do you really think you'd blow up?

[malcolm]

there's been a popular notion in time travel fiction that if you were to meet yourself in the time period in which you traveled back or forward to that you'd both either blow up or implode or soemthing nasty like that to correct the strain of time and of having the same entity in one plane of existence at the same time.

i don't think this would happen personally because of variations in make up over time. i.e: person in the future has a pace maker and person in past doesnt, cells grow and die on a daily basis, etc.
what do you think?

[OliX]

I have no idea. Blowing up or imploding - no.

[malcolm]

interesting question though,no? see i think the reson they say thatin sci-fi time travel fiction is because they just dont want someone going around telling their past selves things about the future that might change their time stream, yaknow like (dont invest in enron,1997 me.) etc.

[aXa]

my personal take on this is that it provides an explanation for all those cases of "spontaneous human combustion" that have occurred over the years. they were instances in which the time traveler and their other self meet up and, well....*poof!*

[Ajax Knucklebones]

Time travel? Pasha....I can't even get my George Jetson space mobile, let alone think that anytime in the near future we'll be traveling in time.

[malcolm]

im still waiting on the pill that can make me a new liver

[keiko]

its not a blowing up or imploding thing - you actually cancel your self out and one, or maybe both, of you just isn't any more. As there has never been a documented incident i'm too sure on the details the the concept of being "Xed" a total annihilating not just matter, but knowledge and understanding of the individual in question.

~K

[Mr Karl]

you'd be meeting a different person.............of course if that whole concept was applied then just travelling in time would cause everything to do something spectuacular, or ambiguous...........who knows

Do people actually wonder about stuff like that?

[Morning Glory]

well there's a few different theories of time travel.

The one that seems to be the most accepted and keeping with science is the Multi-timeline theory. Being that time is just the relationship between two objects, when you change the way that you look at an object, it changes the way that it appears. that's just simple physical-psychology, but the same applies to time. if you change the way you look at time, you will experience time on a new vector. getting more in depth, for every action there is a set of variables, some of which will become actualized when a vector is taken, and the rest that will not. in that instance a time event has occurred.

In terms of personal time-travel we usually refer to the standard present as timeline A. when you alter the timeline by changing the events in the past or the future, it then creates a new set of variables to follow and a new vector, which we call timeline B. and so on. From this perspective it is impossible to actually change any events in time, and all the events still happen, but on different timelines (or vectors), and the time traveler expierences what appears to him as a change.

This is best presented on the screen in the film The Butterfly Effect. the time-traveler continually alters the course of time, creating new timelines, and he can never return back to timeline A, but can only hope to create a new timeline that possess a close enough resemblance of conditions to the original.

To a certain extent the Terminator movies follow this idea too, but they are a little bit looser with the logical consequences of the actions, so that you could travel to any number of timelines, including the original, and none of them are conditioned upon each other.

Another theory that was put forth, but is less popular these days because it doesn't offer as much possibilities for fantasy writers is the idea of Chronology Protection. Foreseeing disastrous causality paradoxes potentially occurring through time-travel, (such as the famous question, if you traveled back in time and prevented your self from being born, then how could you have grown up to subsequently become the time-traveler?), they postulated that there must be some unknown physical law that prevents people from making changes to the timeline. While this paradox is solved in the multi-timeline theory, it's not without weight and does offer some explanations such as for the fact that time always seems to only flow "future-ward" and never "backwards", when there is no apparent physical law that dictates it should happen that way.

This what the OP was talking about. It was shown in the movie Back To The Future when the Doc warned that Marty most not interact with his alternate time-line selves no matter what or it would destroy the universe. It is also demonstrated on the TV series Lost, with a more psychological explanation. If a person attempts to change the timeline there brain will become "ungrounded" in time and you will not know what time event you are in, until eventually your brain loses all sense of any relative perspective and it "forgets" that it exists at all, at which point you keel over and die. This is remedied by finding a time event that is consistent in all timelines that establishes a relationship to ground you, so that you have some form of external validation of what time event you are in.

Another popular theory, which is a form of Chronology Protection, but a bit more imaginative, is called the Consistency theory of time-travel. This states that if you traveled back in time and tried to change things and then returned to the present again, you'd find that everything was exactly the same, because the future is always a casual conclusion of past events. Your attempts to change time events was mere ignorance on your part of the Consistency theory . It was in fact because you time traveled back and made those changes that your present was the way it was and the only way to change it would be to not have traveled back in time, which is impossible because it already happened. If you should then go back and try to prevent yourself from time traveling, or make any other changes, they would be equally ineffectual and wind up with the same results.

[malcolm]

my head just exploded lol and yeah, mr. karl, i think about stuff like that and other weird things like i wonder if bananas would scream if they had a mouth when we unpeeled them and such.

[Mr Karl]

oh, I've pondered time travel, and then I came to the conclusion that to actually achieve this time travel would require an understanding of everything that there actually wouldn't be much point to traveling through time by any other means than the natural ways of doing so

[malcolm]

or a phone booth

[Dusk]

Excellent! *plays imaginary guitar*
That was one of the best movies EVER!

[malcolm]

yeah and i kinda liked the sequel too believe it or not. r.i.p rufus.....

[ROGIZOID]

I dont think you would blow up or anything like that.
Maybe go into shock hahaha.

Good question.

[malcolm]

thank you. i'm a monkey (1980), we tend to ask lots of questions.

[Dusk]

I liked that movie too, if your talking about the one with Bruce Willis. NOM NOM NOM SPIDER!

[malcolm]

wait, was he in bogus journey? lol i dont remember.

[Dusk]

No im talking about 12 Monkeys.
On the topic of Bill and Ted I actually did an English report on Inner Journeys using Bill and Teds Excellent Adventure as the source. I failed because the teacher thought that I wasnt serious.

[malcolm]

oooooooh! lol i didnt get that at first cus i was refering to the animal symbol of the year i was born lol (monkey) my bad.

i think alot of great life lessons can be learned from bill and ted like oh say.....

bubblegum and vienna sauasage cans make a good patch repair to time traveling phone booths,

everyone gets the air guitar as a symbol of peace in the future,

the easiest way to kidnap a mongolian warlord is with twinkies

and ofcourse: be execellent to each other.

[Dusk]

And Beethoven is the easiest person ever to kodnap

[malcolm]

oh i dont know. ghenghis khan was pretty easy to snag too. stick a twinkie in his face and he's your bitch practically lol.

but we also learned that sigmond freud is a geek,
plato like billiards and joan of arch is a natural born aerobics instructor too

[Dusk]

This is apparently an accurate representation of me and my friend Leasha
http://www.vgcats.com/comics/?strip_id=271
http://www.vgcats.com/comics/?strip_id=273

[malcolm]

lol! those are hillarious

[Dusk]

try www.ctrlaltdel-online.com

[malcolm]

those are some pretty cool sites. i've been thinking about doing something like that for my own comic ideas instead of putting em in shops. .

[Dusk]

I just talked my friend into doing the drawing for mine. WOOT!
Ill send you a link when We've actually started

[malcolm]

groovy. i've been too busy taking care of my mom and dealing with my flaky ex who doesnt know if she wants to talk to me or not to really feel like picking up a pencil much. i tossed a sample page of the firs tpage up though in the comic book thread.

[Dusk]

My huouse mate drew it up, but our scanner dosent work... Now Im waiting on him to ues his computer but hes busy with tafe and his game.

[malcolm]

<----has a pinter/scanner.

[Dusk]

We have one, but we lost th CD we need to get it to work

[malcolm]

you should invent a time machine and go back in time to when you had it before you lost it then. just be careful not to interact with yourself then cus you might blow up.

[Dusk]

I didnt lose it tho. And I already have a time machine but I dont know when the disc was lost so its not much help.

[malcolm]

well that sux. gotta admit that was a bonny little segway back on track though, no?

[Dusk]

Yes. Yes it was. Segue FTW!

[malcolm]

lol i thought you typed sega. now i got that stuck in my head...."SEGA!"

[Dusk]

I used to have one of them when I was a kid. If I could I would probably still play it.

[malcolm]

meh. they were okay. i think sonic the hedgehog was pretty much their best offeringthough and you can get that for most modern systems now in a box set.

[toxicat]

Or you could try tumo.
I dunno, first I've heard of that one.

[malcolm]

I mean exclusive to sega,allah.
some of those games you could get on snes too