birthedbythebigbang

birthedbythebigbang t1_j101rjr wrote

A world where you can go into the past and meet your younger self implies one of two things, both of them unlikely:

  1. Linear time is not only illusory, but all time exists simultaneously, and there is no free will whatsoever, and all things have all happened, and ones travel to the past to change it is also part of the original expression.
  2. The "many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics" is literally true, and there is an entirely new, complete universe hyperdimensionally branching off of every possible quantum state flux in all of existence, and this is the way the universe could accommodate timestream bifurcations like altering the past. You'd never ever be able to return to ones original timestream.
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birthedbythebigbang t1_j0zoap4 wrote

This is another reason - perhaps not a classic paradox - that leads me to believe that time travel to the past is a practical impossibility not allowed by nature. It sets up too many causal loops that make no sense whatsoever. Travel to the future is definitely possible, and we're doing so right at this instant, every one of us, and some of us more efficiently than others. If we were ever to send people into the distant future, it would almost certainly require them traveling quite a long distance at relativistic/time dilating speeds for a long period of time (from their frame of reference - much, much longer from ours) before returning to the place they wanted to end up in the future, and then they're stuck there. They can't go back. Like Matthew McConaughey or the character from Queen's "'39," maybe they'll meet their elderly children, or their distant descendants.

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