Subject:  Re: a no longer so simple question
Date:  Fri, 02 Oct 1998 15:00:38 EDT
From:  "chad hadsell"

Yeah, i guess that does make sense. thanx for clearing that up.  I love pondering questions like these, and it has been fun discussing the mechanisms of time.  One more thing about the future is still bothering me, though.  If i went to the future, while i was there, would my future self cease to exist?  Because it hasn't been decided yet that i would ever return to be able to become my future self.  Then, when i did return (to the past), the future would simply change  to include me once more?  What happens when that point in the future becomes my present?  Would i be there to greet my past self?  It seems like the "first" time i went to the future, i would NOT meet my self, but maybe from then on i WOULD, because it has been decided that i WILL return to the past.  Is this proper reasoning?

--chad

Chad--

As a matter of fact, Chad, that's exactly what happens in the film Flight of the Navigator--we see the story of the A-B timeline, as Davey disappears from time and comes back eight years later, not having aged at all.  Although in that case, it was high-velocity space travel and not time travel which removed him from history for eight years, it would have been the same had it been time travel forward--having left the past and arriving in the future, he would have been absent from the timeline for that eight years.  But by the end of the film, he's taken back in time to roughly the moment he left, and we discuss the complications of that.  In this C-D time segment, he is a temporal duplicate of himself who came back in time from the future; in eight years the spaceship will return with the version of him who belongs in this timeline, and find the other version of him already there--well, you can read it there.  But in short, I think you've got it--if you go into the future, you aren't there; but then if you return to the past, you restore your presence, and in the C-D segment, you find yourself in the future...these things sound so complicated, but I think you've got it.

Thanks for the note.