#amwriting #amwritingscifi #timetravel
I’ll make this quick, because, really, who has the time? Get it, see what I did there? Maybe not, cause maybe you don’t know what this blog post is about. It’s about my new time travel short story, KILLING TIME. Now do you get it? Pretty good, huh? Yeah, I’m funny.
Okay, so here’s a screen shot of a little time problem I have been working on:
So, if you killed somebody who killed your brother, but then go back in time to stop the guy who killed your brother, but fail and kill the guy who killed your brother a second, third, hundredth time, when you get back to the future (original present) is there more than one dead guy now? It goes to the core of when you go back in time is the future that was your present erased? Is the future empty until the second we do something in the present? Would this make it impossible to travel to the future, it not existing as an independent state?
But what about the bootstrap paradox? You from the future coming back to give yourself instructions on how to build a time machine which you don’t have, which you couldn’t come back and do unless you past self built the time machine enabling your future self to travel back and give you the book on how to build the time machine? Here the future seems to exist as an independent state and which you maybe could travel to.
In the first paragraph, we are talking about “The Grandfather Paradox” of time travel. In the second paragraph, we are talking about “The Bootstrap Paradox” of time travel. It’s what makes talking about (and writing about) time travel such a massive headache and a whole bunch of fun.
Here are a couple of videos that explain it better, thereby increasing the fun, and the pain in our heads:
Okay, talk amongst yourselves. I have to go find some Advil.