a solution to the time travel paradox

[nerd1]

I thought up a solution to the time travel paradox that goes like this. "if i go back in time and kill my grandmother, what happens?"
this would normally be a paradox, because if you killed your grandmother, then you wouldn't be able to be born, and therefore unable to kill her. I think that instead of traveling through time, you would instead change which timestream you would be in, and even though you would kill your grandmother, that grandmother wouldn't affect you, and you would still be alive to kill her.
disclaimer: if this sounds somewhat incoherent, i would like to say that i thought this up nearly right after sleeping, so i forgot most of the details that i would have used to explain this, but i digress.

[Camoninja]

Yes! This is how I imagined time travel. Every time someone goes back in time, the universe splits into two parallel universes. The first universe is like you never traveled back in time, and the second universe is like you came out of nowhere (in other words you came from another universe). Since there's two universes, there can be two of you, but you don't realize it.

[Korugar]

Sorry to burst your bubble, but you're hardly the first one to think of this. The Stargate series' has done this multiple times...

[Five In One]

I have a bit of a different belief about time and time travelling, though it's not too far off from what's here.

Basically, I believe that time flows like a tree, with an infinite number of timelines being created in an infinitely small amount of time. While this may seem similar to some other theories, a key difference is that it takes place at the atomic level, rather than at the human level. Because the movement of atoms is random, there are an unlimited amount of different ways they could move. The slightest change in a single atom's path can affect the entire outcome of a timeline, even if only so slightly. With the amount of atoms in the universe, this can greatly affect the events that occur in a timeline, and can even change human thought.

As for time travelling, I believe it is not possible. I do believe, however, that you can travel into alternate timelines to observe and interact with objects in that timeline. There will be some factors that affect things, though. For one, you'd need to do it in a vacuum, so that no atoms are dispersed in the area you reappear in. For this, it may be easier to do this in space or in a laboratory, rather than out in the open. Another is the fact that gravity must play a role in making sure you end up where you want, since Earth and the other objects in the universe are constantly moving relative to each other at billions and trillions of miles per hour. Lastly, the further you travel into alternate timelines, the harder it will be to get back to your original timeline, since the timelines are constantly drifting further away from one another.

That pretty much sums it up for my theory, I think. There may be some issues I didn't account for yet, though.

[Bloodshadow]

Quantum theory, guys. There are many different interpretations, including multiple futures, multiple pasts...

[nerd1]

I meant to say that you would be traveling through the 5th dimension to another timeline.

[Demagog]

The problem with your assumption is that you assume you always enter a separate universe upon time traveling. That one time that you wind up in the same universe, the paradox remains.

Also, if you were to attempt to travel back through time, how would you materialize? Keep in mind that matter can no be created nor destroyed. It is constant. Simply by traveling through time, you would be removing matter from one universe/time and adding matter to another.

Let's also not forget that time travel does not necessarily include space travel. If you were to travel back even exactly a year through time alone, you'd probably end up in space. Even traveling through time only a few seconds could be disastrous.

[ninjamaster1991]

My theory is that all time travel is factored in one single universe, so, if you travelled back in time and killed Abe Lincoln, then however you killed him, the wound would look like a bullet wound, and ppl would hear a gunshot. Or the guy that killed him would get to you first. Or you would fail, and be jailed for a long time.

[nerd1]

but what would be your solution to the time travel paradox then?

[ninjamaster1991]

No paradoxes would be possible, thus solving the problem.

[Xenocidius]

I'm not the only one to think of this?
Damn ...

I imagine time as being a line, like such: ____1975_________2000_________2025_____
                                                                          ^                         ^                       ^
Say you travel back in time, to here:    You go back to (25)  You are born (0)   You came from (25)               

Your age is in brackets. You kill or don't kill your mother.

I imagine moving through time would be the same as moving through space. In this sense, time really is a fourth dimension. (Although not the fourth spacial dimension in your profile picture, nerd1. Tesseracts ftw)

If you did not kill your mother, then time would continue normally, and from the minute you were born there would be two of you, one 50 years old and one 0 years old. Then in 25 years the 25-year-old you would go back in time, leaving only the 75-year-old you.

Now if you did kill your grandmother, then it would be the same, except without a second version of you. That is, there would only ever exist one version of you. A version which went back in time at the age of 25, in the year 2025, to the year 1975. Time continues, past the year 2000, in which you were born, to the year 2025, where you travelled back in time. You are now 75 dying of heart cancer.

So basically you can alter the past, but it won't have any effect on you, because once you do so you effectively create two versions of yourself. Killing your mother only removes the other version you created.

[nerd1]

by traveling through the 5th dimension (all possible timelines) i meant traveling from one point in time in your universe to another point in time, in a specific place, in another universe, and this avoids paradox because if you travel to another universe and kill your grandmother, even if you somehow got lucky enough to travel back to your original universe, which there is only a 1/infinity chance, nothing would have happened, as you can only travel back to a point in our universe further ahead in time the same amount of time you spent time traveling in other universes, and not changing your universe at all, because nobody would care if you died somewhere in space, if that's what will happen, although i doubt it, as if gravity can bend time, then i think that you would either gravitate to you planet anyways, or you would just return to your time machine on our world.