The time travel paradox


Time travel as movie concept is sexy. That much is true.

The point of time travel is to change (or not to change) the past, and who doesn't have that fantasy in one form or another.

But travel to the past creates the paradox: that changes to the past could evisciate the present. This leads time travel stories to invent ever more complicated mechanics to explain away the paradox.

However, I can't remember ever seeing a story that deals with the second simpliest solution (The simplest being that time travel to the past is imposible): that there can be no inconsistency since the past aready includes all of the incursions ever made into it. This then creates a new paradox: that the future therefore is predetermined, and cannot be changed either. This then evisciates free will.

Does anyone know of a story that wrestles with this?

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The only real way to answer this question is with my fist hitting your face.

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I thought of one ... "12 Monkeys" with Bruce Willis

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[deleted]

Except that the machine could travel back and forth in time with you, as in the movie "Back to the Future".

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while the trilogy are great films, Back to the Future makes a mockery of time-travel theories.

12 Monkeys does a very good job with time travel, having only one minor slip up (which is way better than most other movies). And no, if the "past" is already set then that does not mean the future is also written in stone. Just because you can't go back to the past and change something (if we're going with the notion that whatever it is that you "change" has actually already happened in the timeline you exist in) that does not mean that the actions that occur right now cannot be altered by human will... but also, time travel is tricky. Because (if time travel was real) there could never truly be a past, present, or future. everything is merely relative.

I personally don't believe that humans will ever accomplish time travel because if we did, wouldn't someone have come back and told us by now?

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In theory time travel is possible if one could travel with the speed of light, but this only applies to future trips and it's all relative and non reversable. No going back to the past.

If you want to view paradise, simply look around

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No, because that would be altering the past, hence change the future.
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I'd recommend Primer and Los Cronocrimenes (Timecrimes). Although there's no way around the paradox of time travel, I was the most satisfied by these of any others. I won't tell you how they deal with time travel for risk of spoiling them. Definitely check them out though.

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Time travel is real. However, one can only travel as far back in the past as some has traveled from that time point to the future.
So if time travel is perfected in 2015 and someone travels to the future, then the farthest that one could travel back in time to will always and forever more be 2015.
Put another way, just as soon as we invent time travel to the future, then visitors from the future will start showing up.
One more thing about time travel. Two different time events cannot be mutually dependent. A thing that happens in the present cannot be cause by someone traveling from the future, if that event in the future is dependent on the thing that happened in the present. In other words, you cannot travel back in time and be your own father no matter how sexy Hollywood thinks the story line is.

"Mediocre Marx Brothers is better than no Marx Brothers!"

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Time travel is fake. You know how we know that? Because nobody has ever come from the future to tell us otherwise.

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This then evisciates free will
I don't know. It's like saying, I used my free will yesterday, but I can't go back and change what I did therefore I wasn't using free will. I am using free will right now but tomorrow it will already have happened. What I did yesterday wasn't predetermined but it did happen in the past. So both things are true.

I choose to believe what I was programmed to believe

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think of it this way: Be on the phone in New York, and phone your friend in Sydney, Australia. Count to five to him, time-jump to him to hear yourself speak, then time-jump back, and stop counting before you reach the number 2.



"...i'm a mountain man, and i love mountain women..."

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There's a third option and it's a real scientific theory: parallel universes. If someone were to travel back in time they would simply be in a newly created timeline that has no effect whatsoever on the timeline that the traveler came from. He can then go ahead and kill his grandfather or whatnot and it will not make him disappear. There's no paradox.

The theory also applies if you don't travel back in time. "Everything that can happen, does happen" and creates new timelines all the time. So if you roll a dice, that moment branches out into different timelines letting you roll a 1, a 2, a 3, etc. all from the same roll, but *you* will only see one outcome because each *you* chooses one branch, one possible universe/timeline.

As each newly branched off universe continuously branches off into yet more universes, you end up with possible universes that can be vastly different from each other. Sliders (1995) is a good example of this idea.

Here's the Many worlds interpretation article on wikipedia. Some of the illustrations in it make the idea easy to understand.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worlds_interpretation

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Nice post, save for one little thing:

"If someone were to travel back in time, from that moment on they would simply be in a newly created timeline"
Fixed.

Other than that, yes, that's the most acceptable theory nowadays within the scientific community (and the one that sounds the most logical, really).

Still, there's also the "time bastard" theory, along with several others:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temporal_paradox

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Although the sequels don't hold to it, the original Terminator plays a bit with the idea that the incursions always existed, with Kyle Reese, a man from the future, being John Conner's father. He would have had to have alway been John's father.

Also, there a deleted end scene showing the remains of the T-800 being found in the plant, thus causing Skynet to be created. It's travel to the past is necessary for Skynet to exist.

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