Can Time Travel Reveal Tasks Before Completion?

mgsully
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About Me: I am not a physics student, but I do have a physics question.

Question: The question is, assuming it is possible to travel into the future: could it be possible to learn whether a task performed in the future had occurred before it had been performed?

Theory:
You are capable of sending a person ten minutes into the future to perform a given task. Normally you would have to wait ten minutes to see whether or not that task had been performed, right? However, if at the exact same time you sent a second person into the future, only this time it was nine minutes. When the second person saw that the task had been completed, they were to raise a flag above their head. The second person sent nine minutes would only have to wait one minute to see if the task had been completed and thus, we would only have to wait nine minutes to see if the second person sent had confirmed that the task done by the person sent one minute farther into the future had been done.

Carrying this onward, let's send another person eight minutes into the future, and a forth seven minutes, and so on. With ten people sent into the future, each a minute apart, but each sent at the exact same time. Would not each person be waiting the same, single minute to see what the person sent one minute farther in time was doing? Therefor, would we only have to wait one minute to see if the person sent one minute into the future had a flag raised over there head, since they only waited the same, single minute to see if the person sent one minute farther into the future had done the same, and so on?

Theoretically, we could learn shortly after one minute whether or not a task performed nine minutes later had been completed.
 
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mgsully said:
The second person sent nine minutes would only have to wait one minute to see if the task had been completed and thus, we would only have to wait nine minutes to see if the second person sent had confirmed that the task done by the person sent one minute farther into the future had been done.

This is where your mistake is. You forgot to add the 1-minute.
Thus, 9+1=10
 
Yeah, it later occurred to me that even though they were each only waiting one minute, and waiting that one minute at the exact same time, that they were different minutes - each sequentially spread apart, consecutively across a ten minute period of time...

Thank though.
 
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