Unanswerable Questions?

I just watched an episode of Dora the Explorer with the babies. I think I am mentally scarred for life. For real. That show is REALLY weird. In today’s episode Dora and Boots had to find something that could scratch the Big Red Chicken’s itch. What they found was a magic stick that could do a trick. Lawd…I know my mind has been in the gutter WAY too long, but that’s just sick. *smh*
On Saturday, I took the kids to the movies. This is one of my favorite activities to do with them when we MUST do something indoors (yes, even with an active toddler…call me masochistic hehe). As long as he can hold the bag of popcorn, Donovan will sit through almost any movie for at least 85% of it, INCLUDING Harry Potter. Hehehehe.
So anyway. we went to see The Time Machine. I thought it was wonderful and quite entertaining. It had that “B” movie quality to it, but in a much grander and more superb special effects kind of way. And I love “B” movies. Sue me. =D I won’t spoil anything here for those of you who may be wanting to see it, but I do recommend it, especially for those who are science fiction fans, or have kids who are.
After the movie, on the walk home, the conversation with Gregory was quite thought-provoking. He asked a great many questions that, honestly, I hadn’t really thought about before, and had no way of answering. “Can we go back in time? What about to the future? If we went and changed the past or the future, would we have to stay there? What would happen if we met our past or future selves? Do you think the Moon could really break up like that and make it so humans couldn’t live on the Earth anymore? Do you think that if all the humans were extinct like the dinosaurs, that it’s even possible that another kind of human could really develop?” Mind you, this is an 8-year-old child, and this was only a 10-minute walk *shaking my head*.
So anyway, I didn’t really have any answers to like…any of those questions. LoL. He came up with some pretty good theories on his own, but of course he hasn’t had the benefit of quantum physics and the theory of relativity and all of that, and even though I have, I learned about them a loooooong time ago, and not really in any great depth or with much interest, so I am unequipped to teach it to him in the space of one evening.
Now, just thinking about it for myself without doing any kind of research, off the top of my cynical head I would say time travel is nearly impossible. But the fanciful dreamer part of me wants to believe otherwise. Although….would I REALLY want to go back in time? Or into the future? I can’t say for sure. Sometimes…it seems like it would be nice, if only to escape what my life is now. And that’s not the right reason to do something like that. So I just decided to do a little research on it. Partly to answer at least some of Gregory’s questions, and partly for my own curiosity. A few things I found were extremely compelling and interesting.
One of the more interesting (and more serious – most of the sites I found were full of tongue-in-cheek or fantastical or science fiction views) things I found was a paper on Time Travel and Interdimensional Voyages. It explains how the theory of relativity can be used to prove that time travel IS possible, citing documented facts such as the way time slows down the faster you are moving, and if we could just find a way to move fast enough, such as going faster than the speed of light or going through wormholes or time dilation, we could actually travel into the future. While a bit more tricky and paradox-ridden, and therefore more likely to be the truly impossible obstacle (in my opinion), travel into the past is not irrevocably ruled out, either.
“Einstein