How would a Heim- theory drive actually behave?

[NoXion]

With regards to time travel, I was under the impression that stuff like the Self-Consistency Principle merely prevented stuff like killing your own grandfather, not necessarily time travel itself. You can't kill your own grandfather because you're already alive, but you can shake his hand because doing so doesn't interfere with your birth. And contrary to the hoary old saw "stepping on an ant will make the Nazis win WWII" or whatever, any action you do undertake will not alter the timeline (minor effects such you being in the wrong time will be cancelled out by the general "noise" of events), and your presence in the past may in fact fulfil it. Why don't we see evidence of time travel in the past? For the same reason one can't phone someone else without a telephone line - nobody's built one yet. I'm pretty sure that once the first time machine is constructed (if it's at all possible), the first thing that'll happen is that we'll be entertaining guests from the future.

Of course, all the above is based on various assumptions that may, in fact, be utterly wrong. I'm willing to be corrected.

[Ryan Thunder]

With regards to time travel, I was under the impression that stuff like the Self-Consistency Principle merely prevented stuff like killing your own grandfather, not necessarily time travel itself. You can't kill your own grandfather because you're already alive, but you can shake his hand because doing so doesn't interfere with your birth. And contrary to the hoary old saw "stepping on an ant will make the Nazis win WWII" or whatever, any action you do undertake will not alter the timeline (minor effects such you being in the wrong time will be cancelled out by the general "noise" of events), and your presence in the past may in fact fulfil it. Why don't we see evidence of time travel in the past? For the same reason one can't phone someone else without a telephone line - nobody's built one yet. I'm pretty sure that once the first time machine is constructed (if it's at all possible), the first thing that'll happen is that we'll be entertaining guests from the future.

Of course, all the above is based on various assumptions that may, in fact, be utterly wrong. I'm willing to be corrected.

Yes. If you view all the universe as a coordinate system and time as its 4th dimension, then the future already exists. However, like 2-dimensional beings attempting to grasp a 3-dimensional universe, we can't directly detect anything out of our own "plane" if you will.

Hence, if time machines are possible or are ever built, then they exist concurrently with us. There's no point at which we can "develop" them and then begin to see their effects.