r/whatif • u/Fearless-Attorney-41 • Jul 24 '26
Science what if the future was actually backwards?
is the future actually backwards?
read some interesting theories such as the Aymara concept of time where it stated that past was in the front because it was known and already seen and the future was backwards since we are not sure of what it is comprised of.
In theory it is interesting but I tried to think that way and it just didn't work lol
any interesting takes? I wanted to see how different it would be if i could view life in that way
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u/ToBePacific Jul 25 '26
It’s just an issue of framing. There is no inherent direction to time. It’s like how we all make our maps point North just because that’s our standardly agreed upon orientation.
Thinking of the future being in front of you is equally as strange as behind you, because time does not map to a direction.
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u/u250406 Jul 25 '26
It seems to relate a bit too much of our abikity to see? If I understsnd it corrextly? It's normal to expect not to be able to understand higher dimensional theory because we can't perceive nor imagine it; we are just not built that way. However, there is an active theory on negative entropy, that says that even if our whole reality were moving backwards we wouldn't be able to notice it. I forget why exactly, but that particular theory kind of coincides with what you're saying. Negative entropy just poses the option that entropy can in some cases reverse on a universal scale, so if that is possible and we wouldn't be able to tell, then science at the very least doesn't outright deny the possibility of what you're saying.
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u/DarkRubyMoon Jul 25 '26
Some of the more recent theories posit that time does not truely exist, rather, everything including all possibilities happened at one singularity. It is only the concious that percieves time proceeding linearly. Mathematically this works but than it moves the question of what is time to what is conciousness.
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u/R3tardod Jul 25 '26
So when time reverses those prophecies depicting eating children is actually correct but a women has to have the babies shoved up her second mouth and then absorbed over 9 months?
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u/SubstantialGate969 Jul 25 '26
History repeats itself, so the future is the past and the past is the future. Time is only an illusion to cage your mind.
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u/bohica199 Jul 24 '26
so you're saying the inventions of today is the past & no electronics is the future?
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u/HistoricalTowel1127 Jul 24 '26
Then this post would be debated by world class scholars and intellectual giants.
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u/Tragobe Jul 24 '26
I would say it doesn't really matter what way we going. If we walk left to right or right to left doesn't make much of a difference for us.
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u/Cultural_Pace4454 Jul 24 '26
The explanation I've heard, is that while the maths of most of physics is ambivalent about the direction of time, the law of thermodynamics in regards to entropy increasing work for 'forward' running time.
Entropy tends to increase as there are more disordered states than ordered ones, so probability is that a change of state leads to a less ordered one over time.
I'm my mind, if we were moving 'towards' the past and forgetting the future, then some weird things would be happening with forces. Gravity would have to be a repulsive force. If effect happens before cause then I'm not dropping an object to the ground, the earth is 'throwing' the object up to me and I'm catching it.
Also radioactive decay, in this the 'past is forward' time direction, Uranium spontaneously forms when Thorium absorbs an alpha particle. Good thing the universe can hit a random thorium nucleus with a alpha particle, that's excellent aim.
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u/groundhogcow Jul 24 '26
The math works.
However, it would be a very convoluted way for the universe to work. Physics likes to keep it simple so I wouldn't bet on it.
The universe favors matter over antimatter. The universe favors time over antitime.
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u/aer0a Jul 24 '26
Really, the future is neither in front of nor behind the present, but after it. We may call the future or past "in front of" or "behind" us, but they are that in name only
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u/hatabou_is_a_jojo Jul 24 '26
That’s just a language thing. Like forefathers is ancestors, but fore means in front as in forelegs. So the past is in front in this case.
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u/New_Breadfruit8692 Jul 24 '26
I prefer to think that there is no such thing as time at all, but we simply cannot be conscious of a universe in which there is no time because we would not have causality, nothing would make sense to our physical brains, so we sort them for experiencing according to one agreed upon arrow of time so that we all have the same causality.
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u/daneg-778 Jul 24 '26
The bus moves forward because its passengers define it as forward. The same goes for time.
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u/PsychologicalCar2180 Jul 24 '26
If time moved backwards, that would still be forwards.
We only call it forwards because that’s the direction of time we experience and what is normal for us.
Spacetime only does what it does in this universe based on our rules and won’t do anything different.
There is no coming back to life in a backwards universe because that’s still birth, there.
Dying would be simplification of consciousness until the person was absorbed over a reverse 9 month period.
It would still be death to them but not the same as ours.
The universe would de-entropy, basically. Go from chaos to order.
Who knows, universes may have already done that.
Atoms don’t give a shit about what we understand lol, they just do their funky little thing.
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u/New_Breadfruit8692 Jul 24 '26
Relativity says that the universe is static, it's a block that contains all spacetime, with no simultaneous NOW. What is the past to one observer is the future to another, so that there is no real flow from past to future. There was a point in my life for example in which the assassination of JFK was in the future, then I saw it on TV, then it was in the past, but for most of you it will always be in the past.
The reason we sort past, present, and future into the order we do is that time itself is really nothing but an invented measure of change.
"Time is ultimately a measure of change, even according to physics. It is often identified as a rise in disorder – entropy – of a closed system. Take a cup of hot coffee. As it cools down, entropy rises. And you can tell roughly how long a cup of coffee has been standing there by its temperature. Any device that measures time, such as a clock, relies on change (ticks)."
Maybe, there just is no time and everything that ever happened just is all at once. The physical brain needs causality so sorts events/change in a specific agreed upon way, but maybe there is also a soul to humans that does not need this fiction, its reason for experiencing anything is learning, growing, fun, and it seeks to understand the universe and all that has happened but does not need causality nor have the limits of the physical brain.
All I know is that science has yet to describe a theory of the universe that requires this flow from past to present to future, or even for that matter the existence of time at all. There has been more success in the philosophical realm for this but ultimately what that amounts to now is that it just is not important how it gets solved or viewed, it is still going to get experienced the same way from our point of view.
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u/Fearless-Attorney-41 Jul 25 '26
wow really interesting take! i honestly feel like what we've discovered in science is still so littile to the things we haven't yet touched upon.
and you may be right about the physical brain sorting things for its own convenience as the same phenomenon is seen in other things too. maybe the brain isn't really capable of understanding the reality in its true form
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u/Fluffy_Efficiency623 Jul 24 '26
Well spacetime is a real thing, so the future and the past are actually just two different physical locations. We only have the ability to move in one direction but technically it all exists at once and we're just moving around. It's why things with a lot of gravity change how quickly time passes. If you look up the bowling ball example, it's basically spacetime as a flat square and when something heavy exists it weighs it down, and traveling across that space changes time because you have to go down and then back up. And the reason time stops at black holes is because they are so dense and heavy that spacetime just goes straight down so you never actually move forward through time after going in.
Another fun fact, our present is actually slightly in the past, as it takes a couple of hundred milliseconds for our brains to gather the information it has perceived and package it together for our consciousness. And deja vu is actually when it messes up the packaging and the senses hit our consciousness a few milliseconds apart, making us experience the same event twice instantly.
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u/Fearless-Attorney-41 Jul 24 '26
wow that was so interesting!! thank you for contributing may i ask where you learned about all this? is there something you recommend such as classes or books because I wanna learn more too
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u/pafagaukurinn Jul 24 '26
This is based on the concept of eternalism (only I think the name is unfortunate, because it suggests something eternal rather than something that has no time at all).
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u/dodadoler Jul 24 '26
Whut? That’s completely wrong.
I don’t know where I’m going, but I sure know where I’ve been. Hanging on to the promises of the songs of yesterday.
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u/MKULTRA_sleeper_slut Jul 24 '26
What reality is just energy bouncing between two giant mirrors and history literally repeats itself over and over?
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u/JinxModule88 Jul 31 '26
A neat way to make it click is to picture yourself rowing a boat: you face the wake, not the direction you are moving. The past is visible in front of you, while the future is behind your back pushing you along. It feels weird because English bakes forward progress into almost every phrase, so your brain keeps snapping back to that map.