It’s a basic rule of time travel, that. You can’t encounter yourself. One of the reasons time machines will never be invented There’s no way to reliably prevent it from happening. If the effect is impossible, the cause cannot happen. Therefore, even if you could invent a time machine, and placed no restrictions on where it could travel, you still couldn’t get it to work because you could take it back to enounter yourself, which you cannot do.
Similarly, you couldn’t go back in time and alter the past. Doing that irrevocably changes the future, and who you are. You would end up not inventing the time machine, and then it all snarls, and nobody wants that.
Tangential to that, you can’t go into the furure, either. Seeing the future- or rather, being there- no matter how small a glimpse, or how short an amount of time, sets that future. Locks it in place. Everything will end up at that point. Even if the second before, everything is nowhere near how you saw it, everything will, at that moment, snap to the position you saw it in, and proceed along that path.
Obviously, since such an effect is impossible by the laws of physics, the cause cannot happen. So. No time travel.
Sorry, geeks.
But Ishmael, I hear you asking me- or would if my name was Ishmael, which it isn’t, and if you could talk to me directly, which I guess technically you can, but since you don’t know that I exist, and never will, you won’t bother, and you couldn’t hear me replying anyway, because you don’t work on that wavelength, so I will ask the question for you- how can you travel through time?
That’s where we get, as Mrs. Slocombe was wont to say, into the gritty-nitty. I can travel through time because I can’t affect anything. If I travel to the future, I can observe what happens- the true flow- which I’ll explain in a moment.
Humans can’t do it, because just by being there, even if they do nothing, affects everything. Their body displaces air, which may effect a developing weather pattern, or a harmless little butterfly, and then, the hurricane that would have sprung up in the atlantic and killed a thousand people, including a future tyrannical world dictator never happens, and said dictator rises up, comes to power, and kills millions more.
Who wants that?
I can travel to the future, or the past, because my being there displaces no air, affects no one. The Fleshy Physics don’t apply to me, so I get a pass.
The displacement of air changes everything and locks it in. It’s the changing and the collapsing of the probability field between all the “What Could Happens” that there are that locks it in. Not the observing.
As I said, I see the true flow of time. I see what WILL happen. Since humans can’t lock anything in place by traveling to the future, the future is fluid. Anything could happen, depending on what you mortals choose to do.
I can move forward along that time line, fast-forward if you will, to see what happens next. I can’t just jump from one point to another. I can fast forward incredibly quickly, but I can’t, for lack of a better term, travel through time.
I see what will happen, and I am powerless to stop it, move it aside, or change it. Which essentially means the future is already set, even though you fleshies have free will and can choose to do anything you want.
Chew on that, too.
Anyway, as a result of all this, you would think that I would have to be pretty dispassionate about the people that I meet, and the lives I observe.
You’d think that.
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