Musings on Time Travel · 2:50pm Nov 21st, 2019
I've recently had a sort of epiphany about time travel, and how people want to use it as well as how it's portrayed in fiction. I don't know if I can convey my theory on its own, so I'll use it in an example.
Skipping over trivial things like how I would accomplish it, let's say I go back in time to try and prevent 9/11 from happening, and that I succeed in doing so. The world's better for it, right? Nope. Because see, my purpose for going back would be to stop that specific thing from happening. But now that history has been altered so that it didn't happen, my motivation for going back in time to stop it in the first place would be now non-existent. Meaning that I would not have known that there was something that I would want to prevent from happening, and thus I would not go back in time to prevent it at all. Thus, because now did not go back to prevent 9/11 from happening, it would still happen as it did.
So logically speaking, it is impossible to purposefully change the past.
One more thing regarding time travel, but unrelated to the above. You know that idea that if you go back/forward in time and meet yourself, the universe will explode or you'll go insane or something overly catastrophic like that? I think that's bogus. Technically speaking, our bodies change by the microsecond. Cells grow old and die, blood shifts through the body, and so on and so forth. It is scientifically impossible to have the absolute exact same body as we did a few seconds ago. Seeing your past/future self might be a shock, yes, but I don't think it would necessarily be a logic bomb that ends the universe.
Reasonable thinking, but consider this:
If you went back and altered the past, then going forward would be impossible; because the timeline you came from no longer exists. Since matter cannot be simply unmade, you would not just blink into nothing.
Going backwards might be possible, but you'd be stuck where you went.
Unless your static timeline was made possible because a previous incarnation of you traveled backwards
In this case you would be trapped in a loop.