Quote:
Originally Posted by Kaisos Erranon
Interesting idea, but, because of the way time travel works, they would already have interfered, from their perspective.
They have no choice but to cause the war. They cannot choose, because the future has already happened.
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This is one of the more confusing aspects of time travel.
Why would you create a time travel agency to ensure the future happens, when you understand perfectly well that history can't be changed?
Bossman:so...you want me to give you a hundred billion megacreds a year, to create a time traveling organization to ensure that things that have already happened, will always happen, and cannot be kept from happening, happen?
Mook:Yep
Bossman: NO
Mook: Aw...
...Of course, A time travel is fundamentally a weird concept. You basically have events happening...because they happen. It seems to take the concept of cause and effect, and beat it bluntly on the head to death. You have a never ending loop of events, that seem to have started for no logical reason.
It might seem somewhat consistent when you're speaking about actions, but there are certain similiar time travel stories working on the same principal of "It happened because it happened".
The story "All you zombies" by Robert Heinlen, features a character that has sex with himself, impregnates himself, and then gives birth to himself (Intersexual with working male/female parts). The basics for the causation at first hand seems to be explainable by the standard time travel "It happened because it happened", but a more fundemental problem comes into being when you think of the lineage more carefully.
What is it's lineage? This individual has no blood relation with the rest of the human race. It has no plausible relation to any human ancestor, all the way down to the vertebrates that first crawled out of the sea. Logically speaking, this thing shouldn't even exist. It's almost as if the universe itself hiccuped, and out spawned this individual stuck in a time loop.
While seemingly unrelated to destiny time travel stories, it is still fundamentally related. where as in All you zombies, the major visible paradox is within the biology, it can still be applied to actions and causation. The actions or events of absolute time travel seem to have be stuck in a loop that has no apparent start (Which doesn't have allot of meaning, seeing how you've bypassed the 4th dimension).