The Future

What's going to happen. The notion of the future is predicated upon the idea that we cannot receive information from things that have not happened yet. The converse of this is that if we have not received information of it, it has not yet happened (no evidence to say it has, after all) Since information cannot travel faster than light, any information that would have to travel faster than light to reach me right now is part of my future. Therefore, what specifically constitutes the future is partially local: What is in the future for one location is in the past for another. This rejection of the Newtonian notion of AbsoluteTime is why Einstein's theories are called Relativistic.

Causality is another part of our conception of the future: If A causes B, B cannot happen before A, so B is in A's future. If time travel is possible, time travel being defined as information being able to travel faster than the speed of light in a vacuum, paradoxes are trivial: A causes B which causes C which prevents A, which means B is prevented, which means C is prevented, which means A happens, etc. (the GrandfatherParadox). The paradoxes are resolved by positing the ChronologicalProtectionConjecture?, first enunciated by Hawking, which, briefly, states that the Universe will not allow illogical things to occur, such as violations of causality. If that is posited, time travel cannot create paradoxes.

Some perceptions of time do not include a future. Various religions include notions of cyclical time, where everything happens over and over again in an endless circle, or simply propose that time is illusory (as the Hopi do) and that everything happens at once. The TimeArrow?, where the Future, Present, and Past are all clearly defined concepts, is a Western idea strongly tied to notions of Progress and Fate.

CategoryTime CategoryFuture