Time Travel Paradox

I have no problem believing in the real-life possibility of most science fiction conventions. Everything from little green men to breaking the speed of light seems somewhat plausible. Warp drives, why not? Transporter beams that energize us from one place to another, unlikely, but let’s see how science progresses over the next few centuries. Flying cars, I don’t understand why we don’t have them already. Spaceships, that one will happen. Evil galactic empires? That will probably be us one day. Cryosleep chambers, sure. Terraforming, that would be cool. Robots. Androids. Artificial intelligence. Space stations. Outposts. Utopias. Dystopias. It may take a while, but it’s all possible. It all feels grounded in some basis of reality that maybe one day could transform it from science fiction to science fact.

But time travel? Fuck off.

It’s utter nonsense. The idea that we can go backwards or forwards in time. Bend space. Twist space. Subvert space. Do the ‘Ookie Kookie’ around space. Gibberish. I just can’t abide the concept of time travel. Being able to move forwards and backwards in time at will? Traveling back aeons, or jumping forward to an unknown future… that would already be known if time travel existed. Absolute garbage. It gives me a headache.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I enjoy the classics: Back to the Future, Terminator, Time Machine. Hell, Freejack was a personal favourite as a kid. They’re all amazing. I loved Marty’s adventures, seeing the future unfold, going back to when his parents were younger. It was good, innocent fun. And Terminator really is one of the greatest movies of all time, a machine sent from the future to destroy any chance of a human resistance. Who can’t love a plot like that? But let’s face facts: Independence Day is more likely than Terminator. Armageddon is more likely than Back to the Future. The Looney Tunes Movie or Babe is more likely than Freejack. Time travel simply isn’t possible. There’s no science that can convince me otherwise.

And everyone knows it isn’t possible, that’s why they always have these asinine rules. Cryosleep doesn’t come with rulebooks. Warp speed doesn’t come with an instruction manual. Just the so-and-so thingamajig was invented, and now we can do that. But time travel is never allowed to be that simple; we always have to come up with rules and paradoxes because we know it’s complete bullshit.

You can’t occupy the same space in time as yourself, otherwise Timecop turns into Society. We can’t interfere with anything either; otherwise, there’s a butterfly effect that could doom all of humanity, past and present. You don’t see energizer beams causing that kind of chaos. If we accidentally kill our parents, will we exist? What about our grandparents or anyone ever in our bloodline? Same rules apply? Can we kill baby Hitler to stop the World Wars? Apparently not, that would just cause more problems as the world somehow corrects the timeline and something even worse would happen. Odd that that rule never seems to apply to anything else. Invest in the stock market, and we will end up owning the entire planet while everyone else becomes poor because of us. We can only go forward. We can only go back. We can only go ten years this way or that. It’s tiring. It’s trite. If it’s such a great, plausible concept, then why does it need so many damn rules?

Then there’s the whole faster-than-light travel and that meaning we’re looking back into the past, or seeing into the future, or something or other. Weak sauce. Stupid. Time travel is baloney.

Which makes me all the more pissed off that my future self is currently standing next to me in the kitchen.

One second, I’m doing the dishes, and the next moment there’s Old Man Me just materialising out of thin air. I wish I could say it’s all fake. Just a magic trick by some old prankster. “Haha, very funny, now get the fuck out of my kitchen.” That it’s not me. But it is. The old geezer has my stupid face… just saggier. He has the same cut above his eye. The same cowlick that won’t ever stay down. It’s depressing to know I never solved that. The same out-of-control eyebrows, only they’re grey now, like my hair. He’s unmistakable.

He tells me that Time Travel will be invented fifty years from now, but people can only travel along their own timeline. Visit themselves. More ridiculous rules. Does it ever stop? He tells me how my daughter-in-law invented the Time Machine that he’s now holding in his hand. How incredible time travel is. How it’s going to revolutionise the world. How they need to be careful, but it’s the dawn of a new, magnificent era.

Old Man Me keeps rattling on like this for twenty minutes. Singing the platitudes of his wonderful daughter-in-law, our daughter-in-law, he keeps correcting himself, despite the fact that I don’t even have a kid yet, much less a married one. He talks about it like we accomplished something, all the while standing out of time on my kitchen floor, holding something that looks like a fancy toaster but can apparently defy the laws of absolutely everything.

I hate every second of his stupid explanation. His moronic reasoning. His proof that Time Travel is an actual possibility, when I know damn well it’s not. He tells me that the Time Machine is DNA coded, so if I want, I can use it with him. We can travel in time together, as long as we ‘leap’ (they already have their own lingo) to our former or future self, our bloodline. He’s a little vague on the details, but isn’t that just plain typical of all things Time Travel related?

Like, can I use my former self as a starting point and then wander off wherever I want? Does it have to be me? Or can I go back and scare the shit out of my dad, granddad, or great-great-great-great whatever the fuck? Are there any dinosaurs I’m related to, because I’d love to see them. You can see how bullshit this all is, right? Ridiculous. Why the hell did he have to ruin my day like this? I just wanted to finish the dishes and watch some Farscape. Wormholes! That’s another one I’d take over Time Travel, despite Time Travel being on my kitchen floor.

So, I did the only thing I could do in this ludicrous situation… I snatched the damn toaster-looking Time Machine out of his hand and went back twenty minutes to when he first arrived and before twenty-minutes-ago me had spotted him. Then, the moment he materialised, I broke the old fart’s neck and dragged his dead carcass out of the room before twenty-minutes-ago Me spotted him. After that, I destroyed the Time Machine so that it could never have existed in the first place, because new me never became Old Man Me, and never had a kid, therefore no daughter-in-law, who my no-longer-existing son apparently supported so she could create the Time Machine in the first place.

Then, I simply faded back into myself and forgot all about it, because I was never there in the first place, since Old Man Me was dead before he had a chance to see new me, because current me killed him when I used Old Man Me’s time device to go back before Old Man Me arrived, and new me killed Old Man Me without present me ever knowing about Old Man Me or current me.

…And now, I’m never going to have kids, so that puts a stop to all that nonsense before it even begins… or does it?

Fucking Time Travel Paradoxes…