What would happen if you went back in time and killed your grandfather?

[Mr. SmartyPants]

What exactly is a singularity?

The point which the energy in the universe was all densed and compressed into a little "ball".

[Warrior4Christ]

Wikipedia knows all: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_singularity.

In simple terms, a black hole.

Or, in maths, it is a point of being undefined. Eg. if f(x)=1/x, f(x) has a singularity at 0 because you can't divide by zero.

So generally, it is a point of undefined behaviour.

[yukinon]

oi, I should have known that. I read a whole book about it in middle school.

Don't talk to me about math. eeeeevil

[mitsuki lover]

I forget the qoute but Chief O'Brien had a line on DS9 that was appropiate for this discussion.

[TurkishMonky]

my guess is either you woud de-age until you were non-existant, or you would find yourself in a parallel universe, (second is more likely) since time always moves forward...

[Dante]

TurkishMonky you have bought this post back from the dead, どして?!

Also, please explain why you would de-age, and please define the term. Is it the same as "get younger" and why would the occur?

Pascal

[Stephen]

Kae pretty much nailed it. You would be trapped in a loop. Think groundhog day, only nobody will laugh at your story.

[TurkishMonky]

de-age, yes umm, from an un-scientific standpoint, to travel back in time and keep the time the same you would have to perfectly reverse every part of life, and every particle would have to rewind it's path.. which would cause you to get younger and eventually pop out of existance...

which is why a parallel univers is so much more realistic to think about...time would continue to move ahead...

[Keely]

Wait Shatterheart - People laughed at Groundhog's Day? Wow...that's a bigger mystery than this time travel thing! ;P

I took a time travel movie appreciation class in college, it was about the parodoxies of time travel. 12 Monkeys, Frequency, the Time Machine, Run Lola Run and a few others were what we watched. Good movies for time travel, not all good for Christians. Same goes for Donnie Darko.

I'd suggest watching some of these movies, Butterfly Effect too, to gain other perspectives on time travel. Just do some research on the movies first to make sure they're appropriate for you. Some have cursing and other disturbing things. Can't remember any nudity in those, but it's possible.

[termyt]

[quote="Keely"]Wait Shatterheart - People laughed at Groundhog's Day? Wow...that's a bigger mystery than this time travel thing! ]
I must concur. This may well prove the alternate universe theory.

[Stephen]

Oh come on! Poor Bill Murray. Nobody laughs at him.

[hawaiishirtguy]

Physics theory and other points aside I tend to favor the fixed history standpoint, in short you cant change history. I heard it once explained as the Present = the sum of all past events. Since we know certain past events occured (i.e. the signing of the Declaration of Independece) they cannot be changed. If you did travel to the past you cannot stop the signing because we know that it occurred.

Parallel universe theories would be more likely explanations of the "McFly accidentally messing up his ancestry" situation.

Also, if you are interrested in reading a christian novel about time-travel try checking out "Transgression" by Randall Ingermanson.

[Keely]

Bah! Your post reminded me of the Back to the Future movies too! Forgotten we'd watched those in that class! Number 2 deals the most with parodoxies.

[mitsuki lover]

As I believe I noted earlier you have a far better chance of offing one of your ancestors the further back in time you go,especially since the further back you go the more ancestors you have and the less likely you are to know who all of them are.However because of the fact that also the population of the world is less the further back in time you go the more likely it is that you would have been able to trace more than one line to a single ancestor.In this case if you accidentally offed said ancestor you would in fact end up killing more than one descendant line to comes back to you.The best advice is when tempted to time travel to get roaring drunk instead and watch a marathon of Tom Baker Dr.Who episodes!

[Supersith]

My dad just pointed this out to me after reading your post, Pascal. He said that we do not move forward in time at a constant velocity. There was that one instance in the Bible(not sure where exavtly in the Bible it is, but I do remember the story) where God stopped the progress of time for a while by stopping the movement of the earth. So, according to that, time is not constant, and can be changed. (Although in my opinion this was a supernatural act that could not, except by God's direct intervention, be replicated, and thus does not exactly show that time does not move at a constant velocity when not changed directly by God's hand.)


Actually Snoring Frog, God stopped the movements of the earth and the "Day" lasted longer but time kept going on, and a quick theory of time, is it possible that time does not exist. That time is just the requirment of our nevervous system to explain why things keep going because our minds are not yet perfect. I heard this somewhere or some version of it don't remember where though.

[Supersith]

If the sun were to blow up though and we were to go spinning out into space we could still measure time in years, we just wouldn't be spinning around the sun

Actaully Stars go through phases, if we lived long enough for it to happen(some few million years) we would already be dead, the human race as a whole. But that won't happen because God will take care of the human race, send sinners to hell and belivers to heaven ect.

[Mithrandir]

While a litteral interpritation of that scripture is indeed a point that could be argued in the discussion, let's not head off onto that topic as a debate point.

The idea that time is an illusion generated by our brain's inability to percieve reality all at once is indeed not a new invention. I heard it many years ago, but I can't recall where. Maybe someone else can help us out on that one.

Also - you may find the "edit" button works better than posting multiple times.

[Supersith]

Ok, I have several thoerys on this here they are.

1. The instant you take a breath, someone looks at you, you step on the ground, the instant you interact with anything, you mess up the entire timeline of the universe from that point, compared to the default, assuming the default is you never going back in time. There was a story written along time ago called "The Roar of Thunder", it talks about a man going hunting back in time and becoming scared and heading back he steps off the floating tracks and kills a butterfly, then when they return the signs and phonics and stuff is different and a mans opinion on who should be they're president i think it was, should be. That i believe is accurate. The simplist thing can change time and completely distorted. Once you killed your grandfather you would exist as the universes plot-hole, outside of the continuity as it were. Your memories exist in your mind, but nowere else. the universe goes on as do you but it isn't your home. You know noone and aside from noone who you tell about yourself to know one knows you.

2. Their is an infinite series of universes all different, and when you time travel it causes the creation of a new one.(which is very common seing as how breathing or not breathing creates a new one)Actually several new ones, which are the following:

universe1: You dissapear
universe2: You kill your grandfather, your parent never exist
universe3: You never disapear, you never kill your grandfather and life goes on as it would if you never left.

3. You kill your grandfather but you still exist because your mother/father from the other grandfather still exists and marrys someone else and you are born but your life is completely different and you are only part you, because what you inherited frome your now non-existant parent has been replace by your alternate mother/father.

4. You kill your grandfather go back stop yourself, but, but not exactly yourself seeing as how because of new experiences you are slightly different that before mentaly, and kill yourself or you end up both dieing because you killed each other leading to some intresting stories when you grow up and your grandfather recognizes your face from when you tried to kill him.

Well thats all my theories for now. Bye.

[SnoringFrog]

1. The instant you take a breath, someone looks at you, you step on the ground, the instant you interact with anything, you mess up the entire timeline of the universe from that point, compared to the default, assuming the default is you never going back in time

The simplist thing can change time and completely distorted.

Both of these quotes put a a very good argument, because you have no idea how maybe taking .000000000001 seconds longer to think of something could change the world, it could easily get you killed, or just as easily save your life. It's amazing how God does things like this. He could have saved us from death countless times by causing our shoes to be untied.

Once you killed your grandfather you would exist as the universes plot-hole, outside of the continuity as it were. Your memories exist in your mind, but nowere else. the universe goes on as do you but it isn't your home

I also share the same opinion here. When you do kill your grandfather, you cease to exist in the universe's history, and become a glob of matter floating around somewhere with no existence other than that of your physical one, which does not have an origin other than in your mind. Your memories would be real, but at the same time would never have happened, figments of your imagination that you aren't imagining.

2. Their is an infinite series of universes all different, and when you time travel it causes the creation of a new one.(which is very common seing as how breathing or not breathing creates a new one)Actually several new ones, which are the following:

universe1: You dissapear
universe2: You kill your grandfather, your parent never exist
universe3: You never disapear, you never kill your grandfather and life goes on as it would if you never left.

The infinite alternate universes does hold a bit of sense, and the way I see that, it would be like every imaginable possible outcome of our lives has already been set and finished, but we still have to make all the choices, thereby still giving us free-will to do whatever we choose. But, they way you said it, when you go back and kill your grandfather, all of these other universes would then be created and... then what? How would it be decided which universe you end up in? Random chance? Somehow that doesn't seem thesible to me.

3. You kill your grandfather but you still exist because your mother/father from the other grandfather still exists and marrys someone else and you are born but your life is completely different and you are only part you, because what you inherited frome your now non-existant parent has been replace by your alternate mother/father.

So, after killing your grandfather(let's just say he was your father's father) you mother's father still marrys the woman he did before, and your mother is then born. She marrys another man, and you are born, but you are only partially you because your genes from your mother are still intact, but your genes from your father have been replaced by those of your new father. correct? What I want to know is, what happens to you at the time you kill your grandfather? DO you suddenly change? Would your memories remain intact or would new ones come into place? Or, would your life start over again and you would be forced to relive your entire life, only different this time. Which then, you could go back again and repeat the cycle if you so wished, but you would, however, be unable to prevent yourself from killing your original grandfather because that event never occurred. But that statement in itself poses another problem. Since your life is completely new(assuming it started over when you killed your grandfather) you never grew up and killed that particular man in history, so shouldn't he have lived? and you then should have been born like normal so that you could grow up and go back in time to kill him? It just puts you back into a circle.

On the other hand, let's assume that when you kill your father's father, everything stays the same with your mother's side, and your father's to-be mother marrys another man, has a son, and that man marrys your mother as if he were your father. Would your genes then change the way described earlier, with his replacing your father and grandfather's? or woulod something else happen? This also leads to the problem of your life being different and leads back into the circle once more.

4. You kill your grandfather go back stop yourself, but, but not exactly yourself seeing as how because of new experiences you are slightly different that before mentaly, and kill yourself or you end up both dieing because you killed each other leading to some intresting stories when you grow up and your grandfather recognizes your face from when you tried to kill him.

First, how would you go back and stop yourself? Is this because of the gene change that we covered before? I'll assume it is. So, you grow up semi-differently, go back in time yet again, back to the point at which you killed your original grandfather. At this time, you see yourself, and either (1)realize that that is you and/or the man you are about to murder was supposed to be your grandfather, or (2) you decide to stop the killing simply because it seems like the right thing to do. After stopping the killing, what would happen you and your past/future self? Would one of you disappear? or would you both continue to exist? or maybe the two of you would merge into one being somehow?

Assuming one of you ceased to exist from that moment onward, who would it be? Would it be you because your true granfather did what he did originally, and your past/future self was born(which this could lead to the loop again, if your past/future self did not retain his memories or did not kill your grandfather after you disappeared) or would your "other" grandfther marry your grandmother and you be born that way, which would then casue your past/future self to dissapear?

One problem with the disappearing is this: when would history decide that it had been altered, and that your grandfather was not killed? Because if you disappeared after you stopped the initial killing, what would happen if your past/future self killed your grandfather anyways? And when would history decide to make him disappear instead of you?

If you both continued to exist, assuming you convined your other self not to kill your granfather, what would happen then? How would you both have a history, since both of your pasts could not be carried out in their original way?

And the merging into one being-- this one seems the least logical to me, but if it did indeed happen, what memories would you have? Would you have two sets of memories? And who would your parents/grandparents be? To me, the first of these sounds most likely, but none of them seem too likely at all.

If you both killed each other, then it would lead into the loop again, for, since you preventing your other self from mudering your grandfather would in turn lead to your original self being born, what is there to stop your original self from repeating all of this again? Because saving your original grandfather would result in the you from teh alternate gandfather not being born, you would never go back to stop him, unless the killing of your original granfather resulted in the rebirth of the genectically changed you which would, as I said, put us back into the time loop.

Okay, I'm not sure how your grandfather would meet you again (perhaps your genetically altered self convinced your original self to not kill him, and after your g-altered self disappeared, your original self returned to his tiem without killing your original grandfather) but if he did, would he actually be certain it was you? Or would he just think that perhaps the man that tried to kill him was your mother's father, and that is why you looked like him? He could even think that it was his own son, if you looked like your dad did when he was that age, what then? There are an infinite number of possibilites for this, and it would all depend on how your grandfather thought about things.

[Supersith]

So, after killing your grandfather(let's just say he was your father's father) you mother's father still marrys the woman he did before, and your mother is then born. She marrys another man, and you are born, but you are only partially you because your genes from your mother are still intact, but your genes from your father have been replaced by those of your new father. correct? What I want to know is, what happens to you at the time you kill your grandfather? DO you suddenly change? Would your memories remain intact or would new ones come into place? Or, would your life start over again and you would be forced to relive your entire life, only different this time. Which then, you could go back again and repeat the cycle if you so wished, but you would, however, be unable to prevent yourself from killing your original grandfather because that event never occurred. But that statement in itself poses another problem. Since your life is completely new(assuming it started over when you killed your grandfather) you never grew up and killed that particular man in history, so shouldn't he have lived? and you then should have been born like normal so that you could grow up and go back in time to kill him? It just puts you back into a circle.

No you remain the universes plothole, the other exist as an alternate you, one that exist but is yet isn't you.

First, how would you go back and stop yourself? Is this because of the gene change that we covered before? I'll assume it is. So, you grow up semi-differently, go back in time yet again, back to the point at which you killed your original grandfather. At this time, you see yourself, and either (1)realize that that is you and/or the man you are about to murder was supposed to be your grandfather, or (2) you decide to stop the killing simply because it seems like the right thing to do. After stopping the killing, what would happen you and your past/future self? Would one of you disappear? or would you both continue to exist? or maybe the two of you would merge into one being somehow?

Well supposedly a universe were you still chose to kill your grandfather but the original/default you decides to stop it and then you kill each other

The infinite alternate universes does hold a bit of sense, and the way I see that, it would be like every imaginable possible outcome of our lives has already been set and finished, but we still have to make all the choices, thereby still giving us free-will to do whatever we choose. But, they way you said it, when you go back and kill your grandfather, all of these other universes would then be created and... then what? How would it be decided which universe you end up in? Random chance? Somehow that doesn't seem thesible to me.

You go to universe 2 the one created from you leaving universe 1.

On the other hand, let's assume that when you kill your father's father, everything stays the same with your mother's side, and your father's to-be mother marrys another man, has a son, and that man marrys your mother as if he were your father. Would your genes then change the way described earlier, with his replacing your father and grandfather's? or woulod something else happen? This also leads to the problem of your life being different and leads back into the circle once more.

Ultimately the same result your fathers side beign different and your mothers side being the same.

Okay, I'm not sure how your grandfather would meet you again (perhaps your genetically altered self convinced your original self to not kill him, and after your g-altered self disappeared, your original self returned to his tiem without killing your original grandfather) but if he did, would he actually be certain it was you? Or would he just think that perhaps the man that tried to kill him was your mother's father, and that is why you looked like him? He could even think that it was his own son, if you looked like your dad did when he was that age, what then? There are an infinite number of possibilites for this, and it would all depend on how your grandfather thought about things.

Sort of goes along with the alternate universe thoery, a universe where you kill yourselfs each other at once,... whatever, and you grow up he recognizes you then a possibility of at least 2 universes are created here(to be realistic billions upon billions but i will only mention 2) 1) later in life you attempt it because you heard your grandfather said it was possible 2) you hear about it and live the rest of your life the way you would if you hadn't left but its slightly different because you heard the story, and probably a few other little changes from other things also but I won't go that in-depth. Thats it for now.

[SnoringFrog]

No you remain the universes plothole, the other exist as an alternate you, one that exist but is yet isn't you.

So then you would exist only as an anomaly, and the alternate you that was born would grow up into the person I described, with the different genes?

Ultimately the same result your fathers side beign different and your mothers side being the same.

SO this would then be the same as what I described above?

1) later in life you attempt it because you heard your grandfather said it was possible

Which eventually leads to the loop again.

2) you hear about it and live the rest of your life the way you would if you hadn't left but its slightly different because you heard the story, and probably a few other little changes from other things also but I won't go that in-depth. Thats it for now.

True, it would be soemthing you could go over in your mind, but the frequency of you doing that would var from person to person, and from alternate you to alternate you. And there's still always the chance that your grandfather would never mention it.

[BigZam]

my brain exploded...

[SnoringFrog]

THAT'S IT!!! You figured it out, BZ, the answer for all of these is... your head would explode and you would never exist! everything else would be as you remembered it, just you would die from head-explosion!

[That Dude]

If you went back in time and killed your grandfather........You'd be a murderer.

[Lochaber Axe]

*Shakes head and smiles* Abstract theories...

On Einstein's Theory of Relativity, I believe it is incorrect (at least how I understand it) in that it doesn't take into effect biological time. It doesn't matter how far in space we go, our lives are based upon cell multiplication. We age because cell multiplication is slowing down.

The only way something like Voices of a Distant Star could occur is if two people entered different universes where they were born earlier or later then the former universe. Of course, I know hoohah about Quantum physics. I just thought of it in my own logical way, which is separate from yours based upon my own frame of reference (ie my experiences, which caused my point of view).

[Shadowchild]

lol
You so much as lay a finger on my grandfather and you wont even have enough energy to pick your nose!

jk

[TheDrunkenNinja]

Meh, I probably wouldn't even be Christian if that happened.

[mitsuki lover]

I think it be more interesting if you went back in time and became your own ancestor.

[Pent]

Interesting question. People have said this would create a paradox in that if you killed your grandfather you would never be born therefore you never killed your grandfather. But the real paradox is existing before you where born. If you where born in 1985 then you can not exist in 1950. When they do find a way to time travel, (believe it or not they know a couple ways how but they can't do it untill we are a little more advanced), who ever "time travels" first may just be lost. Know one will know what happened. And know one will want to try it after that. Time travel to the future will be more appealing. Becuase we have all ready done that. And the people who did it are fine. All you have to do is go faster then everyone else. The people who traveled to the moon got a couple seconds on us all.

I think you might still exist. People who only know what sci-fi movies have taught them don't really understand how time works very well. It's hard to explain. Everyone might have the memory of you killing your own grandfather. But you would still be there. Your grandmother might go on to marry someone else and so on. Your parents would still exist and be married. Even your siblings. The governments records of you would all still be there.

Think of it this way:

Lets say you are traveling along on the road of time. Picture it as a physical road. Along the way you trip over a log and get a scar on your arm. Farther down the road you take a shortcut on a side road back to that log. You then move it out of the way. Then you take the same shortcut back. You look at your arm. Of course the scar will still be there.

Now of course your saying time doesn't work like that! But it kind of does.
Einstien figured out that we travel through space and time. So just as you travel through space (walking down the road) you also travel through time.
It's hard to think about but just remember that how time really works is nothing like the movies.

[SnoringFrog]

Lets say you are traveling along on the road of time. Picture it as a physical road. Along the way you trip over a log and get a scar on your arm. Farther down the road you take a shortcut on a side road back to that log. You then move it out of the way. Then you take the same shortcut back. You look at your arm. Of course the scar will still be there.

I see what your saying there. Never thought about it that way, I'll have to go back through and rethink some of these things with that in mind.