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

Anyone who wishes to discuss this subject with me prepare the aspirins...
Is it possible to go back in time, marry your mother and have yourself as son?

no, genetically there would not be enough of a difference for a healthy feutus to form so either conception would not occur or the baby would be miscarried.

FABT

Oh I understand

from a time travel point of view though i suppose it would be possible, but only if all time travel was fated/fixed so that you had to create yourself.

FABT

According to the timeline, do you think you can prevent youself from ever being born by stopping your father and mother to ever meet?

no.

i think if ever humans were able to travel in time that there would be a lot of constraints on it to make it work. like with a car engine it can only do a certain number of things, anything else will make it explode. i think with time that certain things wouldnt work because any travel done would be severely limited by it's own mechanics, none of this free for all that you see on tv.

I don't understand your exampel but I undterstand what you mean.
No more Back to the future films for me.

I guess you think that changing historical events is impossible too?

yeah, i guess i do

i never really thought about it all that much, but basically i believe that it's all a matter of perception of our world, i think someone else has posted a load of stuff on this. i agree with most of what they said.



as for changing history,.....if it were possible, i.e. if time travel happened like on tv, the you would also have the tv style 'timecpos' who would make sure that nothing was changed. after all, they have forever to put right any mistakes they make so we will never notice any discrepancies.


actually, how would we know if there were any changes to the time line? we wouldnt would we........so maybe its happening all around us.....


FABT

Yeah thats probably right.

so.......what do you think then?

If the (most likely) "parralel universes" or "time branches" theory is correct, this would not happen.

I'm not sure about this paradox thing, I choose to look at time as a two-dimesnonal world, were two events does not affect each other except on long distance.
PS.Why don't we boogie over to another conversation; ofcourse it's possible... at talk/ time travels, where I guess you found my conversation.
I'm already there.

Erm. Whoever it was that said time travelling and becoming your own father would be risky because there wouldn't be enough genetic difference to produce viable offspring is fairly missing the point. If you were your own father, there could be *no* mixing of chromosomes, since you would have to have the same DNA as your son (because it would be you). Therefore, you would need the extremely unlikely / impossible (I'm not a biologist) event that *only* the father's genes were selected.