Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2016/07/14/whats-the-likelihood-that-yo.html
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What always strikes me as really weird is when you see someone who looks sort of like someone you knew a long time ago–like an old college friend you have seen in a while–and they look the way that person looked then, and not the way they would look now, like 20+ years older.
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When I was younger I looked like my dad’s clone. And I have met someone who looked the spitting image of my older brother.
Then again, we have fairly generic German faces, so the similarity should not be a surprise.
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I apparently had a doppelganger in college; I never met him, but friends said he looked similar. None of those friends used precise measuring tools to compare characteristics, and I’m not sure how many of them were good at recognizing faces as opposed to relatively face-blind.
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Also trippy when you encounter someone who looks uncannily like someone you know, but is of a different race. I’ve seen a few people like that.
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I’ve heard lots of stories from friends who’ve had run-ins with my doppelgangers. A few years back, my wife saw someone who looked just like me, only 20 years older. Similar features, build, posture, clothing style, carrying a bag similar to one I’d typically use, eating my favorite brand and flavor of granola bars.
My logical conclusion is that future-me will have traveled to the past to prevent some sort of apocalypse that wiped out the world’s supply of Nature Valley Oats’n’Honey granola bars. Or maybe temporal tourism is going to be a thing and for some reason I chose early 2000’s Boston out of all of time and space.
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If you think that’s disturbing, flip it around; what if you are the copy and not the other way around?
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When I was about 20 or 22, when I poked around Rasputins or Amoeba music in Berkeley, I would get asked now and again if I was Todd Barnes from TSOL. It wasn’t exactly flattering (he wasn’t a handsome fellow, nor am I), but I confess I did enjoy the nervous anticipation of someone bringing up a TSOL album for me to sign, although I never pretended to be him once the conversation started.
Years later now, I do a much better job of being a fake Trader Joe’s employee, given my penchant for wearing aloha shirts. I no longer explain away that I’m not a TJ employee, I just point the folks to the right place if I know where it is.
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I see scruffy white beard men walking around everywhere that resemble me. It’s crazy, I know.
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That’s weird, your profile pic reminds me of TSOL too.
[note “Flowers by the Door” sarcasm]
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I looked exactly like my mother at 23 when I was 19 to 27 or so. I have a poster size photo of her holding me at 2 months old. It used to be right behind my desk, as an example of the size of posters we could print. People I worked with every day asked me whose baby I was holding. Shockingly the same.
The only reason I don’t currently look like she did at my age is weight. If I weighed what she weighed, we would be a match.
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Ever since I watched Anna to the Infinite Power, I’ve always wondered if I was indeed just a copy. 
It’s currently streaming on Amazon, so I might have to rewatch it, and find out if my childhood fantasies are all retroactively ruined.
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People tell me I have one, but I’m much better looking than mine.
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There are only so many genes in the world which specify the shape of the face
That’s not quite how genetics work.
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Well of course I have a doppelganger, but I can’t for the life of me get Sean Connery’s accent down.
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Not the same thing, but I had a similar experience hearing the stories of other people with Aspergers once I found out I had it. It’s not that everyone’s the same, but a lot of stuff that I thought made me different was actually a less common kind of typical. Experiences, behaviour, perspectives on life, personality traits, even physical appearance to a certain extent. It’s weird.
A while ago my brother discovered another guy with the same name as him (unusually, the same spelling too) who was blogging on the same topics in theology and was also based in Scotland.
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I did have a doppelganger, but I had it surgically removed.
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100%. In college I constantly met people who looked A LOT like someone I knew but were not. I just had a much greater pool of people I saw everyday.
My Mother saw mine one day. She was so sure it was me, she called after her. Later that day she called to ask me why I ignored her earlier. I was over 500 miles away at the time.
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