In Star Trek they say space it the final frontier, but should that not be time.

I suppose that`s hinted at in The Undiscovered Country (Star Trek Movie number ?).
Then again, if we do master time and space there is bound to be another frontier. Perhaps Infinity! ?
And then what`s after that?

"To Infinity and Beyond" (Buzz Lightyear"

terry : I suppose that`s hinted at in The Undiscovered Country (Star Trek Movie number ?). Then again, if we do master time and space there is bound to be another frontier. Perhaps Infinity! ? And then what`s after that?

There's always the other great mystery of the universe. Women!  - Doc Brown (Back to the Future)

"You are about to go were everyone has gone before" - Commander  Ivanova (Babylon 5)

zaphod : There's always the other great mystery of the universe. Women!  - Doc Brown (Back to the Future)

Reminds me of a joke I read.
A man is walking on a beach one day when God suddenly appears before him. God says "you have been such a good and selfless person all your life and so I will grant you one wish."
The man thinks for a moment and says "God, I have always wanted to visit Greece but I have this dreadful fear of flying which has prevented me, as you must know. My wish is that you would build a bridge from here to Greece that I may drive there."
God replies,"My son, that is very selfish. Think of all the steel and concrete that would be required and the impact that would have on the environment. Surely you must have a wish less selfish?"
"Please forgive me, Lord" says the man. "God, I have thought again and I would ask that you grant me one wish.
"Please could you help me to understand my wife. To know when she is sad and the right words to speak to comfort her. To know when to hold her close to me and when to give her solitude if she so desires. Help me to know how I may make her happy."

"Right", says God, "This bridge you wanted, how many lanes,...?"

Okay, forget the joke,..though I thought it was funny...
Getting back on subject; there was an article in Saturdays (5/5/07) Daily Mail regarding future sight, or pre-cognition, that reminded me of experiments conducted that SEEM to indicate the intrusion of future into the past. Simply put the experiment was this.
Volunteers are wired to detect stress or lack of stress while being shown images on a screen. Some images are pleasant, some less so while others are disturbing, i.e. stressful. The important thing to remember is that the images are displayed totally at random. It seems that people display signs of stress upon seeing the disturbing images up to three seconds before they are shown. By all accounts this experiment has been duplicated time and again and in varying formats with the same results reported.
The article then mentioned that MOST models of our Universe work with a reverse flow of time.
Personally, I don`t feel I can subscribe to the idea of physical time-travel (though I would be a fool to write it off) or the idea of an ever branching Multi-verse (where every possible option happens (maybe I`m too small minded)) nor a state of time that can be wound forward or backward like a tape cassette, but I do believe in pre-cognition.
It seems by the lack of response on this subject that people are either unwilling or uninterested in Time travel except where it remains in the realm of fiction. Is this so?
Personally I find the subject even more fascinating than the idea of travel between the stars and the possible exchange/interaction between ourselves and alien cultures.

like in red dwarf. when time goes backwards. or like the wine in Discworld when you get the hangover before you drinck the wine.

I`ve not read the discworld books but it sounds a good idea. Do they have a lower rate of alcoholism on that planet?

I'm highly dubious (at least in regard to this experiment!), I'd want to know more about the control to show that the anticipation of something nasty wasn't quite well grounded!
If causality works in both directions, you'd expect to see examples of it outside the lab. Let's tote up the strong and weak examples.

Things which highly suggest pre-cognition
Fortune telling
Prophesy

Things which may suggest pre-cognition
Chicken sexing
Deja vu
Premonition/premonitiative dream

I`d first heard about this experiment a couple of years ago on a TV documentary.
As best as I can remember details, volunteers were wired to something pretty much like a lie detector. They were then asked to watch a computer screen. A succession of images were shown for a few seconds each. Apparently, the machine registered the stress levels of the volunteers` up to a couple of seconds before really distressing images were shown. More than that I don`t know, other than the newspaper article which claimed that the experiment has since been reproduced many times by many other parties with startlingly similar results even in varying formats.
On the topic of experiments; I remember being told that there was a documentary about a cat (not schroedingers`) which at birth was placed in an environment of black and white vertical stripes.After several months(?) in this environment objects with black and white horizontal stripes were introduced and the cat seemed unable to percieve them, or so I am told.
Does anyone know anything about this or was I spun a yarn?

This sounds like a very common thought experiment in philosophy, which is replete with people being raised in boxes or in isolation to certain experiences of knowledge. I don't believe it. Ignorance of horizontal stripes wouldn't effectively render the victim brain damaged or sensory learned deficient. Having said that, cat's eyes are not human and their perceptions are geared more to scurrying things they can pounce on.

To be honest I quite doubted the source (my brother) but thought he may have misconstrued what he had seen. I wondered however that there was such an experiment but more complex. Never mind!

What about if some one was told that the colour green is called red, and the colour red is called green all his life. It would not change his sense of perception, but his life would be short lived when he drove thru the first set of traffic lights at a busy intersection.

That depends on whether they'd been taught to stop on "green" and go on "red".

Incidentally, this is very close to the classic thought experiment of grue. Grue is defined as a colour which is green until it is suddenly blue, or green when examined before time X and blue when examined after time X. Conversely, breen is blue before time X and green after time X.

So what, you might respond. Simply this; induction works on the principal that all known members of a group exhibit a certian characteristic, however grue and bleen items would appear to demonstrate that induction is wrong (not that the induction that emeralds must be green rather than grue, rather that induction itself is spurious).

If that's not enough, there is also such a thing as philosophy of colour!

Martin : That depends on whether they'd been taught to stop on "green" and go on "red".

Why anyone would say go on red (unless they are a New York Taxi driver)?

As per your observation, regardless of whether they called it "red" or "green" ("or "grue"), they'd have been taught to go on the colour we call green. Or not.

I am trying to say they have been taught to go on green , but they see the red light and they believe it is green so they go and not stop.
Red is red but when we do not speak the same language (or culture) our meanings are not the same trouble occurs. Internationally it can lead to war, at traffic lights it means injury or death.
This would be even worse with aliens, as their language, beliefs, religions and terms of reference would be totally different to us that there maybe no common ground for us to work with.
What they may considered humane (to use our term) we might consider cruel or sick.
We are having these problems amongst ourselves, mainly at the international level but also all the way down to locally.
Sorry I am getting too preachy. But communication between beings is always on my mind. I will usually try to see other peoples side, or even be devils advocate (even if I don't agree), but it is how I try to understand the situation.

personally, I think communication with any species is an interesting task.  not only language is a barrier, but also social structures, local beliefs and more importantly mindsets are all factors.

Mind you, it's at the forefront of my mind at the moment because I'm in the middle of reading "Stranger in a Strange Land" by Robert Heinlein.  Very political, yet interesting in it's portrayal of the communications barriers people have encountered within their own cultures let alone an alien species.  Heck, trying to get 2 people to believe exactly the same thing is next to impossible.

Back to time travel.
Many people say time travel can not be as there is no evidence of time travelers being here.
I say that there could be time travelers have been here, as for evidence, those who wrote the history, might not have known they were travelers, or ignored them and took credit for themselves, or who is say that the people involved were not the travelers them self.
As for the changes they made effecting their future, they might find out that they created their future and they had to come back to fulfill it (as Sinclair in B5 going back 1000 years to become the Minbari leader in the last shadow war).
The physicist Stephen hawking now believes that time travel is possible, but that it would take more power that the entire world can and has ever generated to do this. The time lords created a black hole (the 3 Doctors story) to created the power source for time travel.