Some time ago, I threw a simple question onto Quora about the possibility of two different directions of time meeting.
my question
One of the answers I received felt quite sharp:
Reading it felt like getting a whiteboard eraser thrown at me by an old professor.
Harsh. But after thinking it over, the critique wasn’t actually attacking the idea, but rather how I framed the question. He read my question with a classical assumption: time as a single straight line (linear).
past → present → future
In that model, he’s right. There are no “two of me” that can meet. “Yesterday me” and “tomorrow me” are just different points on the same path. Their meeting happens through the continuity of identity and memory. The logic is neat.
But my question was actually more like this:
“What if there are two observers moving through time in opposite directions?”
Observer A: past → future Observer B: future → past
Now, this seems to no longer be about identity or time in memory, but about the geometric structure of time.
Let me try to break it down: If time is linear, two people with opposite temporal directions might be able to meet, but only if there is a shared synchronization point.
Imagine the direction of time:
They could meet at a midpoint if “meeting” is defined within external coordinates. This is the most mind-bending part for me. If B sees aging as turning back into a child, it’s because the “future” for B is the “past” for A.
For A: Childhood → Will become an adult For B: Adulthood → Will become a child.
If they meet, it’s hard to imagine what the subjective experience would be like at that point. Maybe it’s not that time stops, but my understanding of time starts losing its shape.
When I try to imagine this within the linear model, the interaction results in a Biological Anomaly.
Imagine observer B, who is supposed to be “growing backward” toward childhood, suddenly having to interact with observer A, who is growing into adulthood. (Observer B, from A’s perspective, appears to be moving backward to childhood. But observer B considers growing into childhood as “normal”.)
Physically, this creates dissonance: should their cells divide or merge?
At this point, my head is about to explode. This linear model makes the meeting of two time directions feel like a cosmic accident impossible for the brain to process. But, what if the problem isn’t the direction, but the shape of the path?
The old professor was right that my language was “sloppy” if forced into a rigid linear ruler. But what if time doesn’t stretch from end to end, but loops circularly like the Cell Cycle or Homeostasis?
(To be continued …..)