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Thread starter kafigalo Start date May 4, Joined Mar 2, So if you go back in time say 1 year and you meet yourself, what would happen? Why is it imperative that you never meet yourself in the past? Joined Dec 23, Time travel to the past is paradoxical in general; I really don't think there's anything exceptionally paradoxical about meeting a past version of yourself though.
Heck, in Back to the Future, part 2 , Biff, Doc and Jennifer all met past versions of themselves and the universe was fine. It depends on a million things, and it depends on how you view time travel. Two common thought processes are: 1 When you go and meet yourself in the past you create a new timeline - where that meeting set events in motion down another path, and it becomes an alternate universe.
The universe where you initially traveled from this one would remain unaffected, as it still exists and all that happened was the timelines split. You would disappear - this person right now who traveled in the past - because that very meeting of yourself and your past self led to different decisions being made by your past self and you would not be the same person at the same place.
However, this also means that if you were visited by yourself in the past, you are here now, so you are the current timeline, and you should go back in the past in order to keep it the same.
Because if you didn't, then the decisions your past self would make would change, and everything would be different. It is much more complicated than this, and no one is sure exactly what would happen whether alternate timelines, interconnected timelines, or even just everything ceases to exist due to the paradox It is less about meeting yourself in the past, its about traveling in the past at all. But you would directly affect you own timeline if you meet with yourself.
Or maintain it, as you have already met with yourself. See what I'm getting at? Krazy4Krash Moderator Staff member. What a good time to bring this up. I just finished watching Back to the Future II less than ten minutes ago. I think it's just because it would cause a change of events that should off never occurred.
As in, a new timeline split that shouldn't happen, because the future would be different. Not necessarily in a bad case, just not the preferred 'normal' flow of events. Joined Jan 29, Location United Kingdom. Well, if you go back in time and meet yourself then something about your life in the past has changed.
It may not seem like much at the time but it could change past you's entire thought process which would change present you's entire thought process. Having done so, their past and future selves start brawling furiously over which one of their duo Hex should return to the Discworld The Eyes of Kid Midas has a surreal, dreamlike scene towards the end where the protagonist interacts with his future self.
The Franny K. Before heading home, Franny also decides she'd like to see how she'd look when she's older, but finds to her horror that she's created a Bad Future where her teenage self is creating an army of elephant monsters to get even with everyone for laughing at her middle name, as changing the middle name still ended with everyone laughing at her and Franny had to realize that she had to stop letting the humiliation of her middle name upset her so much.
I Can't Do That In Magic 2. One is an elected president, and the other two are two temporal versions of the city's builder: Brit the Younger and Brit the Elder. Brit the Younger hates being around her future self, since Brit the Elder typically makes her seem like a stupid child. The time-hopping protagonist ends up having sex with lots of male and female versions of himself from the past, future and parallel timelines. Robert A.
Heinlein examples: His —All You Zombies— turns this Up to Eleven , as the main character is actually all the characters. At the beginning of the story, he is a man, but explains to a bartender that he was originally a woman, until one day she had a one-night stand with some guy and got pregnant. There were complications during the birth and surgery was required. When the doctors opened her up, they discovered she was a Hermaphrodite with a fully functioning set of internal male genitalia.
Since her female genitalia were destroyed by the birth, the doctors just The bartender then reveals to the protagonist that he is actually a time-travelling secret agent, and offers to take him back in time to get revenge on the deadbeat who knocked him up and disappeared on him. The protagonist agrees, but while back in time, he ends up seducing his past female self, eventually realizing he was the deadbeat. Meanwhile, the bartender travels ahead nine months, kidnaps the baby the protagonist gave birth to, and brings it further back into the past to drop off at the doorstep of an orphanage.
The same orphanage the protagonist said he grew up in. Because the baby is the protagonist too , and the bartender's mission was to complete the Stable Time Loop of the protagonist's existence. The bartender then recruits the protagonist into the agency he works for and then goes home, where it is finally revealed to the reader that he's also the protagonist, meaning that this entire story had exactly one character in it.
In " By His Bootstraps " a man's future selves go back and meet his past self for various reasons. In Time Enough for Love , Lazarus briefly meets himself as a child.
He thinks he's a brat. In The Mirror of Merlin , the titular character passes through a Magic Mirror where he meets an elderly Merlin tutoring a young Arthur. In Sonic the Hedgehog in the Fourth Dimension with time-travel and dimension hopping aplenty; at one point there are three Sonics and Tailses. At the end they trick Robotnik into believing a whole dimension is populated by Sonic and Tails look-a-likes with this paradox.
In The Time Traveler's Wife Henry meets up with himself repeatedly, including the very first time he time travels as a 6 year old and is often depicted sheltering himself when he time jumps. In Time Twister by Ged Maybury, the protagonist travels into the future and meets a man who introduces himself as "Yos", and tells the protagonist what he needs to do in the present to avert an imminent catastrophe.
Near the end of the book, he learns that his sister has also travelled into the future and met Yos — but the Yos she met was a woman. They realise that "Yos" is an acronym: Y our o lder s elf. Live-Action TV. Arrowverse : In The Flash , Barry meets a past or future self several times. On one occasion, his past self actually saves him from a Time Wraith.
This is also how a speedster can create a "time remnant". Zoom does this to create the heroic persona of Jay Garrick the Flash of Earth 2 , while simultaneously acting as his arch-nemesis. In the season 2 finale, Barry creates a time remnant in order to fight Zoom as himself, while his remnant performs a Heroic Sacrifice to stop Zoom's plan. The spin-off Legends of Tomorrow has several characters meet their past selves. Snart meets his child self and asks him to be strong. Kendra meets a past incarnation and has a conversation with her.
One episode involves a temporal assassin trying to kill the team's past selves in order to stop them, resulting in Mick berating his teenage self, while Sara pretends to be a relative to her younger self.
The assassin is stopped with the help of Rip's child self named Michael all Time Masters are required to adopt new names, hence the name Rip Hunter. Chronos the bounty hunter has been hounding the team since day one and is later revealed to be Mick from the future.
An old man appears and convinces Xander not to go through with his wedding with Anya. Near the end of the episode, we find out that it was a Xander from the future. And at the very end, we find out that he's not, but instead a demon trying to get revenge on Anya.
Charmed has done this more than once. In "That Seventies Episode", a warlock who made a deal with the girls' mother for their powers comes to collect. They go back in time to stop the deal from ever being made. Their mother is still pregnant with Phoebe, but Prue and Piper meet their younger selves. The episode title "Three Faces of Phoebe" refers to Phoebe casting a spell that accidentally brings a child-version and elderly-version of herself into the present, so it's "Me, My Future Self, and I".
Season 5, episode 8, "A Witch in Time" , plays this straight two times. First a warlock meets his past self to suggest using future knowledge for self gain.
Second, Piper tells her past self to sabotage a rescue attempt to prevent the entire timeline from happening in the first place. One episode has a spell to communicate with two-and-a-half-year-old Wyatt instead bring year-old Wyatt to the present. He takes it in stride and cheerfully goes to talk to himself. In the series finale, Piper and Leo wind up in the future and meet their older selves, who in this case remember the meeting. Old Piper even has Aspirin waiting on a plate for Young Piper when she mentions she has a headache from trying to understand the situation.
Two and Three bicker constantly, and One gets a wonderful dig at them both. First Doctor: So, you're my replacements , eh? A dandy and a clown! Example's track " Today I Met Myself ", built off a sample of The Stranglers ' "Peaches", is about Example meeting a future version of himself who tells him what he should and shouldn't do if he wants to make it out of the music business alive.
Tabletop Games. Continuum , being a game about Time Travel , codifies this both mechanically and with In-Universe etiquette. It's common enough that there's a term for when it happens - it's a "gemini event. Video Games. This trope is an ever-present occupational hazard of the soldiers of Achron. Captain Halloway meets Captain Halloway-from-five-minutes-later in the first level of the campaign, introducing the first application of time travel for war.
I'm, like, a vision from the past. This is part of the driving force of the plot in Bayonetta , where the little girl Cereza is a 4 or 5 year old version of Bayonetta, brought forward in time to somehow awaken Bayonetta herself as The Left Eye, through a deliberate violation of Never the Selves Shall Meet. Evident in BlazBlue. Depending on the friends you have and how much they like spoilers, it can be strangely unsurprising or a Mind Screw when you find out that Hakumen is the future Jin Kisaragi, but he's renounced his Jerkass past to become a different kind of jerkass.
It gets better. The Black Beast, as everyone who played the first game knows, is Ragna. More specifically, it's a fusion of Ragna and Nu after they fell through the Cauldron in Kagatsuchi together. So thus Ragna basically made himself what he is. Chrono Trigger has surprisingly little of this for a game based on time travel since most of your journeys cover hundreds or thousands or millions of years, not human lifetimes.
You can leave Robo unsurprisingly a robot behind in the past to work on reviving a forest. Four hundred years later from his perspective and a couple of minutes later for the rest of the party, you can reactivate him and he rejoins you. You can then hop back through time and have the two Robos meet face to face, but the game does nothing with it.
Fridge Logic suggests that it wouldn't be too difficult to lighten the workload a bit by having at least a handful of Robos cooperate. More sets in when you realize you have the means to combat the Big Bad with an arbitrarily large army of heavily armed robots, assuming Robos can keep each other active and repaired for the years between the present day and the disaster you're trying to avert. Janus is hurled into the future as a child, grows up, and then is sent back as an adult by your party.
He largely averts the trope, though; he barely interacts with his past self. He has larger concerns. Happens a few times in City of Heroes. In Dragon Quest V the main character meets a future version of himself disguised as an ordinary traveler with a seemingly innocuous request very early on.
While the young version doesn't realize this, the resemblance between past and future versions is incredibly obvious to the player. Later in the game, he goes back in time to swap the Gold Orb for a fake so that the real one is saved from destruction.
In the mobile spin-off game Fire Emblem Heroes , the Manakete princess Tiki exists in both her little girl incarnation as seen in Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light and its sequel Fire Emblem: Mystery of the Emblem , and her young adult incarnation as seen in Fire Emblem Awakening , and there's nothing to stop the player from placing them on the same four-person team.
Justified , as the game in question is a Crossover featuring characters from all of the games in the series, and the Player Character summons them directly from the world and time period in question. Later, a young version of Azura from Fire Emblem Fates was added and can be placed alongside her adult self in fact the Tempest Trial centered around Azura had the two meeting in Young Azura's dreams. While this doesn't happen in the game itself, in Lucina's solo ending in Fire Emblem Awakening notes that she held her younger self and whispered that hers would be a bright future before vanishing.
Meanwhile Noire's solo ending says she stayed with her mother Tharja and her younger self, and it speculated Noire did so to protect her younger self from Tharja's curses. Also of note is that Cherche figured out that Gerome was her son because he was riding a future version of Minerva, who was identical to the Minerva she was riding.
Demise, as the Imprisoned, appears alongside his reincarnation Ganondorf. A non-story variant can happen in Inazuma Eleven GO. This can result in, for example, year-old adult!
Kogure on the same team as his year-old Bratty Half-Pint self, and Endou being coached by his years-later self. Eventually the kid is sent back to before the first game so he can grow up into Jak. There's also special dialogues for when past characters match off against their future selves in JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: All Star Battle , with special mention going to Kosaku! Kira wondering if meeting his past self was an effect of Bites the Dust.
JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Eyes of Heaven has a similar situation, plus Story Mode interactions between past and future selves as the characters move through different parts. Kira and his future self disguised as Kosaku get along based on their shared desire for a quiet life, but Joseph is another story —when his versions from Stardust Crusaders and Battle Tendency meet, the latter thinks the former is an old fart and the former thinks the latter is a brat.
Joseph also prevents his younger self from having the argument with Caesar that would lead to Caesar getting himself killed. The opening of The Journeyman Project 2: Buried in Time has Agent 5 go back in time to warn his past self that they've been framed for murder, and quickly transports his past self to a safe place where he explains everything in more detail.
The Mario Kart series has been incorporating baby versions of certain racers in the console games since Double Dash!! There's No Time to Explain! That hour period constitutes the entire life span of this time traveler. Every trip through the gate is precisely the same to him.
That may strike you as weird or unlikely, but there is nothing paradoxical or logically inconsistent about it. The real question is this: What happens if we try to cause trouble? That is, what if we choose not to go along with the plan? But once you actually do jump backward in time, you still seem to have a choice about what to do next. You can obediently fulfill your apparent destiny, or you can cause trouble by wandering off.
What is to stop you from deciding to wander? That seems like it would create a paradox. Your younger self bumped into your older self, but your older self decides not to cooperate, apparently violating the consistency of the story.
We know what the answer is: That cannot happen. If you met up with an older version of yourself, we know with absolute certainty that once you age into that older self, you will be there to meet your younger self. That is because, from your personal point of view, that meet-up happened, and there is no way to make it un-happen, any more than we can change the past without any time travel complications.
There may be more than one consistent set of things that could happen at the various events in space-time, but one and only one set of things actually does occur. Consistent stories happen; inconsistent ones do not. The vexing part is understanding what forces us to play along. The issue that troubles us, when you get down to it, is free will. We have a strong feeling that we cannot be predestined to do something we choose not to do.
That becomes a difficult feeling to sustain if we have already seen ourselves doing it. Of course, there are some kinds of predestination we are willing to accept. If we get thrown out of a window on the top floor of a skyscraper, we expect to hurtle to the ground, no matter how much we would rather fly away and land safely elsewhere. The much more detailed kind of predestination implied by closed timelike curves, where it seems that we simply cannot make certain choices like walking away after meeting a future version of ourselves , is bothersome.
The arrow of time is simply the distinction between the past and the future. We can turn an egg into an omelet, but not an omelet into an egg; we remember yesterday, but not tomorrow; we are born, grow older, and die, never the reverse.
A neatly stacked collection of papers has a low entropy, while the same collection scattered across a desktop has a high entropy. The entropy of any system left to its own devices will either increase with time or stay constant; that is the celebrated second law of thermodynamics.
The arrow of time comes down to the fact that entropy increases toward the future and was lower in the past. But in the presence of closed timelike curves, some events are in our past and also in our future.
So do we remember such events or not? In general, events along a closed timelike curve cannot be compatible with an uninterrupted increase of entropy along the curve. Something has to give. To emphasize this point, think about the hypothetical traveler who emerges from the gate, only to enter it from the other side one day later, so that his entire life story is a one-day loop repeated ad infinitum.
The traveler would have to ensure that, one day later, every single atom in his body was in precisely the right place to join up smoothly with his past self.
He would have to make sure, for example, that his clothes did not accumulate a single extra speck of dust that was not there one day earlier. This seems incompatible with our experience of how entropy increases. In either case, though, the insistence that we be in the right place at the right time puts a very stringent constraint on our possible future actions. Our concept of free will is intimately related to the idea that the past may be set in stone, but the future is up for grabs.
A closed timelike curve seems to imply predestination: We know what is going to happen to us in the future because we witnessed it in our past. Closed timelike curves, in other words, make the future resemble the past.
It is set in stone, not up for grabs at all. The reason we think the past is fixed once and for all is that there is a boundary condition at the beginning of time.
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