we are all time travellers!
here’s one for ya; there are many paradoxes with time travel, like the one where you can go back in time and shoot your grandparents, or where you could shoot yourself and hence not be able to go forwards in time in the first place.
so how could time travel work?
time being connected to all events that ever occur in the universe is a circuit, as like electricity doesn’t flow if you break that circuit, if you make an event that contradicts the the flow then you break the circuit.
we may visualise this as like a 10 lane motorway, you start with you time machine at the beginning just before the motorway of time starts, if you take a lane that causes a time paradox i.e. breaks the circuit, then that lane becomes like a dead end. hence one could only take the lane where events flow and don’t cause a paradox.
once you start on that journey it wouldn’t be like any normal kind of travel, you would be linked to sets of events as you travel down the road. as like when you try to remember a word but can’t as it is ‘on the tip of your tongue’, your memories would be undone or at least ones that contradict the loop of time you are on.
so wouldn’t any memory cause a break in the circuit? i think so yes, any given memory of the future would reshape the past, so at the end of your journey you would be sat in your time machine without any memories! waoh, can you imagine that! it would be just like if you had an accident and lost your memory, you would know you are you but not you name or anyone else’s, which brings me to ask; would you remember even language?
our memories are connected to events, take away the events and the memory would have no basis i.e. the brain would not be able to distinguish between one such memory and an imaginary one, or between the memory and the imagination itself. kinda like putting your brain in a blender. it may even be so that the event of you gaining a memory simply vanishes, hence so to does the memory of the said event.
Q. Any action performed in the past effects the present and so causes a paradox, even just being there.
A. if a portion of your life is spent in another time past or future then those events exist in all time so you havent changed anything that isn’t already there.
Q. this makes going back in time futile, because anything you’re going to do has already been done the moment you contemplate it, and then the contemplation is gone.
A. when you go back in time you may have just as much freedom as in the present, once your journey is complete then it is history. i can only presume that the whole thing is in a state of flux.
the crazy bit…
the way i see it is that you would be much like a new born baby except in an adult body. this makes me wonder; if [and i know it is a very big ‘IF’ ] there is such a thing as spirit, the afterlife or rebirth, or if there is any context in which you are taken out of the present [and hence out of existence], this would act exactly like time travel!
you would, in order to enter back into the present/existence, have to take a lane on the super highway that does not contradict any circuit of time. it may be so that once disconnected from the present we are automatically linked to all time in a general sense and be connected to all events, thus having intimate knowledge of the future even your own time-line right up to the point of death. once we take the road to the present we become disconnected from that, this may explain why we sometimes have a profound sense of impending danger or that something great is about to happen. deja’ vous anyone?
people often say how they always ‘knew’ they would become a star or rich, well maybe they did know, but that knowledge can never be fully formulated in ones mind, as the mind is intimately connected to events.
so we are all dr who! 