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Do Time Travellers Age?
- Thread starter Ruby
- Start date
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.
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.
- Thread starter
- #23
Ruby
Auror
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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- #24
Ruby
Auror
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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- #25
Ruby
Auror
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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- #26
Ruby
Auror
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.
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.
Asura Levi
Sage
This is a fairly awesome analogy.
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- #29
Ruby
Auror
Wow! Penpilot this is a brilliant analogy!
CupofJoe
Myth Weaver
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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- #33
Ruby
Auror
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.
Maybe we should also study the plot of the Back to the Future films.
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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- #35
Ruby
Auror
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?
psychotick
Auror
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.
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.
- Thread starter
- #38
Ruby
Auror
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!
- Thread starter
- #39
Ruby
Auror
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!
)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!
