If you had a machine that created a window through which you could see the future, and in the future you wrote down the winning lottery numbers and relayed that information to your present self before that lottery number was drawn.
However, in your present selfs excitement, you turn off the machine before your future self wrote the winning lottery numbers into it for your past self.
What would happen?
You must log in or register to comment.
It is no paradoxon.
Only your story is a bit unclear at the point where it matters. Let me ask a question to clarify = to destroy what appears a paradoxon, but isn’t.
Question:
Who controls the transmission of the information - the past self or the future self?If the past self controls the transmission, then he receives no information. Case closed. It does not matter what the future self is doing.
If the future self controls the transmission, then he knows when the past self turns off the device. He can send it just a minute further into the past, before the past self turns off the device, and so the past self receives it “in time”.
You can kinda see this play on in the short story by Ted Chiang called The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate.
This is fundamentally a variation on the question of a Temporal Paradox, also known as a Grandfather Paradox (“You go back in time and kill your grandfather. What happens?”). Although no killing happens in this variation, the basic idea is the same: Information is transmitted to the past from the future, but results in a situation where it cannot be transmitted in the first place.
Accordingly, there are several hypotheses to cover this. This isn’t even all of them:
- The closed loop theory: To maintain the loop, you will in the future build a time machine which will allow you to activate the machine in the past, maintaining the loop. Past you may even be unaware it was activated from the future.
- The Parallel Universe theory: When future-you sent information into the past, they did not send it into their own past but rather into a universe in which you do not send the information back in the first place.
- The Timelike Curve theory: Because there is no common reference frame for “time”, each quanta of “you” is experiencing a different reference frame. The historic light cone of your future self sending the information back exists, and if you could follow those photons backwards you would find him doing this. But future you, in your frame of reference, will never see the machine activate.
- The Emergent Time theory: Time is not a linear path, but a function of entropy. By inverting entropy, you have caused a reconfiguration of the universe into a version in which the machine is inactive.
I think the idea of parallel universes solves time travel paradoxes in a pretty clean way.
Except for the fact it makes every decision, every moment of tension and every event that occurs irrelevant, because an infinite number of universe exist in which the events occurred and in which they didn’t occur.
You’d still be poor.
Time to watch Déjà Vu I guess
I was thinking about primer when I thought of this question.
Meticulous, yes. Methodical. Educated. They were these things. Nothing extreme. Like anyone, they varied. There were days of mistakes and laziness and infighting. And there were days, good days, when by anyone’s judgment, they would have to be considered clever. No one would say that what they were doing was complicated. It wouldn’t even be considered new. Except maybe in the geological sense. They took from their surroundings what was needed, and made of it something more.
