If you were to travel back in time would you be younger or would you just see a younger version of yourself?

Question

If you were to travel back in time would you be younger or would you just see a younger version of yourself?

Answer 1

That is a very significant question.  It might be that if one could travel back in time to a given date and place in history (that they happen to have been living in), they might not even be aware that the time travel had occurred.  If one goes back in time, the transfer might be so complete that the traveler couldn't differentiate between the future self and the self of the "current" past.  I believe that most folks think of time travel into the past as being like what the movies suggest, but it might be a far more complete process than that.  After all, it is the traveler's own time line.

Your thought observation might even have oncovered a hidden limit on any one individual's ability to travel backwards in time.  Who is to say that ones consciousness could survive time travel back in time past their birth?  Further, this might even suggest that it wouldn't be possible for any one person to travel into the future.

Your question raises some very intriguing thoughts and possibilities.

  

Answer 2

I believe so BUT you would be seeing a totally different *version* of yourself. I say this because I believe that when you travel back in time, you would enter a slightly different parallel universe, 1 of the infinite supply. Therefore, you would see yourself, younger of course, but different in slight or even extreme ways.

Answer 3

If you travel back in time you are still older than when you started, your journey, your personal time line is longer, despite the direction of travel, it is older by the amount of time it takes for you to travel that distance in time, plus whatever age you were, when you started out on this little trip..

.The vision you would have of yourself, in a mirror, would show that to be true, but the vision of your younger self, would not be you, because you have changed, and are no longer that person, that was the person you were, when this happened, it is not the "you" that now exists...but the "was" of what you were......

Answer 4

I've been back in time. As far as 1945, the year I was born.

I found I was not even 1 year old, even at the end of that year.

Glad I didn't look at 1944.

Answer 5

The question is moot.  It is impossible to travel back in time, only forwards at different rates, depending on your velocity.

If it were somehow possible (after watching a Quantum Leap marathon on TV, for example), you would be yourself since your frame of reference is based on the time that you started your trip.  Nature conserves energy by nature, and reversing your aging would require excess energy so it is not expected to occur in my fantasyland at least!