maybe this is not the correct forum but here goes. If you could travel back in time and stop yourself from being born what would happen? Is there a logical answer or it is just WAGs?
How would you stop yourself from being born if there is no ** you **?
If you were symbolised as a ghost, spirit, or anything resembling a non living life form then would you kill your parents?? how would you stop them from concieving another baby in the future…
And why wouldnt you want to be alive as you are now?? Depression?
And as for your * “…what would happen?..” *
Well, everyone you know today, their lives would be semingly different… they wouldnt know you … so every event you had, associated to them, wouldnt of taken place…
Simple,
IMATION
Only WAGs are available.
Logically this isn’t possible. If I stopped myself being born then I couldn’t go back and prevent it once I’m an adult, so I would have been born and could have gone back and stopped it and so…
If you view time as just another dimension like depth or height then it’s a bit like asking what would happen if I electrocuted myself with a power socket inside a room while I was standing outside. One circumstance logically precludes the other as far as I can see. Both can’t be true of the same individual and so we have a paradox.
How would you go about opening a locked safe with the key that is inside?
First of all I would do it. Im not depressed in life in fact im quite happy. I just recognize the unimportance of my conciousness.
If you could do this however (which you cannot BTW) I would imagine you would simply dissapear just as you put the condom on your father on the night of your conception…
In an “If/Then” question, anything can and does follow from a false “If” statement.
Sorry, but you cannot travel backwards in time in such a way as would allow you to interfere with your own existence. History can be changed, but the personal timelines of chrono-operatives are protected by the Law of Conservation of Viewpoint. In layman’s terms, “you” would merely be shunted sideways into a timeline where “you” had been introduced achronometrically (or through a paratime siderial gate-function).
Does this clear up the old Grandfather paradox? A reiterative multiverse prevents any real paradoxes. If the Snakes would understand that, the War would have been over twenty million years from now instead of dragging out for the past fifty thousand.
Why would you disappear. If time is another dimension then you couldn’t exist simulataneously in two points in time any more than you could exist in two points in depth. Therefore what happened to you at any other point you occupied elsewhen shouldn’t affect you should it. Saying you would disappear appears to be a bit like saying that you would die because a bus goes through a point where you were standing a minute ago. When you travel back to the point where the bus is you will only die if the bus still occupies the same location and if there is sufficient energy expended to force the two objects (you and the bus) to try to occupy the same space. Otherwise you just break your nose.
Similarly if you stopped your own conception you should only die if you used sufficient energy to try to occupy the same point in time and space as you did when you were alive. Any well constructed time machine should have some means of overriding this (ie breaks and a big red warning light). If it didn’t you would simply die because your time machine crashes into a co-existing object in time, just like a depth machine (eg a car) will kill you if it crashes into a co-existing object in depth (eg a bus). I would have thought you’d die in a grinding crash of metal, not simply fade away.
Anyway enough of this silliness in GQ.
The current theory holds that 'you could’ve but you woudn’t cause you didn’t.
In other words you can travel back in time but you can alter things that effect you directly cause you didn’t in the first place. In otherwords you can’t change your life.
It is akin to people having a basic ethical and morale code in them and unless it is extreme, you don’t deviate from that morale code.
Sure. Blame it on the Snakes, as if the Spiders had nothing to do with that error.
Come now Tom.
The Snakes are constrained by their mind-set to linear thinking. Spiders are more intuitively able to appreciate mainfold timelike paths.
Basically there are a couple of ways to look at it.
Now, one legitimate way i know to travel back in time, if it were possible with current technology, is thorugh a wormhole. The deal is that you haven’t actually travelled through time, but to another universe where time has is a little behind our time. Soo, if you kill yourself as a baby…there will be no adult you in that universe, but the you from your universe would still be alive… err hopefully. Apparently what happens in other universes affects what happens here. I dunno if thats all true,but it’s what i gather from books and such. Now… my gues is that if you did have a time travelling delorean liek in back to the future that actually ‘travelled’ back in time in your own universe, then it would be impossible to stop yourself from being born because if you could you already would have but you know you haven’t. I personally don’t like paradoxes much, but thats just because i’m not an astrophysicist.
We’re hacking it out here right now. There’s penty of “layman’s” science books out there that adress the issue pretty well, and they all either revolve around the multi-universe idea, or that one can only fulfill the past, not change it.
:shrug:
When you reach an absurd conclusion, one (or more) of your premises must be false.
If can travel back in time and kill your self, then you would not be alive to travel back in time. Therefore you have a false premise. Your premise is that you can travel back in time and affect the past. Either you cannot travel back in time or you cannot affect the past (or both).
The whole idea of multiverse gives me a headache.
Since this is a very borderline General Question, and there is an active discussion in Great Debates, the appropriate forum, I’m going to close this thread and refer everyone over to the GD thread mentioned by aynrandlover.
Dangit, why doesn’t anyone tell me when we get time travel discussions in GD???