[ovrtaxt]

I already read this yesterday. Re-post it for the day before.

[goldstategop]

Its a paradox. If you kill your father, you remove yourself from the timeline. Of course no one in their right mind would be crazy enough to kill themselves. All things being equal, quantum mechanics holds there is a parallel universe in which you don't exist. There's a parallel universe where you're a monster. And so forth. Time travel gives one a temporal headache!

(Denny Crane: "Sometimes you can only look for answers from God and failing that... and Fox News".)

[thoughtomator]

In order for this to be true, there can be no free will. What if you went back in time, told your father that nothing could kill him (because he was alive in the future), and your father therefore decided to take wanton risks with life and limb in the knowledge that he could not be killed?

[LibKill]

Have none of these people seen "The Butterfly Effect".

Tampering with the past leads to disaster! Be warned.

[Jonx6]

Paging John Titor!

[Age of Reason]

I suspect our entire notion of time is an illusion.

[HonoluluCharles]

"people don't suddenly fade into the ether "

Unless they're visiting Aruba...

[XEHRpa]

[Inhale...] 'ere.

[hosepipe]

"Looks like "some one" has been watching too much science fiction"- Church Lady C;-)~

[SunkenCiv]

This topic is from June 2005.

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[Pan_Yans Wife]

My grandfather, who lived to be eighty-three, always said he would never go back and change a thing. I think he believed that all actions run consecutively and that if you change A, you can't have B. And if that was true, he wouldn't be sitting there in his recliner at a ripe old age saying "I'd never change a thing."

[TAdams8591]

Interesting. My explanation for the paradox is that while we may be able to travel to the past, we may not be able to interact with it's environment.

The article's theory is probably the better explanation, however.

[isom35]

could I travel back in time to save a life? like Vince Foster's

[Centurion2000]

bump for later

[SFConservative]

If you went back in time and met your teenage parents, you could not split them up and prevent your birth

OK, I buy that - but how about if I met Al Gore Sr and Pauline LaFon and split them up? Or Hugh Rodham and Dorothy Howell? Or Virginia Cassidy and whatever horny bum was around at the time? Would that have worked? Life would be different!

[investigateworld]

Oldie but goodie bump

[Lancey Howard]

Clearly, the present never is changed by mischievous time-travellers: people don't suddenly fade into the ether because a rerun of events has prevented their births - that much is obvious.

Okay. Have to stop there. It is not obvious at all. If mischievous time-travellers changed anything, nobody would ever know.

[Gideon7]

Larry Niven wrote a short story, "Rotating Cylinders and the Possibility of Global Causality Violation". Any civilization that gets close to building a time machine suffers a natural catastrophe that prevents completion.

[timer]

These guys are from the PT Barnum school of flimflammery. There is no such thing as "time" in and of itself, it's KINETIC ENERGY at some rate(t=dKE). Can you think of a "time" event that is NOT a Kinetic Energy event going on at some rate? $1000 in small, unmarked bills in a brown paper bag to the first person to do the demonstration.

Really, you have to laugh at these four flushers. Picture one of them at the high stakes poker table in vegas. Stud poker, 3 players left. Our FOUR FLUSHER is #3 and has 4 spades showing, which wins the hand against the other 2, IF he has a spade in the hole. There is $300,000 in the pot.

So, instead of showing his hole card he goes into this long alternate universe spiel about probabilities, and claims 1/4 of the pot($75,000)because that's the 25% probability that his hole card is a SPADE.

Now, what is the probability that his tied up/living body will be dumped in a hole(as a HOLE card)out in the desert, using a SPADE?

[arthurus]

We cannot know whether the present has been changed by something happening in time travel because if something is changed then everything is changed including all memories.