That’s what I think time travel would truly be like. Yes you can travel back and time and change the past but when you go back to your present nothing would have changed.
Because once you change the past you start a separate timeline.
It gets really complex when your time traveling triggers an infinite time loop that you personally never experienced.
Example: You go back in time to warn yourself about a coming war or disaster, but you get interrupted before you can finish, so your other self panics and disaster proofs everything, unwittingly preventing the disaster. When the “war or disaster” never happens, you feel silly and stressed, so you go back in time to tell yourself not to worry so much.
You’d have the original timeline where you experienced the disaster, another one where you were warned by your previous self and didn’t experience it, and a third one where you were told by your future self not to worry about it and experienced it. If you kept this up you’d create infinite timelines unless Loki culled them or something.
With a branching timelines theory you don’t create loops you create cascades. Since you can’t make changes to an existing timeline you create a new timeline every time you go back. You would end up spawning an infinite number of timelines.
That’s what I think time travel would truly be like. Yes you can travel back and time and change the past but when you go back to your present nothing would have changed.
Because once you change the past you start a separate timeline.
It gets really complex when your time traveling triggers an infinite time loop that you personally never experienced.
Example: You go back in time to warn yourself about a coming war or disaster, but you get interrupted before you can finish, so your other self panics and disaster proofs everything, unwittingly preventing the disaster. When the “war or disaster” never happens, you feel silly and stressed, so you go back in time to tell yourself not to worry so much.
You’d have the original timeline where you experienced the disaster, another one where you were warned by your previous self and didn’t experience it, and a third one where you were told by your future self not to worry about it and experienced it. If you kept this up you’d create infinite timelines unless Loki culled them or something.
If you got interrupted while warning about the disaster, what makes you think you wouldn’t be interrupted while saying not to worry?
If you remember what interrupted your future self you might be able to prevent it from happening again.
You. The person who interrupted you was yourself.
With a branching timelines theory you don’t create loops you create cascades. Since you can’t make changes to an existing timeline you create a new timeline every time you go back. You would end up spawning an infinite number of timelines.