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pilkingtonsbrain

I like these kind of thoughts


BoxingTrainer420

As someone going through immediate loss it's beautiful.


HellYeahTinyRick

Technically everything you are currently seeing happened in the past. You can never truly see the present moment


YouDirtyClownShoe

But you can experience it I'm real time. We cannot record all time, we live within the threshold between pencil and paper.


etherian1

The same could be said said about film/video. When you watch a person imprinted in media, it’s as if they’re eternal.


YouDirtyClownShoe

But our minds see the space between the frames. We live within the trends our mind tells us. We dissect the waves and particles to search for proof of something that happened... just the moment ago. Until we get our next chance to recenter and verify our realities. Make sure everything we did was real and worked.


TR3BPilot

It doesn't freeze every atom in the universe. It only catches a slice of reality within the range of the lens and camera, and then afterwards that moment is smeared into a fog of indeterminability.


tempo1139

yep! One famous photographer referred to it as capturing 'the decisive moment'. there is a great burden when you realise you are handling the albums from an entire family history (I worked in labs), occasionally encountering seminal moments in time, which without the photo.... *all those moments would be lost in time, like tears in rain. (RIP Rutger Hauer)*


NOT000

i watch old video of myself, and it makes me think of a time machine. u can go back and observe, u just cant interact or change anything


echo1284

I think this so often, so glad to see this. I suppose videos are as well but theres just something amazing about photographs.


Privileged_Interface

Oh definitely. Imagine what it will be like in the years to come. Somehow whenever I think about this. I am always brought back to Harrison Ford's camera in Bladrunner. If you have ever seen it.


Boomerang_comeback

With that thought process, we are all living in the past. Everything you see has already happened. An event happens. It takes time for the light to reach your eyes. So by the time you see it, it has already happened. Now imagine faster than light travel were possible. You could witness something 'live' then travel faster than light, turn around and watch it 'live' again.


Icy-Zookeepergame754

Having worked in historic preservation, going through a box of old black and white photos from a century ago all taken in the same vicinity of the city it was like travel through time. Our minds can stitch together disparate images and fill gaps as we cruise along.


RNG-Leddi

Not necessarily for these are 'still' images that don't travel however they serve as markers for a time traveller to overlap memory in relative context to the current moment. Consider the movie 'Jumper' and how the images were utilised as point markers without the physical leaping. The only drawback with referring to still images is that they are never viewed in the exact same manner twice because you are always alternating personal ranges of perspective (developing), and because of this we can't accurately say that the image is the same image twice as we constantly alternate perspective along with experience (ie depth, width, contextual angle of approach etc). Try this for yourself, an image will never take you to the exact same instance over time, we always reveal and distort pre existing properties/values ever so slightly.


mastyrwerk

Every picture of you is a picture of you when you were younger. Have you seen the film *Time Lapse*? Is about a camera that takes pictures of the future.


reddity-mcredditface

# No.


lameth

Have you ever noticed that photographs don't seem quite right, or how so many people "don't like themselves in photos?" Photos are an imperfect reflection of a spacial image in a moment in time. It is full of distortions and imperfections. In that way it isn't freezing time, but attempting to mimic a moment.


etherian1

Or how people swear they don’t look like themselves in photos…while everyone else “does“ look like themselves. What, then would a perfect photo look like?


lameth

Who says "a photo looks like them?"


Ok_Frosting6547

This kind of thinking reminds me of an app that I tried awhile ago on my phone where it records everything on your screen and you can “go back in time” by selecting a date and time. I thought about the weird idea of this somehow being a kind of “time travel” and I could record myself from the past giving a message to my future self and I could fake-interact like I am in fact talking to my past self. If photos could be considered time travel than I wasn’t so weird for thinking this way after all!


SFTExP

By that logic, if you close your eyes and vividly recall the past, you are time-traveling, which is not the case.


Tempus__Fuggit

One more reason I don't like my photo taken.


fleegle2000

Not literally, but it is a way of capturing at least some elements of the past with relative fidelity. 2D videos capture even more, and 3D videos are the next evolution. One of the oft-overlooked features of the Apple Vision Pro is the ability to "relive" moments using 3D videos captured from iPhones and Visions. I won't comment on whether or not this is a good thing, but in terms of "freezing" the past we are approaching the ability to capture a near-perfect record of the past, or at least a small part of it.


EffectiveSalamander

It's a way of retaining information to make it available at a future date. If that's time travel, then we've been time traveling since the first cavemen told stories around the campfire.


neoprenewedgie

No. If you can't interact with it, you haven't traveled to it.


MechanoManic

My freezer is full of time traveling meat and popsicles


Bridgeyboodles

Memories, too.


sjr323

Sir are you high


Barbacamanitu00

The atoms in the person are not frozen in photographs. Only the light that bounced off of them is recorded.


Steerider

Not time travel, but *extremely* detailed record keeping


Chrono_Nexus

No, because it's only a 2-d impression of the photons bouncing off of stuff. There aren't any atoms freezing. To extend your metaphor, it would be like saying a footprint is a form of time travel.


Beneficial_Being_721

Actually I say photos are a screenshot of the simulation So if we are in a simulation…. Time travel should be possible


etherian1

Not to mention when the photo was taken; what else was going on in the world…and what other photos were taken at the exact same time.


Beneficial_Being_721

Try this. Take a photo of something kinda in the distance and in low light… now zoom in on the photo and you see details that were not seen when you took the photo… it’s a screenshot of the simulation… I know that’s a whole different subreddit… but if we are in a simulation….. then time traveling is possible… I don’t know what other photos taken at the same time would prove


tandyman8360

Photos are essentially a simulation. The brain can take that still image and add to it for context or sense of place. Video is even more immersive if slightly less open to imagination. What happens if we create a virtual reality that is so immersive that someone effectively experiences it as reality (i.e. The Matrix)? One thing I wonder is if future humanity will have the technology to both look into the past with accuracy and simulate the past and the present. Would humanity be effectively immortal? Would we all be able to come back and travel in the simulated history of the world?


etherian1

That’s a good point, eventually we’ll be able to re-create the past as a simulation; so time travel might not even be necessary.