Time Travel Paradox

Time travel has been one of the science fiction topics people have talked about and pondered for decades.  However, many people believe it o be impossible due to the possibility of paradoxes.  The most famous paradox is the grandfather paradox.  In case you are unfamiliar with it, here is how it goes:  Suppose you go back in time and kill your grandfather before your mother/father was born.  Therefore your mother/father cannot be born and neither can you.  I have a slight problem with this paradox.  So, time is relative to the speed at which you are traveling through space.  The faster you go, the more time slows down.  Once you reach the speed of light, time pretty much stops.  Putting aside the fact that we can’t actually reverse time right now, my problem is this.  Once you go back in time and kill your grandfather, that timeline will never catch up the time you left.  The time that you left will continue to go on while you go back in time.  And the “past” time will never catch up to the “present” time since both of them are traveling a the speed of light.  So does that just create an alternate timeline?  The whole scenario doesn’t sound paradoxical to me because both timelines cannot be one in the same.

Image result for futurama

Traveling forward in time, though, is an entirely different story.  As for traveling forward in time, that’s actually theoretically possible.  Remember when I said as you approach the speed of light time slows down?  Well if you had a spaceship that could go at that speed and you left Earth, time would move much more slowly for you than for everyone else back on Earth.  After leaving and returning, say 2000 years could have passed for earth, but only 10 could have passed for you.  Granted with no way to go back in time, you’d essentially be stranded in the future, but that is a workaround method to go “forward” in time.  And maybe if you get lucky, the future that you travel to will have figured out the whole “back in time” ordeal.  Here is an article that goes a bit more in depth into what I was talking about.

So until we figure out these paradoxes and how exactly to reverse time, I guess the highway through time is left being a mere one-way street.

4 thoughts on “Time Travel Paradox

  1. Isaac Chandler Orndorff


    This is a very interesting concept that I’m sure most people in our class are interested in. The two camps of time travel are either a.) the butterfly effect, where if you travelled back in time, every decision you made drastically affected the future, or b.) multiverse (alternate reality) theory, where going back in time creates an alternate timeline that exists on a separate plane. Both are quite interesting, but I have to think that the latter would make more sense scientifically. Also, there was a movie two years ago called Interstellar that played with the concept of time traveling faster for some than for others, causing people to age where it was only hours for others. (Watch it here).

  2. Hannah Margaret Mears


    I found this article very interesting and I too find the concept of time travel intriguing. I have no clue myself what all would happen if people would start to time travel and the dangers it can cause. I wanted to look more into the potential dangers that time travel could bring upon us and came across an article that you might want to check out. LINK

    Hannah Mears

  3. Taylor Lexi Weinstein

    This is a very interesting concept to me Jordan. I just have a question to ask you, if you could get the chance to go time travel and risk you life would you do it? This reminds me of the Justin Timberlake movie called In Time. In the movie he is a poor person and doesn’t have much time left in his life. he travels into the future to save someone and receives the gift of forever. There is a mix up in the movie and forever isn’t always the case for anyone but, would you be willing to risk your own life and go back in time? For me I would have to think about it and it’s not something that I think I could answer right away. It’s a hard concept to understand because it’s just that time travel back and changing the whole way that you look at the world.

    Here is a link to the IMDB movie, talking about the time travel and what the movie is about if you haven’t seen it I suggest that you watch since it has information about what you talked about and going back in time and some of the consequences.

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