Son of Durin
Engaged Member
- Jul 5, 2021
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One issue I see with going back in time and creating a paradox is that the further you go back, the more likely you are to cancel yourself. Now, maybe your team will still create a time machine and do other things, but you won't be part of it and then they'll go back and change other things that might bring you back into the equation while cancelling one or more of themselves.That is actually not accurate, what I mean is that, yes, *if* you built a time machine to do a single task then when that was done it would create a paradox. For example, builds time machine specifically to kill Hitler, goes kills Hitler, no need for time machine, = paradox.
However, while this is the usually "paradox" example given in movies and stories it is *very* easy to break out of. If the time machine was built simply to build a time machine and be able to go back in time (independent of a specific purpose) the paradox is nullified. You would always build the time machine because your goal was just to build a time machine. And short of removing yourself from the equation via past action there is no paradox that would remove the time machine from existence.
It's the obvious answer that most movies and stories miss. And even some actual theoretical physicists miss it too. The creator of the time machine who is doing it just to have done it. Nothing done in the past, outside of them no longer being, would stop them because they would always just want to build a time machine because they wanted to. It is the most likely way it would be done anyway. The inventors of most things aren't doing it for a specific reason, but simply because they can. And if that was the case with time travel then that motive is immutable by past actions.
In fact, this removes nearly all paradoxes.
Of course, an accidental time machine (as seems to be the case with this one) also removes most paradoxes as well. Since, for example, Jenny or the MC's dad working at the lab wouldn't actually change much other than their outcome from the accident. The power plant would still exist, the collider would still be there, and the experiments would still be done. Thus, the time machine created by the accident would still likely come about, just perhaps at a slightly later or earlier date, but with time machines the exact date of its creation is largely irrelevant to the impact it can have on the timeline.
For example, you kill Hitler, but one of the people Hitler killed, or otherwise died during WW2, turned out to be a rotten SOB that kills your father or grandfather before you are conceived, or courted your grandmother and married her, preventing your grandfather from doing so (unless he was the milkman or mailman and your grandma was a ho). If you go back centuries or millennia and take out someone like Mohammed, maybe you prevent 9/11 and the conflicts that followed, but you've also changed the entire fabric of the world since there would be no crusades, no Templars, maybe no Masons, and then the number of people that can kill off or hook up an ancestor instead of the one that did originally increase exponentially, decreasing your chance of existence exponentially.
Observing history via time travel would be an interesting concept; attempting to change it too far back would likely be an unmitigated disaster.