can almost erase his own existence by accidentally stopping his parents from meeting, and why Biff Tannen can get rich by giving his younger self a book of sports scores to bet on.

Other movies handle things differently. In Avengers: Endgame, the superheroes travel back in time to steal versions of the Infinity Stones out of different time periods to revive their fallen friends (look, it doesn’t make much sense unless you’ve seen all 20-something movies). Anyway, they can dabble in the past without ruining the future because the universe has a knack for correcting those paradoxes so that both versions of events did happen.

Here’s the story – our protagonist rewinds history, locates baby Hitler, and averts global war by putting him on a path to peace … but, oh noes! This sets off a domino chain of events that stops our hero from being born, or worse, kicks off the apocalypse.

Unintended ‘butterfly effect’-style consequences of time travel might be a juicy problem in science fiction, but physicists now have reason to believe in a quantum landscape, tweaking history in this way shouldn’t be a major problem.

Since going back to a previous moment in time is still in the ‘too hard’ basket, a pair of physicists from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the US went with the next best thing and created a simulation using an IBM-Q quantum computer.

Reviving a Pleistocene Plant

Thanks Kim K.

A real little time traveler.

Continue reading “Scientists Revive 32,000-Year-Old Plant Right Out of the Pleistocene” »

Circa 2017

Einstein-Rosen or “ER” bridges, are equivalent to entangled quantum particles, also known as Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen or “EPR” pairs. The quantum connection between wormholes prevents their collapse without involving exotic matter.

The quantum-teleportation format precludes using these traversable wormholes as time machines. Anything that goes through the wormhole has to wait for Alice’s message to travel to Bob in the outside universe before it can exit Bob’s black hole, so the wormhole doesn’t offer any superluminal boost that could be exploited for time travel.

Continue reading “Teleportation and traversible wormholes are all real” »

Imagine then, the emancipatory potential of genome editing for these millions.

Realizing this potential, however, will require that genome editing meet with societal approval. The typical response right now when you talk to someone about genetic engineering or reproductive technology is a reference to ‘designer babies,’ eugenics, Nazism, and other evils. These arguments have a very powerful emotional hold over many people, but in my opinion, they simply don’t stand up to scrutiny.

Continue reading “Embrace human genome editing” »

Circa 2013

In a feat of “molecular time travel,” the researchers resurrected and analyzed the functions of the ancestors of genes that play key roles in modern human reproduction, development, immunity and cancer. By re-creating the same DNA changes that occurred during those genes’ ancient history, the team showed that two mutations set the stage for hormones like estrogen, testosterone and cortisol to take on their crucial present-day roles.

“Changes in just two letters of the genetic code in our deep evolutionary past caused a massive shift in the function of one protein and set in motion the evolution of our present-day hormonal and reproductive systems,” said Joe Thornton, PhD, professor of human genetics and ecology & evolution at the University of Chicago, who led the study.

“If those two mutations had not happened, our bodies today would have to use different mechanisms to regulate pregnancy, libido, the response to stress, kidney function, inflammation, and the development of male and female characteristics at puberty,” Thornton said.

If you were to travel back in time to kill your grandparents — let’s ignore the ‘why’ here, for the sake of argument — you would never have been born. Which means there was nobody to kill your grandparents. Which means you were actually born after all, which… hold up, what’s going on here?!

These kinds of brain-breaking paradoxes have been puzzling us forever, inspiring stories ranging from “Back to the Future” to “Hot Tub Time Machine.”

Now, New Scientist reports that physicists Barak Shoshany and Jacob Hauser from the Perimeter Institute in Canada have come up with an apparent solution to these types of paradoxes that requires a very large — but not necessarily infinite — number of parallel universes.

O.,o.

The Red Angel was an entity sought by both Starfleet and Section 31 in relation to a series of mysterious red bursts that occurred in the late 2250s. The crew of the USS Discovery adopted the term “Red Angel” from Spock, who had encountered her during his youth. ( DIS : “ Point of Light ”, ” An Obol for Charon ”)

While Starfleet could not link its appearance to any known winged or avian lifeforms in the Federation, it became gradually clear that the Red Angel was a time traveler operating a suit developed under the Daedalus Project by Section 31. It was ultimately discovered that the Angel was in fact two separate entities wearing different time-travel suits, and their identities were later determined to be Gabrielle Burnham and a future version of her daughter Michael. The former had attempted to prevent Control from taking over the galaxy, while the latter set the red bursts in order to guide Discovery’s mission in a way conducive to defeating Control. ( DIS : ” An Obol for Charon ”, ” The Red Angel ”, ” Such Sweet Sorrow, Part 2 ”)