I wish future me could reassure me that I'm going to be OK.

Post Reply New Topic

Paradoxes by dammed. I wish I could skip ahead to when I've graduated and when I'm learning to drive. Or when lockdown lessens, whichever comes first. This feels like a chapter of my life that's been going on far too long. I feel stagnant. Stuck inside with my thoughts. I'm stressed. Bored. Anxious. Worried that my adult life won't be what I'd hoped it would be and that I'll never feel fulfilled.



I just wish I knew. So much uncertainty. A futile wish, but a wish all the same.

Well driving can be fun if you look at it in the right ways & I'll also point out that I never graduated from anywhere yet either but I spent the whole last two years in paid internships anyway & it looks like I'll be hired by the same company again.

I dropped out of high school & I get to work with robots & lasers pretty regularly.

Excuse my run on sentence - the point is that I'm a sports car nerd with more anxieties about waking up & leaving my house than about driving. I guess it's always going to be something but I realized lately that I've been anxious about these things before I had enough coffee to remembering what I worked past anyway.

_________________
"Standing on a well-chilled cinder, we see the fading of the suns, and try to recall the vanished brilliance of the origin of the worlds."
-Georges Lemaitre
"I fly through hyperspace, in my green computer interface"
-Gem Tos

I wish I knew too my friend. Don't be disheartened though. Go out there and make it so!

One of the leading speculations on Chronodynamics is that if I would go back in time to comfort and encourage my childhood self (not having had such a thing occur to me in my lifetime), the timeline would diverge and my other self would grow up making different decisions and taking different actions, while I continued to grow old and eventually died in his timeline.

Meanwhile, in my old timeline, I would have disappeared, perhaps forever.  The only way that I might be able to return is to go back in time and prevent my earlier self from intervening with my childhood self ... but then there would be three of us in that timeline: me as a miserable and lonely child, me as the man who wanted to comfort and encourage me as a child, and me as the man who prevented the comfort and encouragement from happening.

Then there would be two timelines, and ...

I need to lie down.  My head hurts.

@Fnord

I'm currently reading a fiction book where the heroes have to save the younger version of a supervillain, that time-travelled into their time, from death. There is some discussion over what might happen if they fail to save her.

With time travel plots, it's basically a given that you're going to end up with confusing paradoxes at one point or another. You have to suspend your disbelief considerably.

I remember seeing a cartoon with a time travel plot and their solution to complications was to have a monster that ate anyone it considered to be an anomaly in that time stream.

Personally, in the hypothetical chance we do discover time travel, I think it would be a heavily restricted and banned for most people. You'd likely need something that exists both now and at the time you'd like to travel to and something that was in that exact same position it was back then. TV shows that feature a plot regarding travelling between dimensions often have similar in-universe rules. Yes, I am aware that media is different from real life (although it can impact it - such as inspiring inventions or influencing attitudes).

I think it would be more likely to come in the form of an AI-led VR experience. For your past self, you could feed it information (such as photos, general data held on you and reports) with this it could generate an estimation of what such a person would look and act like, then project it in front of you in a form of augmented reality. Granted such a system would likely be prone to biases and error. I think that someone in the future will probably attempt this, if they aren't already, but the ethics of such a program would be brought into question - especially data usage and security. Of course this computer generated program wouldn't be you, but if such a program was constantly tweaked - perhaps it would become disturbingly close. I can only speculate.

As for a future self, that's more complex. Your future isn't set, although some could argue that it is. It could compare data of people similar to you, consider your past and present then make an estimation based on all three. We can do this with physical appearances somewhat, based on established patterns of aging. Your other self would need some form of intelligence also, which leads us into the issue of when something is considered sentient or not.