I came across this in another thred and it makes me wonder.
Assuming this could even work(I can think of a couple problems off the top of my head assuming time travel is a flawless proceedure), wouldn’t this be akin to brother-sister incest? You’ve basically got a single genetic pool you are working with there and eternally mixing it to pop out a kid, who is acutally yourself who is actually your mother who is actually your father…(oh, crap, I’ve gone crosseyed). Or would this be an incredibly complicated form of cloning?
It’s an interesting concept, but I sincerely have to wonder what would happen if a person could have sex with themself and create a child from it(I guess you could test it partially by having creating a test tube baby raised in a surrogate mother from the eges and sperm of a hermopahrodite…assuming they create healthy specimens of both types).
That’s a great story I reccomend reading the full version, which can be found in many anthologies.
It’s an example of one of the many classic paradoxes in time travel. Imagine this slightly less mindblowing scenario. You go back in time, and give your younger self an important warning. When your younger self grows up, he will go back in time to give the same warning to his younger self. So where did the information come from in the first place?
All You Zombies is very much a similar paradox; here the “information” is the main character’s genetic code.
As for the genetic repurcussions of having sex with your own mother-sibling-self, I got no idea.
I think I seek out the story…apparently there’s a similar one called “By his bootstraps” with a similar idea.
I know the information origin paradox and recently came across it while playing an old game called “Time Quest”. It bugs me, but I can dismiss it.
I get bugged much more by idea of an object trapped in an inifinite loop, that continually gets sent back in time so it can survive until it gets sent back in time. Hypthotheically, such an object should just crumble to dust just by virtue of the fact it’s aging between time trips and making a seemingly infinite number of time trips(or maybe this is my programming brain talking, knowing that any infinite loop is a very, very bad thing). Then again, it had no origin, so technically, shouldn’t it not even exist in the first place?
Which means at some point in time there had to be an origin before the object or information was pushed into the loop and trapped there, seemingly forever(and yes, I realize what I’m saying here).
Time travel. It’s both facinating and insanity-inducing just thinking about it.