LogFAQs > #939294526

Zeus posted...

a predestination paradox, which is a generally annoying paradox.

Ehh, done well, I kind of like closed loops and predestination paradoxes.

I suppose it might stem from getting into Greek myth early in life, because half of those seem to involve an oracle making a prophecy that winds up being fulfilled solely because people tried to circumvent it. So my brain was already primed for the idea of time travelers causing the very thing they wanted to prevent, meaning they were always part of history without realizing it, implying that time is actually static and the past cannot be changed.

If anything, it's the simpler time travel methodology by far, since the alternative (being able to change the past) almost always needs to involve multiple branching timelines or the ability to overwrite history and potentially undo your own reality (which generally needs some form of handwaving to explain how you continue to exist or how it makes sense that you'd be able to alter the past if your new future prevents you from ever existing or inventing/gaining access to time travel in the first place).

Though the latter does support one of my favorite theories about time travel - namely, that any world in which time travel is invented would eventually change their own past in such a way as to undo the invention of time travel in their history, "locking" their timeline in place. So by definition, the mere possibility of time travel automatically prevents time travel. Every timeline or reality would autoselect for a history in which time travel is never invented, for whatever reason. Thus functionally making time travel impossible even if the laws of physics allow for its possibility.
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