If you could travel back in time, would you do it? And if you could pay a visit to an earlier
version of yourself, what would you say to them? Perhaps you’d try to make right your own mistakes…
or you’d try to change one thing in history and thereby save the world. But what repercussions
could you face for indulging in your sci-fi desire for a time-turning try again?
This is Unveiled, and today we’re answering the extraordinary question;
what if you could meet your younger self?
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Imagining that we do develop a means of time travel sometime in the future,
much about today’s question depends on which model of the universe turns out to be true. In
some instances, meeting your younger self could be impossible from the outset. Determinism is an idea
in philosophy that doesn’t initially have anything to do with time travel but can prove integral to
understanding what options we’d have if we were to travel to the past. Essentially, determinism means
that everything has already been decided; you’re not free to do anything other than the thing you
actually do… which means you can never change the past. It also means that unless you, in the past,
have already encountered your future self, you’re never going to encounter your past self
in the future. It’s just not possible. Except, of course, if you did already run into your future
self but were unaware of it for one reason or another. That scenario is still possible.
In just this one example, then, we can begin to see the tricky temporal problems that face us.
But there are many credible scientists hard at work trying to develop time travel concepts that
do stand up to scrutiny, and even Stephen Hawking didn’t write it off completely – once famously
throwing a party for time travellers but only announcing it after it had happened. Nobody showed
up to Hawking’s get-together, but many argue that this still doesn’t prove that time travel doesn’t
exist. You couldn’t, after all, blame a time traveller for wanting to fly under the radar.
And, if a deterministic universe is true and they were never meant to attend the party, then really
their no-show is out of their hands, anyway. Nevertheless, say that our hypothetical means
of time travel works in such a way that you can at least go back through your own past to encounter
your own self… what would you actually say? Most surveys conducted with this question in mind show
that the majority of us would like to give some specific and personal advice - often pertaining to
certain, key choices you know that your younger self will have to make later on in their life.
These could range from the relatively minor, like encouraging them to learn a skill you
wish you’d had when you were young… to something major, like urging them to save somebody’s life
or, if our sci-fi story takes a darker turn, to take somebody’s life. What
would you do in this position? What words of wisdom or warning would you impart?
Even without the potential impossibility of meeting your past self in the first place,
however, time travel isn’t without its risks in general. While determinism is quite a cynical
way of approaching the topic, one benefit is that it doesn’t allow for paradoxes - because
you’ll always only ever be acting out events exactly as they are (or were) supposed to be.
But if determinism isn’t correct (and many believe it isn’t) then our trip to the past
is rife with paradox potential. Even with the most trivial of matters. Say, for example, you told or
influenced your younger self to buy a black car instead of a red one, you (from the future) will
still remember having owned the red car that has now never been bought. And that’s a headache.
But we usually imagine the effects of time travel on a bigger and more severe scale than this,
wherein a traveller goes back and changes a major event, such as they manage to kill Hitler before
he can commit the atrocities of the Second World War. The debate usually then goes that because
nobody has gone back and done this, we can either assume that time travel technology is impossible…
or that using time travel to kill Hitler is impossible. The so-called Hitler Paradox also
ties itself up because if anyone were able to travel back in time to change history,
then they themselves would never have gained the motivation to travel back in time to
change history to begin with, and so on, and so on. The same logic can be applied to
our hypothetical meeting with our younger self, too. It doesn’t need to cover such huge plans as
preventing world wars. Perhaps you tell yourself never to take a certain job, so then you don’t… so
then you never need to tell yourself not to take the job, so then you never travel back in time.
Is that for the better, or for the worse? There’s really no telling… because it’s an endless loop!
Ultimately, nobody knows what the outcome of causing any temporal paradox could be.
But there is another solution, one that allows for time travellers to manipulate
the past freely without causing a paradox: and that solution is parallel universes.
If infinite parallel universes exist for every choice somebody makes – which is the basis of
many a Many Worlds theory – then every time the past is changed there’s a new universe created,
where that particular piece of the past is different. In the context of today’s question,
it means that, somewhere out there, there are universes where you have met your past self. It’s
just that you haven’t in this one. And perhaps, in those other universes, the multiple versions of
you are seamlessly co-existing. But, even in this far out, hypothetical reality, there are still
problems. And any action that any version of you does could still have far-reaching consequences.
You might, for example, meet and tell your younger self to save somebody’s life, only for that person
to go on and do something terrible (in a separate universe, that isn’t the one you originally
travelled back from). Even tiny changes that you inspire in your past could, theoretically, cause
anything to happen - whether that’s you failing an exam in one universe because you walked on the
wrong side of the street, or it’s you accelerating a societal collapse in another because you chose
strawberry ice cream over vanilla. On the other hand, you could provoke positive changes in
alternate universes, too… The point is that in a reality where all outcomes are possible across
myriad parallel worlds, nothing is too unlikely. And meeting your younger self sets up endless
potential outcomes. Especially as there’s also no telling how you’d be able to get back to your home
universe, once you’d caused your own timeline to split off into two at an earlier date. To those
who knew you before, you could be lost forever… Unfortunately - or perhaps fortunately, depending
on the way you see it - it’s not likely that any of this will ever be of major concern to most
people. Even in an alternate world where time travel is possible, it’s likely to be heavily
guarded and regulated - much like space travel or nuclear weapons are today. Presided over only by
governments and organizations with a lot of money. And only ever used by specialist time travellers,
specially trained to avoid all paradoxes. The first rule that they’d be following could even be:
Never meet your younger self! Because another question at the
heart of today’s thought experiment is; do you have the right? Is it even up to you to decide
what’s better or not for the people in your life? What we can see is that any attempt to
go back and change your own timeline wouldn’t just affect you… but also everybody else you come into
contact with from that point forward. Sometimes in a small way and sometimes in a profound way.
This is another time travel phenomenon known as the butterfly effect, and it’s one of the
most popular arguments against ever meddling in past events. No matter how tempting it might be,
even if it were possible to meet a younger you… it probably wouldn’t be a good idea.
If all goes well, you might be able to avert wars and atrocities, or just improve
your own material conditions… but any attempt to communicate with yourself in the past would also
be fraught with risk, danger and world-ruining potential. So, maybe you shouldn’t be quite so
quick to look yourself up. Because that’s what would happen if you met your younger self.
What do you think? Is there anything we missed? Let us know in the comments, check out these other
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