How To Find Out Where in a Time Loop You Are

True, while every position in a time loop is supposedly "identical" to its predecessor and subsequently, it's follower, there is a way to find out where in that loop you are.

What's a time loop? Why am I talking?

A time loop is some kind of situation in which there is a time machine involved. Since the fabric of time will not allow anything to actually be "changed," the time traveller who chooses to go back in time to the age of dinosaurs must have existed there in actuality 365 million years ago.

I saw a movie called "Somewhere in Time," a long time ago. Christopher Reeve, Dr. Quinn, whatever. Anyway, the plot revolves around an object (watch, ring, I don't remember) that is given to the man (Reeve) by an old woman at the beginning of the movie. He keeps it, and somehow stumbles into a time warp that takes him back to the...well, like fifty years earlier. He meets a woman and falls in love with her, and gives her the watch/ring. He dies in that time. Later, the woman grows old and one day sees her love alive, and young. And gives him the watch/ring - thus completing the time loop. Everything is the same, correct? Well...

Everything but the age of the ring. Every time through the time loop, the watch/ring actually gets fifty years older, as the old woman holds onto it for fifty years and the guy just keeps bringing the same item back in time over and over again. If he wanted to, he could scratch his future self messages on the back. Eventually, the watch/ring would be so corroded that it wouldn't even be recognizable, usable, or wanted by anyone. You'd have to put it through carbon dating just to find out how long it had been travelling through this particular loop.

Find out how old the watch/ring is, and find out how long the particular loop you've been trapped in has been repeating. Man, and you thought I was going to tell you something practical.