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Time Travel (IF)

Day 926, 17:47 • Published in USA USA

• by O'Darth McVader

Time Travel (IF)

The topic of time traveling has fascinated many people and of course, writers. In my opinion, the first prominent time travel story was "The Time Machine" by H.G. Wells. To me, Wells was probably one of the best science fiction writers I've known, only to be matched with Jule Verne and Issac Asimov. H.G. Well's "The Time Machine" was probably the best known time traveling book ever written. Ever since that, more and more related stories flooded out. Now this subject has been touched by Issac Asimov in his SciFi collection, "Gold." One thing he mentioned was the following: If a person travels to a time in which his grandfather was still a kid, and kill him, that person would never exist, then, exactly who killed the grandfather?

Many writers simply ignored this obstacle and still proceeds to write his or her time travel stories. I found that to be extremely annoying and would usually consider that person a failed SciFi writer. After all, how can such a drastic problem be neglected?

Over the night, I've thought about the possibilities of time traveling. I hope I make this clear to everyone, you can not change the future by changing the past. The only way to alter the future is by altering the future. For example, if you went to see the future of tomorrow and you see yourself getting murdered after going into an alley, you would never go into an alley the next day. However, something will happen to force you to go to the alley and you will be killed, as seen in the future. Why? Because it is the future, if you did successfully not enter that alley, you would never see yourself getting murdered in the very first place. You can argue that the moment you see yourself getting murdered, the future will be altered because that was the original story line if you never saw into the next day. This could only mean that we single-handedly created another universe. Now, let's base this universe theory on the statement mentioned by Issac. The moment you killed your grandfather, you have created another universe or dimension. While you continue to live in the current world, another universe is created in which you don't exist since you killed your grandfather.

What I meant by "you can only change the future by changing the future" is that it is a way to prevent creating another universe. If you go to the future of tomorrow and you kill the murderer that was going to kill you, that is changing the future by changing the future. Which means, tomorrow, you will walk into the alley and before you can be killed, the criminal will be killed by another you? This will allow 2 of the exact people to exist at the same time. It will affect you because when you enter the alley, you already know that another you will appear and thus, not care. We will constantly be repeating the same actions and have your old self do the job for yourself, successfully, giving you the power to completely create your own flawless destiny. This will give us a similar status as, if there is one, God or a divine being since now you can prevent anything from happening. But what if more than one person has a time machine? What if everyone had a time machine? Does this mean time machine equals god like power, or does it mean, time machine equals an endless cycle of the same event?

Comments

Jeffferson Day 926, 17:59

"If you go to the future of tomorrow and you kill the murderer that was going to kill you, that is changing the future by changing the future. Which means, tomorrow, you will walk into the alley and before you can be killed, the criminal will be killed by another you?"

No, because if you prevent you from being killed, then you never were killed in the first place, so you wouldn't time travel to prevent something that never happened, because you already prevented it... I'm dizzy now.

zeon industry Day 926, 18:12

but would that mean altering time will always create a new universe? hmmmmm. interesting.

not quite. Because if you see yourself getting saved. that would mean you saw your old self and that future self together. that means there will be 3 people at the same time. however, you know that that person who safes you is you, which means you HAVE to travel to the future to safe yourself. but this will all depends on if you are smart enough to realize that it is you who safes yourself in the future thus you must travel to the future too. any question?

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