Time absolutely must be infinite.

[alwaysthinking]

Hi, I know I don't post here much but I'm an intellectual and I have a few theories I think would spark a nice debate.

Time would either have to be finite, or infinite. Here's why finitite time is impossible.

1. If time were finite, there would have to be a beginning, but nothing can start from nothing, so if there was ever a state of pure nothingness, nothing would ever be. God could not be the first thing, god could not create himself from nothing, there would have to be something before that. If there was a god that cared about humans, he would have created humans to start with. He wouldn't have created something set to explode (The big bang) and then have waited billions of years before deciding to create humans, if he actually cared about humans. This is why it's stupid to think that he does.



So then how did everything start? Where did the thing before god start? It didn't. It's always been there. Physicality of space is constant, it never stops and will most likely never end. The universe constantly is expanding, and will start to condense again, and repeat.

So, if time is infinite, that would mean that there was an infinite amount of time before right now, so how do we get to right here?

This is true, because time is infinite, everything must happen at one point in time, this is why things happen. By those standards, nothing would ever happen. So the only real possibility is...

Everything must happen at once.

Now, I know a lot of you are probably sitting at your chair, laughing at this crazy lunatic who think he's solved this great manner. Hear me out though.

Everything happens at once, there are an infinite number of parallel universes, each at a different point in time in an interval so small, we cannot even comprehend it. Each universe represents a moment in time slightly more progressed than the next. If you understand what I'm trying to reach out to you guys, and you truly can comprehend what I'm saying, you can see how this not only is a possibility, but also the most likely possibility.

I hope you guys understand the message I'm trying to convey here. I'll be looking forward to the response.

[noobsensei]

Time is a dimension within our universe, and as such it was formed during the Big Bang just like everything else. At least, that's the current scientific understanding. It may be possible that other universes exist / have existed / will exist (the tenses get kinda weird) where time works completely differently than it does in our universe.

Mar 30, 2010 20:17:36 GMT -5 alwaysthinking said:

If time were finite, there would have to be a beginning, but nothing can start from nothing,

Why not? That's nothing more than an article of faith.

Mar 30, 2010 20:17:36 GMT -5 alwaysthinking said:

Everything happens at once, there are an infinite number of parallel universes, each at a different point in time in an interval so small, we cannot even comprehend it. Each universe represents a moment in time slightly more progressed than the next.

What you are describing is not a parallel universe, it's just a dimension within our universe like length or height.

[Ryan]

If we are talking about time being finite or infinite, we should not assume that should God exist that he has the same classification as time. If time is finite, god could be infinite.

To address the concern of time being infinite and somehow ending up at this point of time think of it like this. (MATH EXAMPLE!) If I were to ask you to draw the function y=x, would it not be infinite? At any point x you could tell me the value of y. Similarly, if I were to ask for a y value, you could tell me at which point x I could evaluate said value. If time is infinite it does not mean that we could never arrive at this point in time, it just means that there was a lot of time before it, and a lot of time to come after it.


Something else to consider is that time is relative. If you were to view the birth of our universe up until now from an outside perspective, then it would seem like a very very fast explosion that swept over what is now the universe as a giant wave. To us on earth, it took 13.75 billion years, but if you viewed it from outside the universe, it might seem like seconds.

I would venture to say that it is not reasonable to assume that time is finite. Give me any amount of time and I can increase it. Though it is also reasonable to assume that time started. For instance, the counting numbers (1, 2, 3 ...) are infinite, but they start at 1 Could there not as easily be a time 0?

[Ricky]

In all honesty I think trying to solve this issue for us is like a caveman trying to understand how an ipod produces music. He'll probably just think that there are tiny people living in the object... Its not that we are not smart enough to understand it, but rather that we don't yet have the tools to examine it.

[neilgdickson]

If I was asked for a guess, I'd guess that time is both infinite and finite, but we may not observe both.

Quantum physics hasn't yet (to my knowledge) been reconciled with the oddity that although observables can be indirectly found to be in two mutually exclusive states at the same time, when they are observed in the basis of those states, we perceive them to be in only one state or the other. It can be modelled as that we are becoming entangled with the observable, but it doesn't explain why we only experience one of the two realities instead of both at once.

It's conceivable that time could be both infinite and finite (in an infinite number of different senses), but we only happen to experience one format of time at the moment.

Of course, there's always the option that there's no such thing as time, or other people, or this website, or even myself... existence instead just being a phenomenon of the present experience subject to apparent past memories.