Did the writers not watch Back to The Future I, II, or III?
"You must not come in contact with your future self Marty, the results could be devestating..."

Same matter touching itself, so on and so forth. How can future Peter touch himself and transport himself into a different body with no apparent repercussions? Shouldn't some sort of gaping black hole have opened up in the space/time continuom?

Then maybe Caitlyn could fall out of said hole and explain where the hell she's been.

I also think everyone makes a good point the pPeter should have all of the powers of his future self since they have come in contact. I think at some point Peter will just become the Zeus of this Heros Olympia that is being built, and he will just eveporate into some form of pure energy that wil encompass the universe (sort of like Galactus or Powder).

And I have to get this out of my system even though I know that time travel in this show we all love does not exactly follow logic. fPeter should cease to exist the moment the future is changed. If the butterfly effect is to make sense, then fPeter should have dissappeared the moment he pulled the trigger and a different version should have come to check on the consequences. Just my .02.

Does anyone else think that Papa Petrelli is actually Doc from Back to The Future just screwing things up until he gets a world he actually likes lol

I don't think that heroes is going to adhere to a normal future theory from other tv shows or movies. I mean theres the back to the future theory. There is way too many theories about how time travel works, and what happens when future person meetes their present person.

BTTF is based on the idea that time is linear. But Heroes, as far as I can can tell, seems to work along the lines that alternate timelines coexist. Alterations will have an impact on the future, sometimes an unpredictable one, but all those futures exist in alternate universes, so that your former self doesn't cease to exist when another one enters its timeline.

I've asked this in "Behind the Eclipse", hope they answer it there...

I think that the Heroes universe will have time rules more similar to those seen in the Futurama movie. Future Peter is inevitably doomed because he is a time clone and cannot exist with the present version of himself.

Actually, having watched the same shows you did (and read the GNs, as you have), I came to exactly the opposite conclusion. lol

Heroes, as far as I can determine, is operating under a linear, alterable, time stream.

It's the reason (IMHO) they've deliberately referenced Ray Bradbury's A Sound Of Thunder so often.

Do alternate futures cease to exist one the past is modified, or are they still there but not accesable by the time traveler?

I would say they cease to exist. The future is rewritten from the point of the change, erasing any previous future history and putting a new one in place.

I don't agree. Apart from the "you must not meet your former self"-stuff, the handling of time travelling in BTTF and Heroes is quite similar. Check the scene in BTTF II where Doc's explaining Marty the change of the timeline and why it didn't affect them. That's pretty close to how the immunity of time travellers is shown in Heroes.

I agree with Synch that the timeline's alterable and there aren't any parallel timelines. Remember Hiro trying to safe Charlie in S1: After he travelled back, the picture of Charlie's birthday changed. If we had alternative timelines it would have stayed the same and Hiro would have ended up in different timeline, unable to travel back to Ando.