h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I've always thought that, if time travel in the past was ever possible, this would be under the assumption that we may travel back to *watch* past events, but without the ability to *interract*. This would be, for example, if you were able to travel faster than light and then look backward : you would probably see yourself coming...
This would explain the absence of anachronisms.

But I have much more difficulty imagining forward time travel. Say for example you can transport yourself in the future, and study there some artifact that was not yet invented "in your own time": to make it simple : you hear a new song. If you are then able to come back and sing this song, you might actually become the song's author. But overall, the song was never written... so where did it come from?...

This is just too much for my poor brains.

I'd rather keep to my everyday time travelling pace, which is one day forward every day.

C.L.

Connie dear,

I am you from 7 years after your post above. I come from the future to let you know what you had wrong in your logic about forward time travel. And actually you had it right from the start with your comment on travel in the past...

You can easily travel to the future (I just did, only quite slowly, it took me 7 years to get from 2007 to 2014), but once you're there (or rather, "then"), you can only go back to your initial present (now the past) to observe it, and not to change it.

So you can't actually bring anything back from the future, not even knowledge... which resolves your paradox of the song never having been written...

Connie dear,

I am you from 7 years after your post above. I come from the future to let you know what you had wrong in your logic about forward time travel. And actually you had it right from the start with your comment on travel in the past...

You can easily travel to the future (I just did, only quite slowly, it took me 7 years to get from 2007 to 2014), but once you're there (or rather, "then"), you can only go back to your initial present (now the past) to observe it, and not to change it.

So you can't actually bring anything back from the future, not even knowledge... which resolves your paradox of the song never having been written...