So I’d have already seen my self travel back in time and am just repeating what’s already happened. Which would mean I’d have already seen my current self in advance and am now just experiencing the same event from the other way around?
Maybe you did… you just didn’t know it was you and it had no major impact on you, so you don’t remember it!
I think that’s assuming a linear timeline. The alternative would be visiting your younger self and then returning to an entirely different future
Yeah, that sounds like you’re worried about paradoxes. You might want to check out the Many-Worlds Interpretation to fix that. In the MWI, every decision and event branches into its own timeline. Instead of running into your past self, you would be visiting an alternate you.
If you don’t remember being visited by a time traveler, then your timeline didn’t have that event. That’s ok though, because there are infinitely many timelines. However, you can’t visit all of them. You’ll only have access to the ones where a future you visited an alternate past you. Instead of changing your own past, you’re creating a new timeline where an alternate you got visited by a time traveler.
It depends on how you imagine time travel and causality. Is it a stable time loop? Or do you visit another version of reality with different outcomes? When you travel, are you unraveling the course of history to be redone? Or are you visiting an unyielding etching of the timespace continuum? If time is a set of dimensions, as all modern physics supports, then theoretically it wouls be possible to move through those dimensions in all directions. Special relativity confirms that movement affects how you move through time, but if you go backwards in time, you are still moving forward from your own reference point. That’s the only way to retain your memories.
I believe I’m just assuming a linear timeline in this scenario, visiting a different dimension is definitely a possibility instead of going back on one timeline
With one linear timeline, you basically have Back to the Future rules. You can go back and change things, even if it rewrites you out of existence. Of course, there are some logical paradoxes that arise from that theory of time, so most versions rely on some delayed repair mechanism, like how the photo of Marty slowly disappears, or how The Ancient One explains the Time Stone to Professor Hulk. Time Cop, Butterfly Effect, and Looper do the same, with changes going into immediate effect like old injuries becoming later scars in real time, but erasing yourself really ought to be devastating to spacetime itself. I liked the concept in Butterfly Effect where the time traveler experiences all the memories of their new life in the altered timeline with every new change, but then they abandon the hard sci-fi aspect to get cute with stigmata. Donnie Darko probably handles it the best, where time travel itself creates a universe-ending paradox that requires the destruction of the time traveler.
Essentially, you jump from now back to another location in spacetime where you didn’t exist the first time around. If you overlap with yourself, you’re either going to gain a new retroactive memory, or there’s some magical maguffin that erased the memory (like the Tardis does for the Doctor), or some universal force reconciles the timestream and eliminates the paradox.
I would say one linear timeline you have more Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. Kind of like what they were describing in the first place (from Bill and Ted’s perspective, we’re not going to talk about the historical figures perspective…)
I think, since future Bill and Ted appear to the earlier Bill and Ted, and Rufus directly assists in creating his future, I think we have to assume that all of those historical figures always experienced those things, and then returned to their timelines with knowledge of the future. Napoleon rode the waterloops before Waterloo. Socrates played catch with Billy the Kid. Those are historical events, as much as Rufus and Future Bill and Ted helping present Bill and Ted pass their classes.
You don’t see enough discussion about Donnie Darko in time travel.
That’s interesting response thank you, definitely food for thought
And that’s why time travel is classified as science FICTION because the paradox would make the situation impossible, among all the other reasons time travel is impossible.
Semi-related: You may enjoy Steins;Gate.
But then what would happen if I choose not to travel back in time even though I’ve already seen myself do it??
Who says you get a choice?
Maybe it was someone else impersonating you, or maybe you accidentally fell into a time portal, or were pushed. Whatever the case, the fact that you’ve already experienced the result proves that whatever you may try to avert it won’t work.
Very interesting answer, I didn’t think of that
And what happens when you’ve traveled back in time and smoke your weed before you get so stoned and ask this question? 😂
That’s assuming I’ve traveled back in time
There are a few different ways fiction has dealt with that. Like one once you do it it updates time and you then remember it once you did it in the future, another you come back to there being two of you the non traveler who remembers and the traveler who does not. In some cases the world is changed but in others a new parralell world is made and sometimes the characters just don’t know. you could also have a thing where you return and everything is exactly the same but a parralell world was made that you just don’t go to when you return.
Timelines bro
Yeah I didn’t factor in multiple timelines lol
Depends on how your time travel works.
Real time travel would require to set everything back in place except your brain/body,
so you haven’t technically traveled back in time, but everyone around you effectively thinks you have
as they’d never accept themselves as being part of a universe that’s been ahead for 30 years and then reversed in place.Watch the movie named The Time Traveller’s Wife. It is absolutely superb and based on sort of that idea, but not quite.
There’s also a series that was cut short.
You can try to be subtle about it. Changes in haircuts and styles can make it less obvious.
I tried not to give it away, but of course, I knew it was me, both times. (I’m both very perceptive and surpringly self-absorbed, so I couldn’t fool me.)
Can’t go back in time, not because of time itself as much but because of the chain of causality. It’s a fantasy. And, from what I understand, many worlds is lazy fiction at worst (it’s okay if it’s just a characteristic of the setting and not the main reason everything works and the plot goes forward, idk 🤷), and an unconvincing and convoluted interpretation at best.
This is a physics question. But the current laws of physics do not allow for going backwards in time, certainly no way for anything to interact with a past version of itself, so even if, IF it was possible under some future model that will replace the current one, there’s no way to predict what would happen with the current model because the current model says it doesn’t happen.
It’s like asking pre-Copernicus physics to calculate the movement of different star systems around a galaxy.
Watch that. Good video that explains it
