Anyone interested in time paradoxes as they pertain to time travel?

Question

Like the sexual paradox, where you father yourself, even cannibalize yourself. You can even simultaneously be your father, mother, daughter, and son, a family tree unto yourself. Know of any time paradoxes you wan to share? Its fascinating!

There's anoher paradox where you travel to the time of the dinosaurs, and you accidently step on a small, furry mammal that is the original ancestor of humanity. By destroying your ancestor, you cannot logically exist.

Answer 1

But you can't father yourself. You are a very specific combination of DNA from your father and your mother, and there is no way that you can be replicated by changing the past. It is possible that you could perhaps interfere in the process of your parents' meeting, or having sex the night they conceived you--and thereby prevent your birth--but you can't become your own father. You also can't become your own mother, daughter, or son--time travel does not open this up.

The only one that you mentioned that is possible is cannibalizing yourself. You could definitely eat yourself if you went back in time, captured your other self, killed it, and dined upon it.

But anyway. Nobody knows what would happen if you prevented your birth or else ate your earlier (or later) self--whether you would vanish in the now, or what. Time is an unknown dimension, so there is no way to predict its behavior and its possibilities. It is interesting to think about, but it is--at this point, at least--impossible to know.

Answer 2

I'm a big sci-fi fan, particularly Star Trek. I've seen those kind of paradoxes but they have never made much sense.

It's a bit too much of a stretch, in my opinion, to be your own parent. Even being the one that gets your parents together is pushing it unless you got in the way of the original meet-up somehow and have to fix it (a la "Back to the Future"). It just seems like if you did interfere you would cease to exist immediately and wouldn't get a chance to fix it.

As far as being both your own father and your own mother, etc., I'm not sure how that would work as most people are not trans-gendered.

Writing with time paradoxes can be very unbelievable unless very well done. One of the best examples I've seen is Imzadi by Peter David (a Star Trek TNG). Star Trek has also pulled it off believably a few other times but not always. And they are, in my opinion, the only ones I've ever read that have done it well. I guess I'm kind of particular because I, personally, don't believe in time travel so it takes a pretty good story to convince me to temporarily suspend my disbelief.

Answer 3

my favorite is betrand russel's(I think it was him) thought experiment of the cat in the box. The cat is in the box with a random chance of being killed or not, which will be carried out in 5 minutes.
Directly at 5 minutes, the cat does not live or die, it does so when you open the box. At that moment you percieve it is when it exists in reality and possibly as soon as you see the cat live or die the other possibility or reality splits off into another existance where the opposite of what you observed happens. Infinite existances or realities spill out creating limitless realities where every occurance has happen.
Another interesting thing is that subatomic particles do not exist in any describable form(we have never encountered anything like them) and they do not react as anything we can percieve. I have read that electrons(and other particles I think) can exist outside of what we call time. For example the radiation that comes from a black hole can be viewed in a way that some particles come back through time when they are radiated through the black hole.
Also white holes are cool, although I think they do not exist but it used to be a theory that everything went in black holes and came out white holes somewhere else in a different time.

A classic, you have probably already heard, is what Einstien said about how two twins, one leaves the earth in a spaceship,the other one stays home. They are the same age b/c they are twins. When the twin from outer space comes back they will not be the same age. If you go the speed of light in the ship and then come back everyone would be long dead when you came back.
Also that clocks(atomic clocks) if one is set in the basement another on the ceiling after a while they will not have the same time because of the lower gravity in the basement. Even more true when you fly in a plane, if you log enough hours you will not be the same age as you were before you started, since the warping effect of gravity upon time is lessened when you are farther from the gravity of the earth. OF course the difference is very small, but still cool.
Another I like is that we start to die the moment we are born.
It is interesting to think of what time would be like if you were in the vacuum of deep space where time was not as distorted hardly at all by gravity. would you actually live longer or would it percievalbly been the same to you but different in regard to others?
you should look into quatum mechanics if you like this sort of thing.

Answer 4

The paradox in "additional details" can be explained. When you travel back in time, you grow smaller and smaller (until when you are a fetus) and disappear! If you say that the ancestor of human if stepped on will cause human race to disappear, then you must believe what I said above too.

Answer 5

If you used a time machine and travelled to the past and did the nasty with a female from your family tree then that past nastification could either result in some cloning or a huge genetic freak that attacks Tokyo in black and white.

Answer 6

In "A Brief History of Time" Stephen Hawkins goes into fair detail regarding this exact question.

It is a good read and what he says may surprise you. Go buy it or check it out from the library.

If you like these types of questions you will not be disapointed with what he says.

Answer 7

Some think that the past is unchangeable, so that even if you somehow time traveled to the past, anything you did created the chain of events which led to you being born and subsequently time traveling to the past.

Answer 8

i read in one book(dont remember the name) that even if u tome travel and kill someone of our family tree,our existence will not be affected.why?because our time travel will not affect our universe but the parallel universe.when we time travel,at the same time we also travel thru parallel dimensions.so as a result our life in no way will be affected.
so u cant do anything that effects our world even if u time travel.

Answer 9

If you went back in time to kill your self you wouldn't exist to kill your self. Then you would exist and try to kill your self and make yourself a nonentity again. That or you would cause a timeline split where ther would be 2 universes created at that moment, one where you were killed and another where you lived.

Answer 10

i like what the last guy said. i'm sure that if you could time travel to the past with knowledge of the future you could intentionally cause much havoc. including thwarting your own existance.