BLAHG

The paradox of time travel is summed up as "what happens if I go back into the past and kill my father before I was born?" The paradox is then of course, you aren't born, so you can't kill your father, so you are born, so you can go back and kill him...

Just recently a group of physicists got around the paradox, but I don't like their explanation (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4097258.stm). I have had my own theory on the topic since the early 90's and since I haven't seen anything quite like it anywhere else, I decided to post it here.

Time

Imagine a road with a truck stop. Every second a truck leaves and heads out on the road. Every truck leaves with the same cargo-- the universe at the first second time began. So, there is only 1 truck per particular time in space. Time progresses normally for each cargo after hitting the road. For the most part the trucks look identical at any particular mile marker as they travel end to end, one passing by every second. There might be some minor differences caused by chaos, but I won't touch on that here.

Time travel would be like visiting another truck. Even if you go 50 years into the past and mess it up, you only mess up that truck. After returning and finding your truck as you left it, you decide to go back 49 years and 364 days. But you find the mess you created in the truck a day behind that one did not carry on to this truck. Now, you can monitor the changes caused by your mess ups, but only by going back to that exact truck you messed up excatly 50 years back from your present. You'll be able to witness the results of the mess you made, BUT only in real time as it happens. To see what happens in a week, you'll have to wait a week.

It gets a little hard to think about, but your alter egos will also probably jump back 50 years and mess it up as well. So that cycle will probably continue until the first messed up truck ages 50 years and because of your mess up, you may or may not have time traveled and the truck at that original mile marker in the past may not get all messed up, continuing undisturbed to reset the cycle 50 years later.

Another consequence of this theory is that when you time travel, you disappear from your truck and will remain missing for an amount of time equal to that spent on other trucks. There is no returning to the moment you left. You could, but that would mean jumping back into a different truck, and I wouldn't risk that because who knows how messed up that truck is from other time travellers like yourself.

This could also force a notion of the first truck--the one that started when time began. You can't travel into the future more than the first truck. The trucks are really going to start diverging from each other when forward time travel is discovered. The scientists in truck 1 will find out that there's no where to go. But the scientists in truck #60 will discover they can go a minute into the future (assuming the second increments, which of course it only used for this example, it would actually probably be Planck's time or 10^-43 seconds). HOWEVER, it could be that time is infinite. Which begs one to wonder if we could travel into the past beyond the Big Bang.

Ethical problems arise quickly. Political groups may try to influence other trucks for their gain, or even worse, some psychotic person could go back and kill his past life and take it's place if he felt he wanted to relive his life. Luckily he could only do this so many times, as he is still aging normally in his own personal time frame. Along with gifts of data and items to other trucks would also certainly be thefts.

Some where in the future is a Hippie trying to pass legislation that will designate certain time frames (ie trucks) from being touched, so that they may remain in their undisturbed natural state. What they don't realize is they have to somehow get the other trucks to agree on that. :)

Along these same lines I have also wondered if it might be easier to just 'see' into the future or past rather than go there. Light is weird. Although not discovered or much thought about, what if light, because of its unique properties, was visible from other trucks when using the right tool? That is something I would love to see. Imagine the use in court. Although your lawyer would just bring in a physicist who states we can't trust all trucks to be the same because of chaos. Just because every truck we monitored at X mile marker had you killing your wife, it does not mean you did it in this truck.

Liar!