Time travel paradox? Saving someone?

Question

Say this year you find out that your dad's best friend died in a fire in 1983. Soon, time travel is discovered. If you go to 1983 and save your dad's friend, wouldn't a paradox result? If you save him in 1983, the future you had no reason to go back to 1983 in the first place. Right? Plus, what would happen to everyone in the future who knew the guy died? Would he suddenly materialize? Doesn't time travel sound impossible because of these problems?

Answer 1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHC8z6ULs18

paradox explanation within string theory
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NS1-SZ2L81k

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOkAagw6iug

I keep hearing the ideas of the church trying to silence the words of "dreamers"

such as:
Copernicus
Einstien
Hawking

Answer 2

Well there are two explanation to your qn. One is the existence of alternate reality. That means you you go back and save the guy, you can come back only to a world that has been influenced by what you did. I mean a different reality. A different present from which you went back. Another thing is to consider that traveling forth in time might be possible but not back in time. This is bcoz, if you have to travel back in time you will have to travel faster than light to reverse time. But you need infinite amount of energy to travel at the speed of light. And the only possible way to travel faster than light is to distort spacial dimensions and create a space warp or a wormhole to travel through. But then again you are defying the laws of physics that govern this universe and you are not traveling faster than light in this one. So you may travel nearly as fast as light and live less while others live more and make it into the future but you simply cant go to your past and kill your great great grandfather.

I personally favour the second option coz its more logical and acceptable.

Answer 3

Maybe so. I've had very similar thoughts. Or maybe not. I don't think time travel is possible. Infinite realities is more plausible to me. (I don't know if I would call them parallel though.* ) I've wondered, if time is infinite, will everything that is possible eventually happen? One of the things that bothers me though is - what's an (practically) infinite number of variations times an (practically) infinite number of possibilities? I guess it's more than infinity times one. Maybe it will take more than an infinite amount of time for everything to happen. * Off on a tangent here. When I hear the term "parallel universe" I like to think of it as a description of the conceptual worlds or universes that we create in our minds. Each person has an idea in their mind of what the universe is, what it contains, and what has happened, is happening, and will happen there. Each person's universe is essentially a conceptual model that they have created based on what they have seen, heard, tasted, smelled, felt, learned, and imagined. All the information that they have based this on has come from the non-conceptual real universe of matter and energy within which they exist. That real universe is all encompassing and incomprehensibly huge. Each of us experiences only a tiny part of it. So while our concepts of what the universe is are many and varied, the real and actual universe is one, and all our concepts are based on it. We contain parallel universes in our heads; they parallel each other because they reflect (imperfectly) the one actual reality upon which they are based.

Answer 4

It is exactly these paradoxes which make time travel seem impossible. Ironically, some movies made just for fun, dealt with this issue in interesting ways. Back to the Future was full of it. Even Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure did some very clever stuff with time travel.

Answer 5

Saving him would alter the whole time continuum, so the future would be a different future, so you would therefore not even be presented with the same scenario in the altered future. All would be altered.
But who's to say that altering the past would always have a negative effect? Maybe altering it would also save someone who then went on to invent a cure for cancer for example?

Answer 6

Science has been proposing lately that even if time travel into the past comes to be possible, it will not be possible to create a paradox. I, for one, subscribe to this idea; it makes good sense.

Answer 7

Simple THINK this way- President Bush dies.And you go to save him from getting shot in the back of the head.Now his future's changed,yours changed and like 6 billion people on this planet.One little thing makes the BIGGEST difference.

Answer 8

Although it is very fun to debate this kind of stuff, (I have on many occasions)

Time travel is impossible, and if in some crazy turn of events it becomes possible, the government wouldn't let anybody know.

Answer 9

If You were to time travel... then you were ment to do it. because if you can time travel, that means Destiny exist, and that you were ment to go back in time. So that being said if you were gonna go back in time to save your dads friend, then it would've already happened, and that he would've never died......Why? because you, sometime in the future you already were gonna go back in time to save him, so he would've already been alive.

thats like for example saying (if i were to go back n time and killed my dad would i still be alive cause i killed him but then again i was still alive at the time but now i killed him etc, etc.)
no you would've NEVER been born if you were to kill him.


think about it if your alive right now and you went back in time and thought about killing your dad before you were born, you would've NEVER have risked it. because you thought you would die and create time paradox right? Right & Wrong, you weren't ment to kill him and you won't because you know what will sort of happen to you.....cause if you did you wouldnt've been born cause you killed him. its a little complicated lol. but hey who knows it could go back as far to say as the Universe blowing up if you did that.

Answer 10

Saving someone who wasn't MEANT to be saved would undoubtedly have catastrophic results, no matter how tempting it would be at the time. Haven't you ever watched Doctor Who? lol.

Answer 11

Interesting question and fun to think about. But does go to show how important one person's life is, and how the entire world is affected, changed, or aggrieved if any one person dies. Shall we appreciate if any one person lives?

Cheers!