What i don't get is that the Dr seams to dislike being the only one, so why doesn't he go back to a time before he's species was wiped out?

I asked this in another thread. I don't think I got an answer.

I wondered also why, in the episode where Rose arrives home a year too late, they didn't go back a year.

Maybe some 'Whovian' can give us a good reason for this.

ok after reading this im going to go to bed, im baffled.

Time travel : Cant happen, well atleast not yet anyway lol

I thought Dalek invason of earth was supposed to be 2000 because that's what the announcers says on the original trailer on the DVD.

I think it's because by the time he had realised, she had already ran into her mum who reacted as if she had been away for a year. They couldn't then go back in time because they already knew that she wasn't there for that year. If they'd realised straight away they would have been able to.

That's just my theory though.

The reason that they never went (came) back to 2005, was because 2006 was where Rose was meant to be - she had been away for a year, it just didn't seem like it.

If they had gone back to 2005, then Rose would have been in the wrong place.

That's my theory, and if it makes no sense at all, please look at the time I posted this at (just waiting for the anti-spyware to finish :sleep: ).

The possibility of time travel is interesting isn't it. Ken Campbell the actor and inveterate follower of the slightly weird and definately wonderful told the story of a bunch of Italians he had met who claimed to actually be travelling in time.

Ken decided to take them to meet an oxbridge time travel expert whose name escapes me. According to Ken the Italians and the boffin got on like a house on fire and in parting Ken asked the professor what the chances were that these guys were actually travelling in time. "Around 40%" was the answer, to which Ken replied "but that's quite high isn't it?". The boffins reposte was that "the universe is way weirder than you think".

In the end how can we as creatures who perceive time as flowing in a single direction ever notice if something changes before or after we reach that point in time.

The universe in which I didn't write this reply because it's 4:55 am is likely to be only slightly different from this one. The universe where Hitler was a woman, Hoover wasn't a transvestite or Tony Blair didn't lie to take the country to war is likely to seem as contiguous to it's inhabitants as any other.

It seems like surfing a wave and only being able to see the part of the wave on which the board currently is.

time travellers can't interfere in tbeir own history, which is why the doctor can't save gallifrey and couldn't take rose back once her mum knew she was back.

It's also why the Doctor couldn't go back to save Adric when he was killed.

But this Rose going to 2006 and missing a year, the Doctor says he took her to the wrong date in time. Surely that would mean if he took her back to the correct time, the day she left she wouldnt be missing in the future.

So the way the Doctor spoke was as if there is only one timeline.

The Tardis has got a mind of it's own. The Doctor may have fallen through time but into a different timeline than his own. Hence all the confusion.
And as a rule Time Lords are not allowed to change history or go back to their home planet in the past to change things, though the Doctor tends to bend the rules a bit.

This is what I thought, that the TARDIS had a life of its own and the Doctor had no control over it. Did it get fixed? He seems to have more control over it now, or maybe Im wrong. I actually used to like the idea that they didnt know where they would end up and had that screen which could look outside.

I also think the series so far has been too earth focused. I believe its Earth again next Saturday.

Yes, but time is different to space. Space is a somewhere that you can travel to. Time is not a somewhere that you can travel to.

If you're going to travel back in time, where are you going to travel to? Yesterday no longer exists, so you can't travel there.

If you're going to travel forward in time, where are you going to travel to? Tomorrow doesn't yet exist, so you can't travel there either.

Yesterday does exist! I was there!

OK, I'm playing devil's advocate here a bit but nobody really knows what scientific advances lie ahead. A hundred years ago, who could have predicted television, the internet or pocket computers?

We have a very definite idea of how time works - what if it turns out we've always been wrong? Many of the science facts of today were science fiction many years ago.

Never say never!

You can travel into the future - we all do it all the time! Using a time machine would just mean speeding up the process. A time machine could work like this: say I travel forward a day in time, it's basically like I stopped existing for 24 hours then started existing again, like I'd been in stasis. Given this it would explain why Rose wouldn't be able to meet herself in 2012 - she hasn't been existing for the 7 years in between travelling forward from 2005 and arriving in 2012. The last time anyone would have seen her was when she disappeared in the Tardis in 2005.

I said it "no longer exists", not that it didn't exist


We don't have all that good an idea. I wish we did!


And many things from the science fiction of yore have also been completely wrong. Remember space 1999?

Time travel isn't like pocket computers, or television, powered flight, or space travel. It implies that the past and the future have an existence independent of the present.

Perhaps they do, but there are consequences if this is the case.

Example 1: If the past has an existence independent of the present, your present self must be independent from each and every one of your past selves. If that's the case, then how can time be shown to pass?

Example 2: If the future has an existence independent of the present, nobody has free will. The future already exists, and our only function is to live into it. So where does the 'illusion' of free will come from?

Yes, very good.


Technically (and in theory), you could do this if you could travel close to the speed of light. The ship and everything in it experences time at a much slower rate than everything outside of (i.e. not traveling at close to the speed of light).

If you were to fly off into space and return to Earth some time later, you'd have experienced less time passing than people on Earth. As a result, and from their perspective, you'd have travelled into the future.

Good luck finding a way back to the 'present' tho!

Of course that argument fails when you consider that just a few weeks ago she was well into the future. For most of that time she obviously didn't exist, but as she was around in some of the intervening years (2006 and 2012) then there is nothing saying that she doesn't go back to 2006 and have dinner with her mum that same evening she left.

I think it is quite possible that she was around in 2012 as per normal, but just didn't happen to be 50 floors down in a bunker in the US. Seeing as she knows she didn't meet her future self in 2012, she isn't going to then go back and try to meet her past self when she is finally really in 2012 because she knows it never happened.

If time travel can exist then I favour the theory that there is only a single timeline. It is impossible to make changes to the past even if you try because the future you will always have existed in the past. Of course this leads to all sorts of paradoxes. If you knew event A was going to happen and you deliberately tried to make it happen differently, then it all goes a bit strange because that is not possible. 12 Monkeys had it right

Of course the whole John Titor concept is quite plausable too, so I won't discount it.

But what I don't understand is, if when Rose 'disappeard' for a year she'd only been gone for a few hours, is she actually now a year younger than her mother believes her to be? And if so, does this meen she could go off 'teraveling' for say 30 years or so and when she got back she'd be middle aged but it would appear to her mother that she'd only been gone a few moments? And what really amazes me is that I actually give a crap!

LOL Its these type of questions that make me love Doctor Who.

Thats an interesting question you ask, does Rose age? I believe that if Rose was dropped off in 2006, she could go to 2030 and see herself older if she bumped into herself so to speak.

But then would the Rose of 2030 have the memory that the Rose of 2005 bumps into her. If that makes sense.

But I recall when Rose's mum asked how long she would be gone she said a few minutes.

It doesn't make sense to travel into the future and meet yourself, a la Back to the Future II. Say I travel forward 20 years, there I am 20 years older... ok what if it's just 10 years, 1 year or a month? Do I meet versions of myself 10 years, 1 year of a month older than me respectively? I reckon not, because imagine I just travel forward 5 seconds, will I meet a version of myself 5 seconds older? If so, when did this version of me appear to greet me?

I say if Rose travels forward in time one year then she's missing until she arrives. And of course she'll be a year younger than everyone expects her to be, otherwise she couldn't travel to the year 5 billion without crumbling to dust.

The theory of there only being one time line does take away free will a bit - doesn't matter what I do with my time machine things will turn out the same anyway.

Actually, there's a "cheap" form of time travel into the future, it's called hibernation. Going back into the past is the tricky/fantasy bit!

K

As to why the Dr doesn't save his own people, the fact that they were wiped out by the so-called 'Time Wars' suggests they were destroyed in a particular way. Perhaps the whole race was erased from history, as was the Darleks. That's why he was so suprised to see the Darlek in 2012. Otherwise why not see a Darlek in another period of history - all it would need was a time-travelling machine.

If once you meet your future self you then go back to the time when you first left and live your life like normal, then yeah of course.


It depends when you come back. If you travel into the future 5 seconds and then meet your future self and then travel back in time a few seconds and meet your past self then yes.


Assuming the possibility of time travel, then you have to consider time as not being linear. As far as Rose is concerned she is only going to be a couple of weeks older than when she first met the Doctor.

From an external point of view billions of years will have passed between Rose getting into the TARDIS and it disappearing in 2005 and the TARDIS appearing and her getting out at the end of the world. From an internal point of view a few minutes have passed.


Free will is an interesting idea. Everything that goes on in your head comes from your thoughts, but are you consciously able to control which thoughts do or do not enter your head? I'm not sure.

But you've got to go back before you can meet yourself, not the other way round!