Time Paradoxes

Time paradoxes are fun. I saw the episode of Futurama tonite where Fry becomes his own grandfather, and so I decided to confuse people. I ended up describing a nifty causality loop of killing your own grandfather. I decided to define the grandfather as being seven years old, because that way he couldn't have possibly fathered your father. Anyway, here's the full on description:

Your time vehicle arrives back in early twenties, stranded for a lack of, oh, let's say AA batteries. Unable to find any power source in the current time, you resign to settling in to the early 20th century. So you get a job, an apartment, and a car. One day, completely out of happenstance, you pass a baseball field, same as every day, and see a somewhat distraught boy standing by the side of the road, baseball bat in one hand, glove on the other, waving his arm in a vaguely hithchhikery motion. You pull over, pick the poor boy up, learning that his parents were unable to give him a ride because they had work. As you drive home, you make small talk with the boy, and ask him his name. When he replies with your grandfather's name, you are overcome with surprise. Further, seemingly innocent, questioning reveals that the boy is infact your father's father. You'd never expected to run into any relatives in the past, and begin to worry that picking him up interferes with your personal history. While you stare at the boy in shock, your car drifts into the left lane, in the path of an oncomming Mack Truck. Panicing even more, you swerve hard to the left, putting your grandfather between you and the danger. The boy is killed on impact.

Your situation, on the other hand, is a little more complex. At this point of time, from my analysis, you both exist and do not exist. Once your grandfather died, you never existed, so went back in time, so your grandfather DIDN'T die, so you DID exist, and DID go back in time... It's highly confusing. You end up torn between two time lines, bot entirely opposite.

1. Your grandfather wasn't in a crash, you existed to go back in time and get your grandfather in a crash.

2. Your grandfather was in a crash, you never existed to go back in time, and your grandfather didn't get in a crash.

Weird. I'm not sure what happens at this point. I think reality crashes at this point.

Other interesting paradoxes for you: One is the same set up as before, where you go back in time 20 years and have to wait for your AA batteries. This time, you manage to get far from any of your family members, keeping your personal time line intact. by 1960, you have your batteries, but you think to yourself that you could save yourself 40 years if you go to just 10 minutes before you went back into 1920, and give yourself the spares. The same paradox type thing ensues, at which point you are both (using my age as a baseline) 20 and 60 years old. One age results from your preventing being stuck, but in that case, you didn't get the idea to give yourself the batteries, and so you would stay the extra fourty years. All very strange.

Here's a slightly simpler causality loop, with only one possible outcome. Wipe the slate clean, this one isn't related to the rest. Its 30 years in the future, and a large space ship was sent to a distant colony loaded with 150 years of music and movies. It passes through a time rift, naturally occurring in outer space obviously, and reappears back in the year 1975. Unable to contact the colony, obviously, the ship turns around and heads back for planet Earth, its contingency plan. Upon reaching our planet, the ship is unable to get GPS landing coordinates, and crashes in the backwoods of Britan, where a young Douglas Adams discovers it, and the only remaining contents: A video of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy movie, fully playable (I don't know how, it just is). He watches this little bit of the future, becomes enthrawled (especially by the bits that said "BASED ON THE WORKS OF DOUGLAS ADAMS") and goes home and writes the radio drama, TV series, and books that eventually become the very movie he saw.

That one is someone easy. Self-fuffilling prophecy. I decided to end on something a little less mind numbing.

Bye. ^_^