Time travel theorisation
Remember, I’m not an expert on time travel.
1: I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that everyone knows of the great caution not to change things in the past, lest they change the future. However, there is something else to consider. You go back twenty years into the past. That means you WERE twenty years in the past. Which is to say, maybe you did something that was vital to the future. Maybe you did something that caused the future to happen the way it happened. However, that still doesn’t preclude the possibility of doing something to totally screw up your future.
2: Again, I’ll say that everyone knows of the grandfather paradox. You go back in time and kill your grandfather before he has had a chance to procreate. Therefore, you could never have been born. Therefore you could never have gone back in time to kill your grandfather. Which means he survived to procreate. Which means you went back in time and killed him. Nice little temporal paradox there.
This paradox can be solved with an idea that if events, places and even people become contrary to the timeline, then they are purged, following the path of least resistance. In effect:
You go back in time and meet your grandfather.
He is in his late teens and is yet to have children.
You kill your grandfather, thus setting up a temporal paradox.
The path of least resistance is taken to rewrite history, removing you and your family from history, since you cannot possibly exist. With this, the temporal paradox is resolved–your grandfather stays dead, you don’t exist.
3: This active force (unnamed as of yet) will also purge anyone or anything who doesn’t belong in the timeline. Whilst there is a given leeway of time for changes to be effected or prevented, at some point, the force must come into play.
For instance, a person from the thirtieth century comes back to the twenty-first century. At some point, they must go back to whence they came, or this force will activate and purge them, since they do not belong in the twenty-first century.
So… all that’s fine and dandy, isn’t it? And why am I blogging this? Well, this might be handy for my time travel thing. The question is how to effect several changes in one aspect, without effecting changes in other aspects, which brings me to my next theory:
4: If you create a minor event, you instigate a major reaction. Whereas if you create a major event, you instigate nothing more than a series of complex rectifying actions.
Of course, there would be an exception to that rule, where the person involved is, by definition, vital to the timeline, a ‘lynch pin’ if you will. If they are eliminated from the timeline in some way, then whatever future hinges on their presence will be wiped out in a catastrophic ripple effect that is unstoppable.
In theory, if you are far enough away from the event in the timeline, you should be able to travel back and prevent the elimination of the ‘lynch pin’, thereby saving the future which is dependant on the ‘lynch pin’. Thankfully, ‘lynch pins’ are rare.
But what of objects in times foreign to their own, referring back to my third point?
5: If you have a device from the thirtieth century present in the twenty-first century, then by rights, the device should be causing some form of temporal disturbance, until the force activates and purges it from the timeline, since it cannot exist there. If it is not causing temporal disturbance, then, logically, it belongs there, in that time. The circumstances may not be obvious, but it cannot be denied that it belongs in that time.
Of course, all this is theory. Nothing more.
And for another thought, relating to the active force–
6: The force may also be able to counteract changes in the timestream, so that the same major events happen, but in different ways, such as:
A time traveller kills Hitler as an infant, attempting to prevent the Holocaust. In twenty years, another person emerges to take Hitler’s role in history. Substantially, nothing has changed.
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