The Battle Against A Time Paradox

Chances are you’ve heard of the idea of time travel, perhaps even suggested as a viable part of our future. Now let me stop you right there — when you’re preparing to even consider time travel, you have to understand all the paradoxes which accompany the implications of moving either forwards or backwards in time.

In this sense, a paradox at least one of the two following things:

• A statement which contradicts itself. In a paradox, you’ll often find the same ideas which logically make sense contradicting each other, sometimes in an endless loop.
• The conclusion is senseless. This is assuming you can come to a conclusion at all, because frequently paradoxes exhibit end results that either don’t make sense at all, or loop back to running the question again.

An example of a famous paradox is the crocodile paradox. In this, a crocodile seizes a small boy, and his mother pleads for it to return him. Here, the crocodile replies that if she can guess whether or not it would return the child correctly, it will return him. If she says it’ll return the child and it intended to, she gets him. If it didn’t, it will keep him. But that’s not the paradox.

Now, if the mother says the crocodile wouldn’t return her son, and he intended to, she was wrong, and thus can’t have him. However, if she doesn’t…