Spoilers Favorite Time Travel Paradoxes

[Rafterman]

Added a note to the Avengers: End Game time travel scenario.

The Problem With End Game: As said before, the easiest solution is to accept what the story tell you. However, if you think about it, The Avengers under the guidance of Banner send 3 teams back in time to retrieve 6 Infinity Stones. As soon as the time line was disrupted by these stones being intercepted, there are three possibilities. 1) They split off time into a new timeline and could not return to their original time line. 2) If the premise is altering a single time line, there never would have been an Infinity War, and there would have been no reason to build a quantum tunnel (time machine) to go back in time to fetch stones. Therefore the teams who went back in time, their future would have become their past, and they would have cut themselves off from returning to their former future, as the new future they created unfolds. 3) Now if the writers were clever enough, they might have concocted a story with a new future, where a quantum tunnel had been built giving the Avengers back in time, a route to return, but it would still not be the original future they left.

The splitting of time lines not only makes the most sense theatrically (avoids the "never was an Infinity War to begin with" problem), it's also a theory many theoretical physicists believe could be true in reality.

So, the whole "killing your grandfather" thing would't happen because while the you in that timeline may cease to exist, the you from the timeline you came from has a very much alive grandfather and thus, an alive you. It slso avoids the "two yous in the same timeline" problem.

 

[Huntn]

The splitting of time lines not only makes the most sense theatrically (avoids the "never was an Infinity War to begin with" problem), it's also a theory many theoretical physicists believe could be true in reality.

So, the whole "killing your grandfather" thing would't happen because while the you in that timeline may cease to exist, the you from the timeline you came from has a very much alive grandfather and thus, an alive you. It slso avoids the "two yous in the same timeline" problem.

As this is all theoretical if that, I’ll acknowledge that SciFi writers mostly have carte blanche, but when describing time travel scenarios backwards, we, many of us still try to make logical sense out it.

If you accept all the complications of a single timeline, I think this can work and some stories have done a good job describing how much things would change if you went back and the effect of that going forward and how it might change the existence you knew.

The split timeline by virtue of interfering with the past, is the simplest, if the caveat is, you can’t return to the original time line, and this is why End Game pissed me off. On one hand you have the suggestion to kill off baby Thanos, and Banner explaining that is not how time works, in essence your old time line becomes your past, meaning that your new future is seperate from what you knew.

But then they go back and by Banners description all 3 teams should have split into new time lines, but that is not what happened, or if it did happen, then they were still allowed by the writers grace to cross back over to their old present, but that last part was not mentioned. Maybe the quantum machine allowed for that.

And then Marvel went hog wild on the multiverse, the Time Line/Reality Authority or what ever it was called in Loki, and jumping around the multiverse became a convenient crutch to write stories. 🤔

 

[Rafterman]

As this is all theoretical if that, I’ll acknowledge that SciFi writers mostly have carte blanche, but when describing time travel scenarios backwards, we, many of us still try to make logical sense out it.

If you accept all the complications of a single timeline, I think this can work and some stories have done a good job describing how much things would change if you went back and the effect of that going forward and how it might change the existence you knew.

The split timeline by virtue of interfering with the past, is the simplest, if the caveat is, you can’t return to the original time line, and this is why End Game pissed me off. On one hand you have the suggestion to kill off baby Thanos, and Banner explaining that is not how time works, in essence your old time line becomes your past, meaning that your new future is seperate from what you knew.

But then they go back and by Banners description all 3 teams should have split into new time lines, but that is not what happened, or if it did happen, then they were still allowed by the writers grace to cross back over to their old present, but that last part was not mentioned. Maybe the quantum machine allowed for that.

And then Marvel went hog wild on the multiverse, the Time Line/Reality Authority or what ever it was called in Loki, and jumping around the multiverse became a convenient crutch to write stories. 🤔

Maybe Stark's wrist do-hickeys tracked each timeline thread's "address" (if such a thing exists), allowing them to return to the original timeline.

In the end though, it's like all science fiction. It doesn't have to make sense, just go with it. Like Star Trek's universal translators that allowed everyone to hear in their own language (English for us viewers). It makes no sense practically, it didn't sound like the voices were coming from the tinny sounding comm badges and why did their lips move to English if the character was speaking Ferengi to us? Why? Doesn't matter. Just go with it

 

[Huntn]

Maybe Stark's wrist do-hickeys tracked each timeline thread's "address" (if such a thing exists), allowing them to return to the original timeline.

In the end though, it's like all science fiction. It doesn't have to make sense, just go with it. Like Star Trek's universal translators that allowed everyone to hear in their own language (English for us viewers). It makes no sense practically, it didn't sound like the voices were coming from the tinny sounding comm badges and why did their lips move to English if the character was speaking Ferengi to us? Why? Doesn't matter. Just go with it

My words often when it comes to this topic.

 

[compwiz1202]

The splitting of time lines not only makes the most sense theatrically (avoids the "never was an Infinity War to begin with" problem), it's also a theory many theoretical physicists believe could be true in reality.

So, the whole "killing your grandfather" thing would't happen because while the you in that timeline may cease to exist, the you from the timeline you came from has a very much alive grandfather and thus, an alive you. It slso avoids the "two yous in the same timeline" problem.

Or the other failsafe some stories have is you can't kill yourself in the past, because then there's no one to go back and do it. And with forward, there would be no future you because your present you left the timeline and thus couldn't age. There's no second Einstein in BTTF. Doc literally said he skipped that minute, which is what would happen whether a minute or 40 years.