If one day we discover that traveling through time is as easy as moving left and right, forward and backward or up and down, then what ramifications would this have for our temporal existence?
At present, we live, we reproduce and we die. But if time travel were possible how might this sequence become jumbled?
Would there be any strange complications?
What are the paradoxes of time travel?
The most commonly cited paradox involving time travel describes how you could erase yourself from existence by going back and killing your own grandfather. By doing this, you would remove the possibility of your even being born. But if that's the case, then, who came back to kill your grandpa? If you don't exist, you could never have traveled back in time. So, your grandpa must therefore live and go back to have a child who in turn produces you and we're back to the paradox once more.
Strangely, this paradox is solvable using nothing more than the original premise itself. Because cause and effect govern our universe. Any action you take in the past would have an impact on the timeline of the future from the very nanosecond you arrived. You would begin to affect your destiny in ways you could not control. Move a single atom one nanometer and you could change the course of Earth's history. Therefore, the moment you arrived in the past ready to settle your beef with Grandpa. You'd be instantly erased before you'd stepped out of your time machine. Let alone pulled the trigger.
Time-travel would basically reset the clock of reality to whichever point you travel to and this would happen every single time you went back.
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If you successfully managed to travel back through time, would you even know what you've done?
Let's say you're an average person with an average family, an average job and an average grasp on history. Right now, you can probably remember raising your kids and your first day at work. But what all of these memories be erased as soon as you arrived in the past?
These memories were created in a certain timeline. Our timeline, they did not occur in the timeline you now inhabit. So, is it even possible for these memories to travel through time with you and exists in the past? Or as your mind just had the factory reset button pushed? Alternatively, if your memories have endured a trip backward through time, then, surely you can use them to change your future. With your knowledge of the future, you can now make alterations to the way things panned out. Hate your kids? Just avoid ever meeting your partner or simply try for kids on a different day when a whole new set of sperms are competing for a shot at life. And your former children are left to die on a piece of dried-up tissue.
Solving this paradox is even weirder than the last one because if you can go backward in time and use the knowledge from the future to inform the past, then, all of human history should be one perfect utopia in the far future when mankind has a solution for every problem at nose-up. We could send this info back to the earliest days of man and prevent every war famine and fidgets spinor that ever came to be. But this creates a paradox similar to the first entry whereby if none of those grotesque things ever occurred, the conditions to enable our future utopia would never have existed either. Thankfully, the solution to this is to be found in yet another paradox, the Bootstrap paradox.
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The Bootstrap paradox describes a situation where a single object or piece of information is sent back in time only to become trapped in an infinite loop of cause and effect.
Imagine, if you went back 20 years and gave Dr. Dre the idea to charge 200 bucks for 10$ headphones by putting a sticker on them. Well, eventually Dre would steal this idea. Market Beats headphones on his own and earns a few hundred million. But eventually, Dr. Dre's timeline would reach the point where you decided to travel back in time and sell Dre his own idea unless the loop is complete and it goes on forever.
Who can truly be said to have invented Beats? Was it you? Was it Dre? Was it someone else?
The idea of Beats headphones can, therefore, be said to exist within an infinite loop with their origin unable to be proven. An even more incredible version of the bootstrap paradox can be found in the Robert Heinlein short story "All You Zombies". In this tale, an intersex male who is born as a female is deceived into going back in time to impregnate herself. As a result, that person could then be said to have no mother or father and no children either. This person is now a self-replicating being which exists within its own causal loop. And the reason this paradox seemingly solves the previous one is that such loops break off from traditional timelines existing in a loop reality of their very own.
If you're still confused, imagine, the analogy of a toy racetrack being built by a child. The child decides to build a normal track which is never-ending adding a new piece every day to allow the cars to continue moving. This is your normal timeline. However, one day he sends a car back to an earlier part of the track. When he does this, he creates a new path and the car heads off in a new direction. But as soon as this happens, the track behind it disappears preventing the car from returning to the original track. The car now exists on a looped track from which it cannot escape.
So, yeah, the solution to the time travel paradox is basically a NASCAR race.
Read More:
One thing we've not yet discussed of time travel paradoxes is the existence of the multiverse. If an infinite or large number of parallel universes exist, then, how are they affected by time travel?
Well, one theory is that time travel may itself take place between multiple universes rather than traveling back through time within your own universe which could be impossible. You would actually be traveling to another universe similar to yours but at a different point in time. This would solve every paradox on the list as since you're now inside an entirely new timeline, you can kill all the grandfathers your heart desires or can you perhaps not. Because if you can time travel between universes and affect the future of another reality, surely, someone can do the same to your reality. At any moment, a time traveler from another universe could land in our timeline and wipe out everything we know today.
Theoretically, this means you could jump from one universe to another meaning that traveling back to your own universe is past would simply be a case of taking a detour through another universe on the way.
An alternative explanation which solves this paradox involves a similar solution to the bootstrap paradox except instead of creating a new loop reality, time travel merely creates another reality branched off from a point in the past. So by putting a bullet in grandpas brain, you're not affecting your own past. You're simply preventing another you from existing in the new universe your actions have just created and maybe that is what the universe wanted you to do all along.
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At present, we live, we reproduce and we die. But if time travel were possible how might this sequence become jumbled?
Would there be any strange complications?
What are the paradoxes of time travel?
1. The Grandfather Paradox
The most commonly cited paradox involving time travel describes how you could erase yourself from existence by going back and killing your own grandfather. By doing this, you would remove the possibility of your even being born. But if that's the case, then, who came back to kill your grandpa? If you don't exist, you could never have traveled back in time. So, your grandpa must therefore live and go back to have a child who in turn produces you and we're back to the paradox once more.
Strangely, this paradox is solvable using nothing more than the original premise itself. Because cause and effect govern our universe. Any action you take in the past would have an impact on the timeline of the future from the very nanosecond you arrived. You would begin to affect your destiny in ways you could not control. Move a single atom one nanometer and you could change the course of Earth's history. Therefore, the moment you arrived in the past ready to settle your beef with Grandpa. You'd be instantly erased before you'd stepped out of your time machine. Let alone pulled the trigger.
Time-travel would basically reset the clock of reality to whichever point you travel to and this would happen every single time you went back.
Read More:
2. Memories
If you successfully managed to travel back through time, would you even know what you've done?
Let's say you're an average person with an average family, an average job and an average grasp on history. Right now, you can probably remember raising your kids and your first day at work. But what all of these memories be erased as soon as you arrived in the past?
These memories were created in a certain timeline. Our timeline, they did not occur in the timeline you now inhabit. So, is it even possible for these memories to travel through time with you and exists in the past? Or as your mind just had the factory reset button pushed? Alternatively, if your memories have endured a trip backward through time, then, surely you can use them to change your future. With your knowledge of the future, you can now make alterations to the way things panned out. Hate your kids? Just avoid ever meeting your partner or simply try for kids on a different day when a whole new set of sperms are competing for a shot at life. And your former children are left to die on a piece of dried-up tissue.
Solving this paradox is even weirder than the last one because if you can go backward in time and use the knowledge from the future to inform the past, then, all of human history should be one perfect utopia in the far future when mankind has a solution for every problem at nose-up. We could send this info back to the earliest days of man and prevent every war famine and fidgets spinor that ever came to be. But this creates a paradox similar to the first entry whereby if none of those grotesque things ever occurred, the conditions to enable our future utopia would never have existed either. Thankfully, the solution to this is to be found in yet another paradox, the Bootstrap paradox.
Read More:
3. The Bootstrap Paradox
The Bootstrap paradox describes a situation where a single object or piece of information is sent back in time only to become trapped in an infinite loop of cause and effect.
Imagine, if you went back 20 years and gave Dr. Dre the idea to charge 200 bucks for 10$ headphones by putting a sticker on them. Well, eventually Dre would steal this idea. Market Beats headphones on his own and earns a few hundred million. But eventually, Dr. Dre's timeline would reach the point where you decided to travel back in time and sell Dre his own idea unless the loop is complete and it goes on forever.
Who can truly be said to have invented Beats? Was it you? Was it Dre? Was it someone else?
The idea of Beats headphones can, therefore, be said to exist within an infinite loop with their origin unable to be proven. An even more incredible version of the bootstrap paradox can be found in the Robert Heinlein short story "All You Zombies". In this tale, an intersex male who is born as a female is deceived into going back in time to impregnate herself. As a result, that person could then be said to have no mother or father and no children either. This person is now a self-replicating being which exists within its own causal loop. And the reason this paradox seemingly solves the previous one is that such loops break off from traditional timelines existing in a loop reality of their very own.
If you're still confused, imagine, the analogy of a toy racetrack being built by a child. The child decides to build a normal track which is never-ending adding a new piece every day to allow the cars to continue moving. This is your normal timeline. However, one day he sends a car back to an earlier part of the track. When he does this, he creates a new path and the car heads off in a new direction. But as soon as this happens, the track behind it disappears preventing the car from returning to the original track. The car now exists on a looped track from which it cannot escape.
So, yeah, the solution to the time travel paradox is basically a NASCAR race.
Read More:
4. The Multiverse Paradox
One thing we've not yet discussed of time travel paradoxes is the existence of the multiverse. If an infinite or large number of parallel universes exist, then, how are they affected by time travel?
Well, one theory is that time travel may itself take place between multiple universes rather than traveling back through time within your own universe which could be impossible. You would actually be traveling to another universe similar to yours but at a different point in time. This would solve every paradox on the list as since you're now inside an entirely new timeline, you can kill all the grandfathers your heart desires or can you perhaps not. Because if you can time travel between universes and affect the future of another reality, surely, someone can do the same to your reality. At any moment, a time traveler from another universe could land in our timeline and wipe out everything we know today.
Theoretically, this means you could jump from one universe to another meaning that traveling back to your own universe is past would simply be a case of taking a detour through another universe on the way.
An alternative explanation which solves this paradox involves a similar solution to the bootstrap paradox except instead of creating a new loop reality, time travel merely creates another reality branched off from a point in the past. So by putting a bullet in grandpas brain, you're not affecting your own past. You're simply preventing another you from existing in the new universe your actions have just created and maybe that is what the universe wanted you to do all along.
Read More on Perception 9:
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