"Time Travel"

[Afrobean]

Originally Posted by devonin

Or, as I said, this is already the reality that is a result of all time travel that went into our past. All the changes to the time stream happened, and this is the result. I don't get why that's such a strange line of reasoning to people. Any changes to the timeline of the -traveller- who came from the future are irellevant and not something we need to consider or account for, because the future is not fixed, only the past.

Because if the time we have now is the result of the time line correcting itself on every backward time travel, THERE WOULD BE TIME PARADOXES. Did you see Back to the Future? That **** would never play out in reality. Marty would have gone back in time and the paradox would have become completely apparent the moment he saved his father from getting hit by the car. Time wouldn't wait and give Marty a chance to influence things. Furthermore, even if he had succeeded in putting his mother and father together, his interfering in the past would have caused a butterfly effect that would have, in all reality, change the genetic structures of himself and his siblings, to say nothing of the chance that he may have more or less siblings. His alterations to his parents' past could even have affected his younger self to such a degree that he might never have met Doc or might have decided not to go to Twin Pines Mall that fateful night, presenting an entirely different paradox possibility. The movie glosses over these facts because it would make for a very boring and stupid story.

The only chance of a correcting singular time line like you are describing would be for it to be paradox resistant. I think Futurama Bender's Big Score touched on something like this, but if I recall, the Universe just ended up ripping apart at the end anyway. Maybe a better example is the 2002 version of The Time Machine (honestly, it's the only adaptation I've seen). The guy builds a time machine to go back in time to save his fiancée. However, when he goes back in time and saves her, it turns bad anyway and she dies again in a different way, because if she never died in the past, he'd have never built the time machine. The Universe corrected the paradox by making it so that no matter how he influenced the past, she would die an accidental death to be the catalyst for him to build the time machine that would get him there.

Now, take a step back. How could the Universe "know" what to do? I'd have to say that this would only be possible with an all-knowing and all-powerful god who would watch over the time stream, one who can even override our apparent free will to ensure that paradoxes are explained out reasonably without logical contradictions.

We can already create a situation in which a person's subjective time differs from the subjective time of everyone else. The net effect has been a slight instance of time travelling to the future.

If you go at high velocities, time passes more slowly for you. Why then would you expect backward time travel to affect THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE? Isn't it much more likely that in traveling back in time, you'd branch off another path in the 4th dimension by way of the 5th, such that the only one affected by the alternate path through the 4th dimension was you? Again, subjective time dilation affects you rather than the Universe, so why would other variances in subjective time flow affect anything other than just you?

Or do you not buy into the concepts presented by multiple dimensions stacked upon each other? I think it's sort of silly to think that there could only be one instance of our reality that would need to be constantly written and overwritten as changes to history (or even future history) are made.