Replies

Something else did just occur to me though. There is one possible method of time travel that could alter the past that could still exist - in our future.

I can't quite recall where I read it, but the gist of the idea was that, when time travel was invented, it required the existence of a time machine to already exist at that point in time.

So, for example, if the time machine is invented in 2008, then future generations living in 3508 could go back in time as far as 2008. The "past" time machine already has to exist in order to provide a destination for the "future" time machine to operate on.

Not that wacky an idea. I wouldn't be surprised at all if teleportation was possible but -required- a receiver on the other side. This would be essentially the same idea.

In that scenario, one could never go back into the past "beyond" the first invention of the time machine, so one could never "undo" it's invention altogether. But that theory does generally mean that history up until this point is pretty much "written in stone".

Qwinn

As long as we are talking about time travel, who remembers the Fantastic Four. Remember in the beginning of the comic, Doctor Doom invented a time machine. Then, in a later issue, he met the Emporer Kang. Kang explained to him that in the far future, he discovered a time machine in the ruins of a building that belonged to an ancestor of his from the past. Kang and Doom always thought they were either one and the same or related. This theory went on for several years until John Byrne did an excellent story concerning Reed Richards and his dad. He stated that he was missing parts of his memory after an encounter with some being and he and his family went to his dad's old place. Where they discovered a time machine that his dad invented years before Doom invented his. They went into a alternate future where Reed's dad was the ruler but basically being led by the nose of a power hungry wife. When they cleared all that up and went back to their past, the story continued with many centuries later, the future relative of Reed's dad in that alternate future discovers the time machine that Reed's dad invented and used it to become Kang. So, instead of Kang being connected to Doctor Doom, he is actually future kin of Reed Richards.