# Do Time Travellers Age?



## Ruby (Dec 16, 2013)

I have a question about the rules of Time Travel in a Fantasy novel. I want my MC, who is 16, to time travel from the end of the 19th century to the second half of the 20th century. She gets stuck in the future for many years until she is an old lady. She then manages to return to her original time. When she returns would she now be an old lady or would she revert to her original age of 16?


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## CupofJoe (Dec 16, 2013)

The "convention" is that the time traveller's chronology is linear to them, if not to anyone else... so they can dart about as they want and only their personal time passes.
If they did age [+ve or -ve] as they move through time, then won't they be stuck in their own life span, even if they could "re-live" their life anew... they could be friends with themselves at school...
I think it would make an interesting device and would also make my ears bleed trying to keep it all straight.
That said, you can make the rules up as you want, as long as you are consistent.


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## Steerpike (Dec 16, 2013)

She would still be an old lady, by conventional thinking. If you want to make her young again when she goes back, you can, but I think you need to provide some explanation as to why things aren't following the normal linear progression of time from her perspective.


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## Benjamin Clayborne (Dec 16, 2013)

There's plenty of stories that use each mechanism, although the first one (your body continues aging normally from your perspective no matter how much time travel you undergo) is more common, mainly because it makes more intuitive sense.

There's nothing wrong with the "reverts to a younger body" trope, although if your body reverts, why wouldn't your mind, causing you to forget everything that happened? In essence, it would be as if the time travel, from your perspective, had never occurred, which would sort of defeat the purpose.


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## Ruby (Dec 16, 2013)

Thank you CupofJoe. I understand your first point that, say a character moved forward a hundred years, they would not age a hundred years but at a normal rate. However, I'm not sure if I understand your second point. Are you saying that while the character was time travelling there could be another "self" who was continuing to live her life in the 19th Century. So there would be a kind of schizophrenic parallel universe?


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## GeekDavid (Dec 16, 2013)

Ruby said:


> Thank you CupofJoe. I understand your first point that, say a character moved forward a hundred years, they would not age a hundred years but at a normal rate. However, I'm not sure if I understand your second point. Are you saying that while the character was time travelling there could be another "self" who was continuing to live her life in the 19th Century. So there would be a kind of schizophrenic parallel universe?



The way Doctor Who explained it was that you could view yourself but not change your own actions, if memory serves. I think each additional "you" that was in a given time strained the timeline... two was okay, three was definitely dangerous, and I don't think they ever went to four, so we don't know what happened.


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## Queshire (Dec 16, 2013)

It's not time travel, but in the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the kids grow to adulthood in Narnia but revert to kids when they come back. This is 100% author's choice. If you wanted to, you could even have time travels stop aging the moment they travel or only age while in their home time period. There was one book that I really liked which did the whole "only age in home time period" thing.

As for what Ben said about forgeting due to reverting, I don't think that's too necessary. It's pretty common with writers and readers to treat the mind and the body as two separate things;  even if the prince gets turned into a frog, he is still able to think like a prince (with a few froggy influences of course) despite not nearly having enough brain space for it.


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## Steerpike (Dec 16, 2013)

GeekDavid said:


> The way Doctor Who explained it was that you could view yourself but not change your own actions, if memory serves. I think each additional "you" that was in a given time strained the timeline... two was okay, three was definitely dangerous, and I don't think they ever went to four, so we don't know what happened.



Unless you split into separate timelines, I think you end up with paradoxes, though. Not sure there's any other way around it.


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## GeekDavid (Dec 16, 2013)

Steerpike said:


> Unless you split into separate timelines, I think you end up with paradoxes, though. Not sure there's any other way around it.



I don't remember the episode(s) where that happened, but that's not surprising, considering how many years the Doctor has been traipsing around time.


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## Queshire (Dec 16, 2013)

I think what Cup was saying is that you could live your life until you're an old man then travel back to earlier in your life so you de-age so you'd have the original you and the older you who traveled backwards and was de-aged living in the same time frame. 

As for causing a paradox by having two of you in the same place, well that depends entirely on the internal rules of time travel and even with Doctor Who it depended mostly on who was writing the episode. Personally I think the whole paradox excuse is mostly 'cuz it can get really confusing really fast.


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## Ruby (Dec 16, 2013)

Hi Steerpike. Yes. It would make more sense if she remained old. But then, say she returned to the moment after she left and suddenly metamorphosed into an old lady, well, that would be scary. (A bit like the young girl who suddenly becomes an old hag in Lost Horizon.) If she stayed young, however, for a hundred years, she would need to use some kind of magic, I suppose.


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## Steerpike (Dec 16, 2013)

GeekDavid said:


> I don't remember the episode(s) where that happened, but that's not surprising, considering how many years the Doctor has been traipsing around time.



Dr. Who is full of paradoxes and inconsistencies. It's best to just forget about them and enjoy the show. There were only a few things that outright bugged me, like WWII-planes flying around space as though it had an atmosphere, or River Song being cast out unprotected into open space and staying alive long enough to be saved.


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## GeekDavid (Dec 16, 2013)

Steerpike said:


> Dr. Who is full of paradoxes and inconsistencies. It's best to just forget about them and enjoy the show. There were only a few things that outright bugged me, like WWII-planes flying around space as though it had an atmosphere, or River Song being cast out unprotected into open space and staying alive long enough to be saved.



That's true... it's still a fun show despite the problems caused by different screenwriters.


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## Ruby (Dec 16, 2013)

Hi Benjamin Clayborne. I think she would have to remember otherwise it would be like an annoying, " and it was just a dream" type of story. I think in most of the time travel literature I've read, the time traveller is not away that long, so no one remarks on his aged appearance. However, come to think of it, how would anyone know how long he's been away?


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## Ruby (Dec 16, 2013)

Hi GeekDavid, I didn't know that about Dr Who. Of course, he overcomes the problem of ageing by regenerating into a totally different body every couple of series.  Although, I suppose we're all doing that anyway over our normal lifetimes. ( Hey, just thought of that, quite philosophical really.) But I don't know if I'd use Dr Who as a guide because there was a paradox in the recent "tv special" where they had the 3 TARDIS time machines in the same place at the same time, and why did he marry Elizabeth I?


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## Deleted member 2173 (Dec 16, 2013)

My personal opinion is that from the perspective of the traveller, they would live a linear life.  What we call aging is a breakdown of DNA replication, where free radicals degrade the process, similar to how photo copy of a photo copy of a photo copy eventually leads to a lesser version.  Unless the traveler is exposed to something that changes that progression, and they are physically moving through time, they wouldn't de-age or accelerate in age based on where in the timeline they are.  If they were jumping into their body at that point in time on a psionic level, then I would say they would experience that effect.


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## Ruby (Dec 16, 2013)

Hi Queshire. I'm glad you mentioned the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. I must admit I find it odd that the four children lived their lives as adults in Narnia for years and then one day returned home to the moment they left, reverting to being children once again.
I like your explanation about the prince and the frog.
My MC is a wizard, so maybe she could do something to delay ageing. Do you think it's ok to mix SF with magic?


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## Asura Levi (Dec 16, 2013)

I expect them to age, so the now old lady has return to her time but she is still old. I would accept, and find interesting if when she traveled to the future, let's say, 50 years, she aged those 50 years. Once she is back to her original time, it would make perfect sense to be young again.

That would create a few limits, you may try to travel far from your age span and just die in the process or cease to exist if you return to before you were born.
Also, if you have things like destiny and fate, a 20 year old woman fated to die at 30 but who travel those 50 years might create a quite interesting conflict.

Edit: 
Just to add, I would also be perfectly fine with the idea of only aging in the original time line. So the girl travel 50 years into the future, lives for 300 years, than go back to her time, resume her aging.


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## Queshire (Dec 16, 2013)

There's no problem with mixing sci-fi with magic, and, hell, I don't know why more people don't do it! If any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic then magic ought to be indistinguishable from sufficiently advanced technology. Why not have a space ship powered by prayer or something?


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## SeverinR (Dec 16, 2013)

I will give my answer before readin replies.

The human body lives in the now. So every day that the body pumps day is one day, never to be retrieved.
If time travel back makes you younger, then time travel into the future would make you older. So you could not travel outside your life time and who knows how far into the future you could go before you died?

IMO the device that takes the body back and forth in time would not affect the body. Ie if you live an average of 70 years you could travel back and forth endlessly but the time you do live, no matter what time period, you have used up that time of your life.
Example:
At 16 she travels to the past and can't come back until the problem is fixed. She would have used up the time the body can live in the past, so there is nothing the machine can do to give the person more life. She could travel back or forward in time but she would still be an old lady.
There could be the negitive effect on the body such as aging twice, or ten times the amount of time it actually takes to travel through time. Say it takes 10 hours to time travel to the period you want, so you could age 20 hours or 200 hours in body time. Making it hard on the body to travel through time.

But that said, when she met the person that can fix the time machine, they could travel back and give her the fixed time machine back then and an alternate person could travel back to the future. But that would be a different person, because the person had to be there to tell what happened to break the machine.
But maybe the person coming back changes time and they are killed in the change? They can't be two places at the same time so they negate themselves.

The hazards of time travel.


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## GeekDavid (Dec 16, 2013)

Queshire said:


> Why not have a space ship powered by prayer or something?



Okay, now you got my muse excited about that idea.


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## Penpilot (Dec 16, 2013)

Ruby said:


> If she stayed young, however, for a hundred years, she would need to use some kind of magic, I suppose.



You don't necessarily need magic. You could just techno-babble your way out of it if you wanted, like time travel plucks you out of the flow of time so you stop ageing. If you're not re-inserted at the point you left exactly, you don't age because there's no hole in the flow of time for you to occupy. So you don't flow along with time. Time flows around you, so you don't age.




Steerpike said:


> Dr. Who is full of paradoxes and inconsistencies. It's best to just forget about them and enjoy the show. There were only a few things that outright bugged me, like WWII-planes flying around space as though it had an atmosphere, or River Song being cast out unprotected into open space and staying alive long enough to be saved.



I remember there was this line where I think it was Rose asked the Doctor something about the butterfly effect. The Doctor answered "Where's the fun in that?" To me that encapsulates what Doctor Who is about, fun over the niggling facts that stand in the way of fun.


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## Ruby (Dec 16, 2013)

Hi Whitestone, I think yours is a physicist's view. Is it also true that according to physics you could only time travel into the future and not into the past?


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## Ruby (Dec 16, 2013)

Hi Asura Levi, I like your version of how she could revert to her original age as it would have a happy ending. The alternative, for her to return as an old lady, is more dramatic as it would be a tragedy. I don't plan for her to go any further back in time. (I've had enough problems already with researching life in Victorian England )


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## Ruby (Dec 16, 2013)

Hi Penpilot, so are you saying that she could time travel forward 50 years and live for another 50 years in the future but wouldn't age as the time is flowing around her? In which case, she would have to return to her own time as a 16 year old before starting the normal ageing process?


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## Ruby (Dec 16, 2013)

Hi SeverinR, yes there are lots of paradoxes here. In my WIP (so far) a time traveller has come to take the MC into the future with him; but he has arrived earlier than he was supposed to so she doesn't know who he is. She just thinks he's mad! He is from the future so he is technically much younger than her, but chronologically he is older.


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## Penpilot (Dec 16, 2013)

Ruby said:


> Hi Penpilot, so are you saying that she could time travel forward 50 years and live for another 50 years in the future but wouldn't age as the time is flowing around her? In which case, she would have to return to her own time as a 16 year old before starting the normal ageing process?



Yeah that's pretty much it. Gobbly-Gooking this, imagine a long sheet of paper. In that sheet of paper there's a cookie cutter shape cut out of it. The cut out can slide around on that paper, interacting with its surface but it isn't part of that paper any longer. Now apply this to 3 dimensions where instead of a paper it's time and instead of a cut out it's a person.


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## Asura Levi (Dec 16, 2013)

Penpilot said:


> Yeah that's pretty much it. Gobbly-Gooking this, imagine a long sheet of paper. In that sheet of paper there's a cookie cutter shape cut out of it. The cut out can slide around on that paper, interacting with its surface but it isn't part of that paper any longer. Now apply this to 3 dimensions where instead of a paper it's time and instead of a cut out it's a person.



This is a fairly awesome analogy.


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## Ruby (Dec 17, 2013)

Wow! Penpilot this is a brilliant analogy!


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## CupofJoe (Dec 17, 2013)

Queshire said:


> I think what Cup was saying is that you could live your life until you're an old man then travel back to earlier in your life so you de-age so you'd have the original you and the older you who traveled backwards and was de-aged living in the same time frame.


Queshire has my intention correctly identified. If you revert to a child when going back in time, you would either have to wipe out the chronology you had followed and write a new singular one coming forward again, or after the rewind, create a separate time line for the new you that would run along side those that exist.
If self awareness [thought, knowledge, and conciousness etc.] is retained through the lives, it could be very interesting to have an incredibly experienced and learned person that just looks like a child...


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## Penpilot (Dec 17, 2013)

Asura Levi said:


> This is a fairly awesome analogy.





Ruby said:


> Wow! Penpilot this is a brilliant analogy!



Aww shucks... I blush.


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## Hainted (Dec 17, 2013)

Go read Rant by Chuck Palahniuk. Time travel through car crashes, and what happens when you interfere with your own timeline, and get stuck outside time. Really twisted, brilliant stuff.


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## Ruby (Dec 17, 2013)

Hi Hainted, thanks for recommending this book. I just looked it up on the internet. Apparently, it deals with splintered time so the main character has lots of different timelines and sleeps with his ancestors. Most people who reviewed it said they hadn't understood it and that no one can follow time travel stories as they are always flawed. Did you understand this book?
Maybe we should also study the plot of the Back to the Future films.


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## Hainted (Dec 17, 2013)

I don't understand it(and I hate the twist of sleeping with his ancestors was kinda ruined, it's a little more complicated) but here's what I got. When we are in high stress situations our perception of time is distorted,not because of adrenaline but because we are shifting out of normal time into liminal time. Some people can use this state to travel through time, and some find a way to live in liminal time forever. They still live in our world, but can never be perceived by those of us in the time flow. hey don't age either.


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## Ruby (Dec 18, 2013)

Thanks. I've decided now that I want the time travellers to disappear so that their absences are noticed. But even then that could be complicated if they eventually return to the moment just after they'd left, causing a paradox. Maybe, you just have to suspend a lot of disbelief to write/read time travel stories?


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## Hainted (Dec 18, 2013)

I like the idea of them leaving a cookie cutter hole, and then as the hole closes they begin to disappear. Not just becoming invisible, but their actual past being erased so they never existed. Just me, your book so do what feels right.


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## psychotick (Dec 19, 2013)

Hi,

Just watched a series recently that had a rather novel twist on this - "Crime Traveller". (It's actually quite good though the time travel stuff is really flawed. It's also surprisingly dated looking like something out of the seventies or eighties at best, though it came out in 1996!)

Regardless their scenario was that you go back in time a bit (you can't go forward) for a period of hours or days then have to live through that length of time until you reach the point at which you left for the past, whereupon you have to get back in the machine. Now the interesting thing was that if you were shot etc in the past, when you reached the present and got in the machine which is still sitting in the apartment, you would be returned to the state you were before you left - i.e. unshot. I don't understand the logic of this but I enjoyed it.

Of course one of the big flaws of the show was that apparently if you met yourself in the past you get a lethal paradox - why I don't know. But what I do know is that if you can't afford to meet yourself and you're in the past rushing back to the machine to get put back in your proper time stream then you're going to meet yourself because he's also there getting in the machine to go back in the past.

Cheers, Greg.


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## Ruby (Dec 19, 2013)

Hi psychotick, this series sounds intriguing. This also sounds a bit like the plot of the film Groundhog Day, where the MC relives the same day over and over again and whatever happens, the next morning he reverts to his original state, although he remembers what's happened and it alters him. Some people on here seem to think that the time travellers would forget their experiences, but I think they have to remember. It makes them wise as they have experienced the future. It also might make them discontented in their own time re poor medicine, education, heating etc but Victorian food might have been better!


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## Ruby (Dec 19, 2013)

Hi psychotick/ Greg, thank you so much for posting this. I just watched the first episode and it was brilliant. I thought the time machine looked a bit ropey as though it was made out of old tape recorders and plastic bottles, but the way they described the time travel was interesting. They had to return at the exact time they left or they got stuck in an infinity loop and that was how the MC, Holly's, father had disappeared. This meant he had to relive the same day to infinity ( so the Groundhog Day analogy was appropriate!) it also made it exciting in case they didn't get back in time. (No pun intended  )They also could only go back in time as the future doesn't exist. This is contrary to what physicists say these days, which is that you can only travel into the future. Also, they couldn't meet themselves or bet to become rich as they would change events. But they changed events anyway, didn't they? I didn't understand how they solved the crimes. It reminded me a bit of the old Dr Who programmes which I preferred to the modern ones,  although his time machines were always better than that! I'm going to watch some more of these. It's a British series, but I don't recall having heard of it. Anyway, thanks again!


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