This is my first post on my blog. I bet you already guessed that, however.
Anyways, I suppose I should put something interesting up here...
Ah, musings on the Grandfather Paradox.
The Grandfather Paradox is in regards to time travel, namely, if you were to build a time machine and travel into the past to when your grandfather was a boy, and then kill your grandfather, what would happen? A rather morbid sort of thing, but it does raise a few questions. If your grandfather is out of the picture, you yourself would never come into existance. If you did not exist, then you wouldn't be able to go back in time at all, and you would never kill your grandfather, and therefore you would exist, and thus be able to go back in time to kill your grandfather...
This might end up messing up the time/space continuum so much that it explodes from sheer headacheyness. But somehow, I don't think God would let it come to that.
It could be that time travel is inherently impossible due to paradoxes such as this one. But that's not any fun, now is it?
Perhaps your going back in time and killing your grandfather would not cause you to cease to exist, but rather create an alternate timeline, parallel to the 'regular' one in which your grandfather lived long enough to give birth to one of your parents.
Or, if it isn't a parallel timeline, perhaps, although your past/future self (that is, the you that isn't born yet) would never come to exist, your present self (that is, how you are now, having just killed your grandfather) would continue to live on in this new world you've created (and likely face murder charges).
Maybe, even if time travel were possible, you would simply be unable to perform an action that would have such impact on the timeline. As in, picking up a penny might be okay, but killing your grandfather would not work.
Either way, I don't think there'll really be much of a chance to find out. Outside of the ethical concerns, time travel, if possible, is still way far in the future.
But it's still pretty fun to give oneself a headache over it.
Anyways, I suppose I should put something interesting up here...
Ah, musings on the Grandfather Paradox.
The Grandfather Paradox is in regards to time travel, namely, if you were to build a time machine and travel into the past to when your grandfather was a boy, and then kill your grandfather, what would happen? A rather morbid sort of thing, but it does raise a few questions. If your grandfather is out of the picture, you yourself would never come into existance. If you did not exist, then you wouldn't be able to go back in time at all, and you would never kill your grandfather, and therefore you would exist, and thus be able to go back in time to kill your grandfather...
This might end up messing up the time/space continuum so much that it explodes from sheer headacheyness. But somehow, I don't think God would let it come to that.
It could be that time travel is inherently impossible due to paradoxes such as this one. But that's not any fun, now is it?
Perhaps your going back in time and killing your grandfather would not cause you to cease to exist, but rather create an alternate timeline, parallel to the 'regular' one in which your grandfather lived long enough to give birth to one of your parents.
Or, if it isn't a parallel timeline, perhaps, although your past/future self (that is, the you that isn't born yet) would never come to exist, your present self (that is, how you are now, having just killed your grandfather) would continue to live on in this new world you've created (and likely face murder charges).
Maybe, even if time travel were possible, you would simply be unable to perform an action that would have such impact on the timeline. As in, picking up a penny might be okay, but killing your grandfather would not work.
Either way, I don't think there'll really be much of a chance to find out. Outside of the ethical concerns, time travel, if possible, is still way far in the future.
But it's still pretty fun to give oneself a headache over it.
posted by Heather @ 11:25 PM
2 Comments:
At 11:20 AM,
Adelina said…
Heather, you got a blog--HOORAY! As far as that "Grandfather Paradox" stuff goes, I think, as you mentioned, that "you would simply be unable to perform an action that would have such impact on the timeline". Cool theory.
At 4:12 PM,
Adelina said…
I shared your theory with my grandfather yesterday. He wouldn't stop talking about it, and pretending to be worried that you were going to kill your grandfather, and I was going to kill him. Yeah, then he started talking about The Twilight Zone. Time travel and killing Boompa were the topics of conversation all day.
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