You can’t wiggle your way out of it. Generations of science fiction and fantasy authors, philosophers, and scientists all agree there are consequences to using a time machine to send a message back to yourself. Time discontinuities, paradoxes, splits in the socio-temporal fabric. No. No doubt. Even if you could find a used Flux Capacitor on Flea Bay, you’d run into consequences.
What are they? Well, some authors have supposed that there is a Time Authority, Temporal Police, or some such that continuously monitors space-time and assesses actions that might disrupt the smooth flow of the continuum. Get into your reused 1960’s telephone box, arrive at Grandma’s house in 1960, and get snapped into some time-disruption-proof paradox cuffs. From there you are off to the pocket universe they use to stow miscreants like you permanently.
Down another track are the paradox freaks. There are several opposing orthodoxies there. The most popular is that the act of changing the past cancels out because you successfully receive the message, and therefore make a change and don’t send it. Because you don’t send it, the change never happens.
Opposing them are schools of thought that think that paradox can happen and causes complex deviations in time. I’ve always liked the school that posits splits in the fabric of time: two, three, or many different futures. Then there is the school that argues that such endless splitting disrupts principles of economy in the flow of time, and such splits tend to heal and recombine.
Choose. But choose wisely! Which one of you would wind up at the beach watching sunset with your sweety?
I mean, it’s up to you if you want to screw up the universe. But don’t tell me later that I didn’t warn you!
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Currently I’m listening to the “Discovery of Witches” trilogy on my Libby app. I’ve seen the TV series (loved it), and now I’m getting the book view. There’s a major “time walking” plot. I just go with it. If the author doesn’t do something totally insane with it, I can suspend my disbelief.
Even if I could be 100% sure they had the technology down pat, I’m not sure I’d do the whole time-manipulation thing. This time line is difficult enough. (With the current politics/admin, my constant sentence is, “We live in the dumbest timeline.”) However, I have frequently stated that I wish I would have paid more and better attention in the forced college FORTRAN class. “Meh, computers” I thought. Stupid stupid stupid. 🙂
Oh Boy! You date yourself! Fortran. Me too. talk about ancient computer skills.
Yup. 1980-something Purdue engineering. We were required to take FORTRAN. I was bored, didn’t see the point. OMG. I actually had an aptitude for it, and had I been less stupid, changed majors, paid attention… it wouldn’t have been out of the question for me to be in on the early days of Bill Gates’s little adventure. I probably wouldn’t be under the poverty line. 🙂
I can see it now…Laura tech Bro Millionaire…I mean Tech Sis Millionaire.
🤣💯siiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiigh! 🙂
“A Sound of Thunder” Ray Bradbury https://youtu.be/qioUenlI2ws?si=NgdUtwuAhaK22r56
What would I say to myself? Gosh, there are so many times when I thought resistance in my head but didn’t speak up. I wish I hadn’t learned my own personal power in my 40s, and had learned it in my 20s instead. I want to go back and tell that drastically insecure girl that she is valuable, and smart, and valid, and she is worth listening to, so she needs to speak up and defend herself and build boundaries and to love her body!
I feel the same way about the younger me. But I question whether the young jerk would listen.
Ha!! My problem as well…