• TheSpermWhale@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    There’s a strong risk of making a paradox here - if the great library survives, it drastically alters history from that point on, meaning there is a very strong chance you would never have been born to go back in time to save the library. Also if the library had already been saved (by you in the past), what motivation would you have to go back and save it, given it never burnt?

    • NegativeInf@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Nah. Just remember to turn on your paradox stabilizers and set a return course for the corrected timeline in which you still exist but also invested in apple 30 years ago.

    • Mossy Feathers (She/They)@pawb.social
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      1 year ago

      Personally, I think if time travel is real then the universe prooobably doesn’t care about paradoxes and would let you do it. Time traveling to kill baby Hitler doesn’t create a paradox because cause and effect is still maintained, it’d just make people very upset because they don’t (and presumably never will) understand why you killed baby Hitler. Paradoxes only occur if you assume the universe has some secret ability to tell that you broke the human perception of causality.

      Like, it’s really hard to explain what I’m trying to say without just saying, “many worlds!” but that’s kinda it. I think the future is relative. If you go back into the past to kill baby Hitler, you’re changing the future, not the past, because the present is whenever you currently reside. Maybe another way of thinking about it is applying the teleporter thought experiment to the problem. If you go back in time and kill baby Hitler, is it the same baby Hitler that grew up into a genocidal dictator, or is it a temporal copy? When you went into the past, is it the same past that lead to your time-traveling adventures, or is it a slightly different past?

      • Swedneck
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        1 year ago

        i mean a simpler explanation is that if it’s this kind of logical paradox then the answer is probably just that it’s not possible in the first place.