• Mossy Feathers (She/They)@pawb.social
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    4
    ·
    1 year ago

    Personally, I think if time travel is real then the universe prooobably doesn’t care about paradoxes and would let you do it. Time traveling to kill baby Hitler doesn’t create a paradox because cause and effect is still maintained, it’d just make people very upset because they don’t (and presumably never will) understand why you killed baby Hitler. Paradoxes only occur if you assume the universe has some secret ability to tell that you broke the human perception of causality.

    Like, it’s really hard to explain what I’m trying to say without just saying, “many worlds!” but that’s kinda it. I think the future is relative. If you go back into the past to kill baby Hitler, you’re changing the future, not the past, because the present is whenever you currently reside. Maybe another way of thinking about it is applying the teleporter thought experiment to the problem. If you go back in time and kill baby Hitler, is it the same baby Hitler that grew up into a genocidal dictator, or is it a temporal copy? When you went into the past, is it the same past that lead to your time-traveling adventures, or is it a slightly different past?

    • Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      i mean a simpler explanation is that if it’s this kind of logical paradox then the answer is probably just that it’s not possible in the first place.