What will your age be after coming back from past travel?

What would you expect your age to be after returning from the past travel? This is one of the most commonly asked questions in time travel.

Some people think that they would age as much as the time spent in the past. This means if a person travels to 1962 and stays there for 10 years, they would be 62 years old when they return. Others believe that whatever age you are when you leave for the past, is what you will be when you come back from it. If a person leaves at 20 years old, he’ll come back with only 20 more years of life after spending 10 years in 1962.

How would time travel work?

If time travel ever becomes possible and you travel to the past, whatever you do there would completely affect that particular timeline. A different world would evolve in that particular universe. But the present will be untouched. It’s possible some people could go back and save or change something. But this would not affect any other universe or timeline.

Wer have a strong opinion that either time will move slowly/faster for you or you will not age at all, throughout past the time travel.

This might sound a little confusing, so let me explain it with an easy example. Let’s say you’re in this universe and you’ve been working as a police officer for 20 years. One day you travel to the past and spend 10 years there, raising your kids and living a happy life.

When you come back from the past, you’ll still be living the exact same life (the one with 20 years of experience), so there wouldn’t be any changes on any timeline or universe, just on the one inside the time machine. So you could have changed the past, but it won’t affect any other universes.

This effect will only be seen in the new universe that has been created when you arrive from the future. It can be changed if someone goes there to do something, but again this would not affect any other universe/timeline. And every other timeline would remain untouched as well.

So let’s say you’re living a happy life and you go back to 1970 and spend 10 years there raising your kids. When you come back to the present time, a different universe will exist inside the time machine (one of your kids) and nothing else would change in any other world or timeline.

But still: What will happen to your age if you travel to the past?

how time works during and after time travel

Basically, there are three possibilities we can imagine:

Either you age as much as the time you spend,
Or you get reverted back to your original age,
Or time will work differently for you. (Either slower or faster or you do not age at all)

The most obvious answer is that you’ll age as much as the time spent, just like a normal person. There’s no problem in this explanation, but there’s something else that’s not so obvious. Will time work the same way in that particular universe? Or, will it go by faster or slower for you? If you go back in time, you might experience some kind of slowing down of time. Or, you may be living in the past with almost no change at all.

For us to know the answer to this question, we must first have a real theoretical model/concept of time travel, which we don’t. So, it’s just impossible to answer those questions. But we are going to rate those possibilities based on what we assume is most likely:

Time will work differently for you . (60/100)
You age as much as the time you spend. (35/100)
You get reverted back to your original age. (5/100)

According to us, it’s most likely that if you travel to the past, the word “time” would mean different. We have a strong opinion that either time will move slowly/faster for you or you will not age at all, throughout past the time travel. Or maybe, although you will live exactly the same amount of time you spend, it will not look like that.

Read: What if the universe is just an illusion created by our minds?

These are our pure assumptions based on what we have acknowledged about the concepts of time travel and the working mechanism of time, and we have placed here these opinions based on that.