Time Travelling Unravelling
One day when I sat atop the mountain peak, my legs akimbo, my mind in meditation, a searcher of knowledge climbed to my position and asked me:
“If I had a time-machine and went back in time, could I see my ten year old self, and interact with him?”
The answer I gave that seeker of enlightenment was a surprise to him, and a disappointment. But alas, in our search for truth the answers we find are not always the truths we hoped to find.
My answer to his earnest query, the answer I share with you now, is this…
The answer was, in fact, a resounding “no”. You cannot exist twice in the same timeframe. The laws of time and space (I didn’t make the laws, so don’t shoot the messenger) would not enable you to come into contact with your ten year old self, or any other “self” of you from an outside timeframe.
If you could, and with that said, if you did, you might potentially inadvertently alter the course of the future; some of which is already your past history—the future of yourself from the past—and the time-space continuum would be cast into inexplicable disarray. For your sake, do not attempt such an endeavor.
My seeker of enlightenment, an apparent Doubting Thomas followed up with “But hypothetically speaking, just because the result would be disastrous does not lend itself to the conclusion that one cannot exist in multiples within one timeframe. Is it that you CANNOT exist twice in the same timeframe, or SHOULD NOT? I believe the operative word is SHOULD.”
While I was tempted to retort that if the answers were already his to be shared, then he might be better to find his own mountain peak and spew his pearls of wisdom to the occasionally constant climbers who think nothing of interrupting the thoughts of mountain men of peace and wisdom. But I maintained my patience, for after all he had climbed from within his own darkness in search of illumination, so since it be my own light he claimed to seek, then forgive his remnant of clinging darkness I must.
What if you ran into your ten year old self and you spoke to him, had a discussion with him; what if something you told him/that younger self causes him to do something different in life—a different choice or path than you had taken in his future/your past, and it eventually alters who you are and how you live your life today? In an instant you would no longer be the same person speaking to your ten year old self, you would be different than the way your previously unaltered past had shaped and directed you, and you very well could be of a vastly different mindset or belief which would preclude from saying the choice of words to your ten year old self which inevitably changed you. The change in you would likely prevent you from having the same thought process that spurred you to say what you did to the ten year old self, in which case the paradox emerges because without saying what led to the changes, how could the changes have otherwise occurred?
To go even further, what if the changes in your life and personality as a result of what you said to your ten-year-old self would preclude you from having the mind-set to be interested in traveling back through time?
If you no longer had the cause to travel back in time to alter your life, than how could you have travelled back in time to cause your life to be altered in such a way precluding your need to have it altered? This is a paradox of cause and effect, a causality loop of infinite curves and loops.
Would you like an Excedrin now?
“Unlearn what you have learned.” --Yoda
“I foresee two possibilities. One, coming face to face with herself 30 years older would put her into shock and she'd simply pass out. Or two, the encounter could create a time paradox, the results of which could cause a chain reaction that would unravel the very fabric of the space time continuum, and destroy the entire universe! Granted, that's a worst case scenario. The destruction might in fact be very localized, limited to merely our own galaxy.” –Doc Brown/Back to the Future
“I'm talking about the classic paradox of time. Imagine, for example, I go back in time and meet my own Grandfather; long before he got married, before he had children. And we have an argument, and I kill him. Now if that happens, how am I ever going to be born? And if I can never be born, how can I go back in history and meet my very own Grandfather?” --Warren Lasky/The Final Countdown
P.S. Just as I wrapped up this blog a person claiming to be my future self, who looked remarkably life me albeit slightly older, appeared out of a glowing orb of light and warned me not to finish this blog. I warned me that it would forever change who I am and what I do if I went ahead and completed it. And that would inexplicably alter the chances of me ever having the state of mind to want to travel back in time to warn my younger self.
Just to be on the safe side I’d better finish it and post it despite the warning, lest I cause a paradox by changing the future path that led to the future me having the urge to travel back in time to alter future me’s past through this past me...
