Time Travel Troubles

Time travel has been a topic of many works of art. From Harry Potter to Hot Tub Time Machine, time travel is seen very often. Many of us always wonder what it would be like to revisit the past or go to the future. However, is this really something we want? The consequences could be catastrophic if we had to technology to time travel. People have always been curious about how we would even travel through time. If by some scientific miracle humans are able to travel through time, it could be the beginning of the end of our very existence.

Back To The Future is a movie released in 1985. Marty McFly is a teenage boy. Marty's mom, Lorraine explains how she met George, Marty's father when George was hit by a car. He is invited by one of his friends to a parking lot. This friend is Dr. Emmett Brown or Doc for short. Doc shows Marty a time machine he built from a DeLorean. It is powered from plutonium that was obtained from terrorists. The terrorists show up and attack Marty and Doc but Marty manages to escape in the DeLorean. He then finds himself in the past. He doesn't have enough plutonium to return back to the present day. Marty saves this teenage boy from getting hit by a car. When he awakens, he is getting cared for by this teenage girl. She then falls in love with Marty. Here is the first problem with time travel.

These people who Marty run into happen to be his soon to be parents. Recall to the beginning of the movie where Lorraine talks about how she met George. Marty gets in between them meeting. This means they won't get married and Marty will never be born. Imagine if people had access to this kind of technology. They could prevent random people from meeting. This could lead to your very existence being wiped from history. This vaguely resembles one of the most famous time travel paradoxes, the Grandfather Paradox. The basics of this paradox are that you would travel back in time and kill your grandfather before he has any children. That would mean your mother/father is never born. That would also mean that you were never born. This is a paradox that has stumped many people for decades. If Marty prevents his parents from meeting, that prevents him from being born, so how does he travel back in time? Another paradox associated with time travel is the causal loop paradox. This novel titled 'Time, Closed Timelike Curves and Causality" states that a causal loop is a paradox of time travel that occurs when a future event is the cause of a past event, which in turn is the cause of the future event. Both events then exist in spacetime, but their origin cannot be determined. A causal loop may involve an event, a person or object, or information.

In the story When We Went to See the End of the World, Mark and Ruby throw lots of parties. They along with Nick, Jane, Henry, Cynthia, Paula, Stan, Marcia, Eddie, Fran, Tom, Harriet, Phil, and Isabel go to see the end of the world. A problem is that the trip is extremely expensive. It costs more than a months trip to Japan.

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