One thing that can not be avoided in time travel fiction is paradox. Will they or won’t they, did they or didn’t they? But what is it, how does it work and why is it so darn much fun? Well all of this and more will be answered below.
The basic idea of a time travel paradox involves using time travel to cause something to happen that is either impossible or didn’t happen before. Take the venerable “Grandfather Paradox” as the classic as well as a prime example. You, having invented some means for travelling into the past, do something that leads to your grandfather being killed. Since your grand dad died, your father was never born and with out a father you were never born. And that is just the beginning of the paradox, it only gets better from there. Because if you were never born then you couldn’t travel back and accidentally kill your grand father, so he wasn’t killed and you’re safe to invent time travel after all… So, are you domed to cycle through these possibilities for ever in a sort of closed ended time loop, or can this somehow be resolved? Have no fear intrepid time traveller, like vacuum the universe abhors paradox and will do what it can to fix it.
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