The Bootstrap Paradox

Why Isn’t Our Universe Overrun with Time Travelers?

Imagine you’re walking down the street and you see a blue telephone box. You’re a fan of a certain long-running British sci-fi show, so you look inside. There, you find a computer that lets you select a specific time and place somewhere on Earth. To your amazement, you type in the Cretaceous period and step outside to find a T. Rex. You excitedly spend the next few hours galavanting around time and space until you decide to go home. To avoid being late for work, you land the time machine a minute before you found it. You also leave it in the same place you found it, because you’d rather not be on the bad side of whoever owns it. As you walk away, you turn back and see your past self getting in the box. The box disappears, and despite taking that same route to work everyday after your adventure, you never see it again.

You come to the conclusion that your past self must have gone on the same adventure as you. Then, you realize that the time machine was left for you to find by yourself. Immediately the question arises: who built the time machine to begin with? Where did it come from? This story is an example of the Bootstrap Paradox, where an item or piece of information travels back in time and…