I want your best paradox

M

Magic 1

Temporal Novice
We have all heard the standard kill your grandmother paradox. I am interested in hearing new ideas of paradoxes that would make traveling in time dangerous if not impossible.
 
Yeah you go back in time to before the dinosaurs got wiped out by a meteorite/asteriod and you take equpiment back to destroy the asteriod,so we never get hit,consequently evolution takes a different identity and the rest of history from there on will be re written by a completely different chain of events,where either the human race dont exist at all or takes a completely different form or gets set back or moves forward.
Your very presence there could change things,cos you gotta be written into history and everything there after is built on you being there and any changes you make.
 
Well, there's always the billiard ball variant of the grandfather paradox, using purely mechanical means (+ wormhole) to cause a paradox.

Actually, I think there was a thread about this sort of thing a long time ago. Try searching the archives.<hr size="1" width="80%" color="#000099" align="left">"All gods are false. Faith itself is idolatry."

Iain M. Banks, _The_Crow_Road_
 
Paradox:

Ok, you travel back in time and change major things like crazy.

Then you travel forward to the present and nothing has changed except you are hungry and thirsty.

Explaination:

The present is not real, you are immagining the whole thing.
 
read the bottom of my post 0c time travel
putting yourself at all points in time simetanousely might be a reason why it won't ork, any read it.
confused.gif
 
How about the idea that time, in actuality, is one absolutely huge time loop. That our physical evidence to date about the geological past of our earth ocurred in our future, somehow. That our descendants, billions and billions of years from now, were some ancient culture that inhabited the same earth we now stand on. Would we then have manifest destiny? Would our experience be predestined? I guess this really isn't a true paradox, but if time itself is so vast, and our experience of it is so minute, who's to say that time is linear? I guess what made me think of this is that geode with the metal rod in it that you see in those para-science books. It's always looked a bit like a hoax to me. Any geologists out there that know what I am referring to, and can give a plausible explanation for it's existence?
 
The paradox that I came up with was a cross between the 'killing your grandfather' and the 'chicken and the egg' paradoxes (paradoxi?)

A couple (a male and a female) travel back in time before the very first human being ever existed. They crash land and can't get back to their original time. Stranded, they make the best of it. They survive as best they can; have kids and eventually die of old age. In turn, their kids have kids and so on and so on and so on, until we reach the point where the original couple is born, meet, go back in time and crash land.

So in this senerio, when did humanity start? Is it possible for a couple to produce generations of offsping so that they will be born far into the future?

The other paradox I can think of is one I saw in a movie, where one person is given a watch by an old woman. He later goes back in time and meets the same woman, but she is muich younger in this time period. He gives her the watch and then later returns to his time. She in turn grows older and meets the man and gives him the watch. He then goes back in time and....etc.

When did the watch come into existance? Was it ever made?

Cheers

Night
 
Supposing in the future, human and alien scientists design and construct a Big Bang Generator, send it back in time to the year dot, where it triggers automatically, generating the Big Bang from nothing, from which the universe is born, creating planets and inhabitable worlds, including earth, where life evolves, producing humans, who produce scientists, who get together with aliens in the fture, and design and build a big bang generator! In a nutshell, the reason for our existence.

It is our DESTINY to design this machine, and to send it back in time. There is no other reason why we exist (except God maybe).

You see, human/alien intelligence is like a force acting on the enviroment in an intelligent manner, and when this force is applied to the past and future, perhaps anything is possible.

Zenithman /ttiforum/images/graemlins/confused.gif [email protected]
 
FTL Communication Problems

A problem for anyone travelling in a FTL (faster than light) ship would be communicating with anyone. The messages would arrive to their source destination before the broadcast was ever made.

Simplified Eg:

Someone getting close to the speed of light (c) is counting from 1 to 10 into a microphone being transmitted. As they reach the nunber 5, they hit 'c'. As they pass 'c', they continue to count.

The message would appear to be sound like "10...1(9)....2(8).....3(7).....4(6).....5"

Night
 
firstly: two parents having children who in turn had children could not possibly happen as the childrens children would be so in-dbred that they wouldn't be able to stand up. (if left for a couple of grenerations to do this.
secondly, the theory of time being a box of slides ( by philip litherland ) indicates that every moment is always happening at the same time and we just travel through it at a constant rate. therefore the watch could have been made at any point in the whole existance of time.
( i am only 14 so i don't know many alternative theorys on this matter)
 
Well BoS, I understand where you're coming from with the inbred statement, but it doesn't address the point. I could change the senerio to a group of 6 women and 6 men traveled back in time, they all become stranded, had children, and after generations and generations, the same 12 people came back into existance to start the cycle over again.

Second of all, the box of slides theory still doesn't explain the 'orgin' of the watch. When did it actually come into existance? When was it ever made? Was it ever made in the first place?

Cheers

Night
 
I can see no problem with going forward in time as this is merely time being relatively compressed or stretched for the traveller (hi-speed) and the non-travellers (normal speed). My problem is with going back.... I have a problem with the replication (creation) of matter. Let me state that I am talking of travelling back along the same timeline I have travelled forward on, not slideing across into other universes ok. For example, If I were to eat a 32oz steak a week ago, then step in Prof.Wells time machine and travel back a year then not only would there need to be a replication of myself but also of the steak. If replication of matter did not take place then either my 'travelling' self might suffer some damage or the cow strangely loses weight!! It just bothers me where these extra atoms are going to appear from.
 
If Time Travel were possible they would be here Now.
If they are here would we know ,they could be changing things in our past as we type.We would not even notice changes.Or maybe we could.
Ever had Dezjavous.Ever been some where and had the feeling ,you know.
Maybe time being one long string from begining of time to infinity,echos of what has happend remains.
You could be living a life you experienced as you in a different time line.
You just jump from one time line to another,and you wouldnt even know it.
Wheres the Paradox.
You have lived the moment already.
 
Paradox:
If you were to go back in time you do not have to affect a large thing to change your past. What if you went back and through a series of unintentional events your parents never meet or your grandparents etc. and you are never born because their relationship never happened.
 
Every(time) I travel in places unknown I find a map or I ask someone. Since nobody has disclosed proof of time travel I'm stuck with a large task. A time map. It would need to 3-Dimensional for perceptual purposes of human sight. We would also need a very large magnfying glass, to pinpoint each particle at a specific point of time and space. While traveling through time, I think all humanistic qualities cease to exist. Essentially you become a (1). In a concept as sensitive as this, we should think more on the lines, of say 1: proton, electron, photon(light), planet, universe. We would be mere calculations that only exist if calculated. Hence, if calculated correctly, error would be an impossibility. I can only speculate at this time. The future holds truth.

ImagiN
 
What if the only parodox that happens is to you the time traveler. By this I mean what if by traveling to the past/future you are also taken to a (or maybe even just create a new) dimension where what you happen to change only changes in that dimension. Being that the dimension you were born in, created the time machine in, time traveled in, etc. would still be the same. The dimension you entered into would also be the same until alted only by you.

This is the only explination I can think of for making time travel possible. Because I think if time travel were possible and the paradox of say the killing of ones grandmother would make it impossible for him to be born, then travel though time, and finally kill his grandmother. so, over all he would be born and so on in a never ending chain. This is why I came to this conclusion of entering into a mirror dimension.

Please tell me what you think.

N E Body
 
Here's the parodox that makes traveling to the past nearly impossible.
Say you want to go back in time to kill Hitler before WW2 and the Haulacaust and you succeed. That way, WW2 didn't happen and the millions of Jews weren't killed. Then there wasn't any reason to go back in time to kill Hitler. So you never did go back in time, which means that the two events happened. This is impossible, so traveling back in time (at least in this universe) is impossible.
 
You didn't prove just now that time travel to the past impossible. You simply stated it's a paradox to kill Hitler. Maybe it isn't possible to kill someone or change a significant event in the past, but that doesn't eliminate the possibility of getting there.
 
Here's one for you:

The universe is here, but you cannot create energy.

I've figured out how to temporally "duplicate" energy, but I still haven't figured out how the original sample was created.
 
Correction,

see my post on the creation of the universe. I've answered my own question regarding how the universe came to be if energy cannot be created. It is the best paradox of them all!

1) "Nothing" occupies infinite space.
2) Therefore, Everything occupies one single point in space.
3) The resulting singularity inverts the relationship and establishes perfect equlibrium.
 
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