Time travel?

Question

Just a hypothetical situation here.

If I were to travel either to the future or the past would there be anything there? I mean I couldn't meet my future/past self because there is only one of me. It would be impossible to meet myself. Or anyone actually cause they would all be in the present. As would the whole world, right? So it seems like there would be nothing there except me.

Does this seem correct or do you think it would be like in the movies where you could go back and visit the younger version of yourself, or go into the future and see how your life turns out? The other seems more likely to me.

Answer 1

You are looking at it from a standpoint of all time happening at once. What if you are only present in this second, in this time right now. If you travel back in time how do you know it isn't another you from another dimension of time - the past? If you go back and change something and do it differently...would it change the you that traveled back and forth? Change your parents, change history so the future is different? I love this topic and all the various imaginative ideas of "what ifs"...Good question!

Answer 2

I should hope the situation was hypothetical!
Sorry, couldn't let that pass without a comment.
why wouldn't you be allowed to meet yourself in the past? Your augment of there being only the one of you which is currently in the present doesn't really make much sense. It's sort of like saying you can't watch a video of yourself because your not in front of the camera, your in front of the TV.
Let say you do go back in time and meet yourself. It's a bit of an awkward situation, to say the least. what do you say? Hi, I'm you from the future? Most normal people would respond with a polite 'push off, you flaming nutcase!' You wouldn't be able to hold a normal conversation.
I think the more paradoxical part would be that, because it was in your past, you would remember all the questions you asked yourself, and the answers you gave, so there really would be no point in going back, except that if you didn't go back you couldn't ask the questions and would therefore give yourself a headache that not even Tylenol 3 could cure.
As for going to the future, would you really tell yourself what was in store for you? Or would you tend to 'hide' the truth, and say everything works out fine, skipping the bit about your ex-husband, and your brothers cancer, and that mystery lump in your left breast, er, and how you walked in on ... but I tend to ramble. I blame the Baily's.

Answer 3

I believe in Einstein's Theory of Relativity: E=mc^2... time is relative to which "frame of existance" you are in right now... meaning; you are being born, dying, having children all that good stuff of life at the same time. There is no such thing as past and future, and present tense only obtains to us as we exist.

Putting it into a biblical perspective, take when Jesus was at the Sermon on the Mount or when he showed John in Revelations the End of the World. Jesus ACTUALLY took John there as it was happening (and this is if your believe in the whole God thing). How could Jesus have done that if it "technically" hadn't already happened? Because it had. Jesus (I believe) had the scientific and "Godly" knowledge of how to bend space and time and was actually able to take John to the "future" when the End of the world was happening. Many other people in the present claim that have been taken by God or Angels to other frames of time and claim to have seen things that come to pass, such as the Ancient Mayan Prophesies, modern day revelator Edward Cayce, or even look at the binary child prodigy, Akiane. It just makes you wonder, how is it so? Things that make you go, "hmmm..."

Answer 4

Going back you would be there as you were already there. Going forward you wouldn't be there but everyone else would be there. You are the only one changing the timeline. When you get there the worl has changed but you haven't. Of course the assumption here is that you haven't gone back in your future. If you do then you restore the time line so that you can see how your life turns out because you went back and lived it. Of course why would you go forward if you have to go back to get anything done? If you go forward and find yourself then what ever you do there has already been done so when do you know to go back? My thought is that you eventually get forced back in time. My other thought is that you were always meant to travel though time, or else we would be back to the everything else changes except you situation.

Answer 5

I've just been reading a book by Brian Greene called "Fabric of the Cosmos". He is a leading scientist in the field of cosmology, and an expert on string theory.

My layman's understanding is that the moments of time are frozen from the perspective of time travel. Which means that even if we were able to travel backward in time, what's happened must happen, and we cannot change it.

So, you cannot travel back and kill your own grandfather before your father was born. That's a good thing as far as I'm concerned.

Answer 6

No -- although timetravel is all theoretically anyways -- if you traveled into the future you would definatly see other people.

If you would see yourself is also a good question - however if you were to return back and then continue living out your life regularly, then seeing yourself in the future and (definatly) the past would be possible.

Time travel is far too messy stuff to even think about.

Answer 7

Since this is a hypothetical question, I'd say that you would see things and people around you as they were or would be.
You might well remain yourself.
It is an established fact that the aging process of the astronauts slows in a minuscule fashion when they are in outer space.

Answer 8

While I am no expert in temporal mechanics, I would have to assume that if you travel backward in time (somehow making yourself exempt from the laws of time), you would indeed be able to run into yourself... as each moment has occured and is therefore permanently marked in history...

Traveling to the future (beyond your current point in this timeline) would have to be impossible as the future has not yet been written... and so there is nowhere to go.

Answer 9

Neither the future or the past exist except in your memory and imagination.

Answer 10

i could see a lot of changes in your question from past to present and to future