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alt title(s): Time Paradox A paradox can be paradoctored.
"Oh my God, I've gone cross-eyed."
"I hate time travel."
A contradiction of causality within the timeline brought about by Time Travel. Theorized to be dangerous to the fabric of reality, and known to be dangerous to the brains of anyone who tries to get their head around them. So don't. It's usually what The Professor worries about during a Time Travel story.
Here's the thing: all our notions of causality are based on the fact that time only moves in the one direction. Once you throw Time Travel into the equation, it's really anyone's guess what will happen. There is no "right" thing for a paradox to do: you might instantly vanish from history; you might be immune but find the world around you different; heck, you might even accidentally unleash killer flying time monkeys.
There are many kinds of paradoxes that can be created by poorly thought-out time travel, but it usually fits one of these two major categories:
Grandfather Paradox:
This paradox gets its name for a very simple question: "what would happen to you if you went back in time and killed your grandfather before he had offspring?" (Parodied by Futurama; see example in Stable Time Loop)
More generally, this means doing something that makes your time travel impossible or unnecessary. While it can destroy the universe if the author is cruel, nowadays it's more likely to fall into the domain of the multiverse theory: According to this theory there are an infinite number of universes, differentiated by things ranging from a single misplaced atom to inexistence of life. According to this theory if you travel back in time what you really do is travel to the past of an Alternate Universe, scenario where you can make anything happen and not trigger a paradox. Complicated, isn't it?
For instance, if success in the time travel endeavor means that the condition you set out to change never happens, then you won't ever have had any reason to come back and try to change it. Thus, without your intervention, it will happen after all, meaning you then come back to change it, meaning you don't have to, meaning you have to, and so on, and so on, etc. (See Austin Powers quote above)
Note that this kind of paradox is deemed irrelevant in most cases of Mental Time Travel.
Ontological Paradox
The kind of paradox that occurs in a Stable Time Loop if you're not very careful about what you're doing. This one is a bit more tricky, as there are several variations:
- Sending to the past an object that came from the future (instead of its present counterpart, if any): The nastiest of all, usually happens if you Write Back To The Future. Not only has the object never been created (it just popped out of a time machine and was sent back), but it will also age at each loop iteration. Since I have no idea how this paradox can solve itself, it's very likely to destroy the universe.
- Sending to the past an information that came from the future: Very similar to the above, but safer to the universe because information doesn't age. Of course, it still pops out of nowhere. Examples: Telling yourself in the past how to build a time machine.
- Saving you own life without having put it in danger in the first place: In other words, doing something necessary for your time travel to be possible, if your time travel did not make it necessary in the first place. This kind of paradox is very unlikely to be of any harm to your universe. However, expect the existence of an Alternate Universe where you died (and thus couldn't go back in time to save yourself), and maybe of an infinity of other universes where you traveled a few seconds/minutes/hours/etc. sooner or later. Basically, this paradox is the polar opposite of the Grandfather one.
Normally, as written, the temporal paradox never turns out to be as dangerous as The Professor imagined it would be, or it turns out the characters were "supposed to do it" in the original timeline. The latter ontological paradox is also known as a predestination paradox, and the resultant philosophical questions are rarely thought about in the series.
If two time periods are featured, the effects of a paradox will usually be visible in the future only "after" the cause has happened in the past (see Meanwhile In The Future).
Interestingly, series rarely have the same result to paradoxes even in the same show.
The most common effect of a paradox, on TV at least, is to trigger the Reset Button and unmake the entire episode's consequences.
Compare Timey Wimey Ball.
Grandfather paradox examples
Anime and Manga
- Toriyama follows a similar approach in DBZ: Future Trunks travels back in time to change the past, although he knows that this will not affect his own past or future (since each timeline exists as a separate dimension, changes made in one timeline will not affect the others). Because Cell is also tavelling around, we end up with five different futures.
- The actual objective of Servant Archer/Heroic Spirit Emiya in Fate Stay Night. He tries to kill his younger self (the protagonist, Emiya Shirou) to force a contradiction within Gaia, which he hopes will cause his whole existence to be erased to keep reality from breaking from the impossibility of the event. He himself admits that this would have a very low chance of happening, considering that by meeting Archer, Shirou is already set on not becoming Heroic Spirit Emiya, so the death of a "different" Emiya Shirou shouldn't affect Heroic Spirit Emiya in the slightest.
Comic Books
- The Marvel Universe has a simple solution for this in the novel trilogy Time's Arrow. There are a large—but not infinite—number of alternate universes, that deal with what ifs. If someone in those timelines goes back in time to change something, it will create a new timeline that's an offshoot of one's own from that point. No going back and killing Hitler, Cyclops notes when told this—the idea being that if you do so, your own timeline will be unaffected. Oddly, this doesn't seem to be the case in the comic universe.
- Except when it is that way. You don't think that any two comic writers actually agree on how this stuff works, do you? That said, the Earth X series (including Universe X and Paradise X) suggests a couple of different versions of this. In the end, it is fundamentally, philosophically important that the idea that alternate universes branch off only as a result of time travel is true.
Film
- In the Back To The Future movies, Doc Brown is very concerned with paradoxes. Paradoxen. Paradoci?
- However, the effects of time travel are different in the various movies. For instance: in the first movie, Marty's accidental stopping his parents getting together was starting to delete him from existence; in the second movie, Biff interferes with his past, and the changed present has Biff saying he sent Marty to a school in Switzerland, yet this never affects the time-travelling Marty.
- Fanon has justified this in various ways; for example, saying the time traveller is only affected by his own changes to the timeline, or by saying that he will be unaffected as long as there's somewhere in the timeline for him to "slot in" - changes to his situation in the new timeline are shrugged off, as long as he exists somewhere.
- The documentaries on the DVD set mention how the justification was that there's some entity that regulates time itself. The partial deletion over time of Marty, why both Jennifers fainted when they met each other, and why even with relatively major changes to the timeline, Marty's family, home, and association with Doc Brown and Jennifer remain largely the same. They wanted to explore this aspect, but couldn't find a way to incorporate it into the films without it being obtrusive. The Other Wiki has more information here
 .
- The Lake House is a story about a mailbox that delivers letters from Kate to Alex two years ago and vice versa. Alex dies in a car accident on Valentines Day. Two years later, when Kate realizes that, she sends a message to Alex two years ago telling him not to be there, and he survives. It should be noted that the Korean movie this movie is based on dealt with the paradox differently: The female character sends the warning back in time, but the male character remains dead. Meanwhile, the insertion of the warning splits off an alternate universe where the male character survives, and the movie ends with the male character meeting the female character, just as the female character is moving into the house, before she's even gotten the first letter. It's okay, though. The guy has quite a story to tell her. Since the movie ends there, by the way, it's unknown whether the female character would have ever started the letter-exchanging if the guy hadn't...ugh, it's all sort of vague, really.
- Frequency depicts basically the same situation as The Lake House—due to abnormal sunspot activity, a police officer and his long-deceased father are able to communicate across a 30-year gulf of time over the same CB radio set. The son first saves his father from dying in a firefighting mishap, only to discover that he died of lung cancer a few years later anyway. But he then manages to convince him to quit smoking.
- The Danny Phantom movie The Ultimate Enemy is one big temporal paradox. In the original timeline, Danny's family and friends are killed, he goes mad with grief and kills himself (people with a Split Personality can do that and survive), and his evil self terrorizes the world for ten years. Thanks to Danny and some timely interference by the Dungeon Master, this timeline was erased, but his evil self was in the past when it was erased, so he still exists even with the events that caused his existence never happening.
- His evil self even pointed out the paradox. "Don't you get it? I still exist. That means you still turn into me."
- Something is mentioned about the evil Danny still being there because he exists outside of time.
- Donnie Darko: After sleepwalking away from the place where he was supposed to die, the titular character is caught in an unstable time loop that he must close. When he moves himself and the jet engine that should have killed him back into the past, he closes the loop by dying in the way that he should have from the beginning, negating everything in the time loop. This causes everything that was changed by his time travel to exist outside of the normal timeline without affecting it. Maybe.
Literature
- David Weber's The Apocalypse Troll has the characters discussing the theories about time travel — one (it's not possible) has been disproved by the fact that one character just did, to arrive in the time of the discussion; the other two, that the future will be altered by what she did or that her presence has caused an alternate world to split off, can't be proved or disproved by anything they can do now. They end up assuming the alternate world and thereafter ignore the question.
- The Time Scout novels avoid Temporal Paradox by the timeline including built-in safeguards; safeguards which are dangerous to time travelers. The most prominent are first, that you can't change anything that's important to the timeline—some improbable accident will occur to prevent it, no matter what you try—which is dangerous, as although some people are obviously important to the timeline, there are even more who aren't obviously important, but just as crucial; and second, that if a time traveler ever arrives at a time where they already exist, the most recent version dies instantly to prevent them from doing anything to their past selves that would undermine their current presence.
Live Action TV
- In Quantum Leap, it appears that Sam is affected by the changes he makes to history only after he leaps, and this has some bearing on his occasional manifestation of previously unmentioned skills (and previously unmentioned/nonexistent family members). Al, on the other hand, seems to be affected instantly, but only when probability of a new event becomes sufficiently high. (In one episode, Sam assures Al's untimely death. When the probability reaches 100%, Al is replaced by another character, but he reappears when Sam reduces the probability.)
- Doctor Who once (in "The Time Meddler") had characters speculate that if history was changed, their memories would be updated with the new version instantly — though later events imply this is not actually the case. In "Father's Day", we see that creating a true paradox (which seems to require not only a change to history which undermines the traveller's presence, but that the traveller witnesses himself doing this by being present in the same time zone twice) has the effect of releasing killer flying time monkeys, which eat everything on your planet. No, really.
- The series does tend to imply that the "Laws of Time" are more of a legal code than physical law: in "Smith and Jones", the Doctor notes that crossing one's own timeline is dangerous and forbidden, "except for cheap tricks."
- Another interesting use of the temporal paradox concept comes in "Last of the Time Lords", in which the Master brings humans back in time from the end of the universe to kill humanity... which would normally make no sense, which is why he turned the TARDIS into a "Paradox Machine" to keep the paradox stable. Destroying this acts as a Reset Button which sets everything on the surface back to the way it was at the end of the last episode.
- Also, "Blink", the episode that gave us the Timey Wimey Ball, has a paradox at its heart. The Doctor is only able to tell Sally Sparrow what's going on via DVD Easter Eggs because Sally wrote it all down at the time and gives it to him at the end of the episode.
- Overall, however, one has to give credit to Doctor Who, in that a show with a time traveler as a central character delves into temporal paradoxes relatively infrequently; in most cases, the time travelling is just a way to set stories in different periods, the temporal version of Adventure Towns.
Tabletop Games
- In the RPG Feng Shui there are no temporal paradoxes, because history rewrites itself to accommodate changes in the timeline. For instance, if Donald Wong goes back in time and kills his great-great-grandfather, when he returns to the present, he'll find that everyone now knows him as Donald Fong, a person with a very similar life to Donald Wong. He'll remember his old life as Donald Wong, but everyone else will always have known him as Donald Fong. In extreme cases - such as when someone controls enough feng shui sites to cause a critical shift (i.e. they change reality) - people can get written out of the timeline entirely; they still exist, but they have no past in the current timeline, because their version of history simply doesn't exist anymore.
Video Games
- The Metal Gear Solid games are well known for situations occuring in which the player can create a paradox of sorts, by killing someone in a prequel who is known to be alive in chronologically later games. Of particular note is Revolver Ocelot, in the third game, whose death during certain scenes results in an instant Nonstandard Game Over. It's especially surreal when your CO from the future starts chewing you out for causing a Time Paradox. The fact that EVA (who is never mentioned in any other game in the series AFAIK) is protected by a similar Nonstandard Game Over adds an additional layer of surreality.
- She's since appeared in 2 more. They were just giving her a paradox vaccine.
- In the Space Quest series of games, Roger Wilco is saved from certain death in Space Quest IV by a mysterious man who is later revealed to be his grown-up son from the future.
- Roger Wilco meets his future-to-be wife (though she doesn't know it yet) in Space Quest V and if she's killed during the course of the story, Roger Jr ceases to exist, and it's Game Over.
- And in Space Quest VI, Roger is demoted and loses Beatrice, falling for another woman, Stellar Santiago, which means that Roger Jr, at least the one from the SQXII future timeline, is never born, defeating the purpose of the previous game.
- One route in the game Ever17 features a time-travel attempt to set right what once went wrong with an obvious fix. Unfortunately, this also undoes the events that triggered the attempt, resulting in a very unpleasant paradox◊.
- In Tales Of Phantasia, Time Travel divides the timeline around halfway through the game in such a way that the object of your characters' revenge and the final boss of the game are two different people.
- In Persona 3, the Temporal Paradox does have quite a devastating effect - the main female love interest wants to go back in time and save/see the main character before he sacrificed himself, which might bring about The End Of The World As We Know It.
- The main villains of Tales of the World: Narikiri Dungeon 3 are the main characters from the future, and they are messing up the timeline to unseal the "Demon King Jababa" and defeat him before he can destroy their village. The thing is, the game implies that he got out and destroyed the village because they released him.
- World Of Warcraft has a quest that plays with this. While doing a survey for the Bronze Dragonflight (keepers of time), the player is assisted by his future self. Later on, he needs to do the same thing again to protect his past self.
Web Comics
Ontological paradox examples
Anime
- Transformers Armada, in the "Drift" episode. Starscream is blasted with the Requiem Blaster, then Highwire somehow apparently warps the kids back in time, but in an Alternate Universe, where both the Autobots and Decepticons are imprisoned and slowly being digested within Unicron. Before he expires, Hot Shot reveals that the Minicons are actually Unicron's cells, and the Transformers were being used by them. Then the kids travel further back in time to when the Minicons were created. Here they tell them to escape from Cybertron, eventually resulting in them coming to Earth and all subsequent events in the story. Then, back in the present, Perceptor stops Thrust from blasting Starscream. Therefore, the kids had to go back in time to trigger the sequence of events that led them to Cybertron and ultimately the time travel event itself.
Fan Fiction
Film
- Another Sandra Bullock film, Premonition, mixes this trope with You Cant Fight Fate: Linda's attempts to prevent her husband's death cause it, but she does get pregnant before he dies, and prevents herself from going crazy and getting committed, which she could not have done had she not had the premonitions of the future.
- Referenced in the Movie Deja vu by agent Carlin right before they send a note back in time:
Technician: It would have gone faster if you had written it [the note] yourself
Carlin: Yeah, then I recognize my own hand writing and the universe explodes.
- Fathering the guy who will send you back in time counts, too.
Literature
- The classic written bootstrap paradox is Heinlein's "'—All You Zombies—'", in which the protagonist turns out to be hisheritthey's own mother, father, mentor, the man who stole his baby, the man who dropped him off at the orphange, and one or two other characters too.
- Averted in his story "By his bootstraps", where the character gets a book from the future, which he copies into another one (the same one, when it's new?) when it's become too old and falling apart. A good way to avoid ontological paradoxes.
- Averted — by the characters, no less — in Isaac Asimov's short story "The Red Queen's Race." They wind up creating a Stable Time Loop instead. A scientist conducts an experiment to send modern scientific texts back in time, translated into ancient Greek. His translator, fearing a Temporal Paradox, only translates the parts that would account for the oddly anachronistic scientific advances already in our ancient history, like Hero's steam engine or the infamous Baghdad Battery.
- Of course, this is an example of Technology Levels; there's no reason a scientific genius of the time couldn't have invented those on their own with the tools of the time, and it only seems anachronistic because we expect steam power to Officially show up in the 1800s, and electric power Officially not long after that.
- It's a little more complicated than that; many 1800s-vintage technologies like efficient, powerful steam engines really did depend on other technologies not developed until a few centuries before that time. Like the use of machine tools to work metal. Put James Watt back in 300 BC, and he'd have a hard time duplicating his engine without first duplicating the metalworking technology of his era.
- In Artemis Fowl and the Time Paradox, Opal Koboi from the past travels to the present, and possesses Artemis' mother, making her appear ill. This forces present day Artemis to travel back in time to get the cure from the past Artemis. Opal then uses Artemis returning to the present to return to a few days before the present to make Artemis' mother ill in the first place. Ironically, this is all so she can aquire the secret of time travel.
Unclassed, multiple or confused Examples
Film
- Millennium concludes with a massive paradox barrelling its destructive way into the future whose time travel efforts caused it.
- Both averted and played with in Primer. As one of the characters says, "The last revision is apparently the one that counts." We find characters gradually losing their worries about causality; they wind up going back in time to relive the events of that same week in their original place — apparently intending to do everything right this time. It appears that causing a paradox causes some kind of mild brain trauma to the time traveler involved. But then there's that other version of yourself that you drugged up and locked in the basement so you could replace him...
- Déjà Vu contradicted itself on terms of Temporal Paradox. First, it is implied that anything changed in past changes the present, as Doug causes the death of his partner, that was thought caused by the ferry explosion. Later, it is implied that the past has already been changed, as the message "U CAN SAVE HER" in Claire's house was written by him, but in the end, it is contradicted, because if he prevented the explosion, he could never have been assigned to the case, and thus could never do the time travelling, and so on...
- French-Canadian movie based from a cult tv show Dans une galaxie près de chez vous 2 featured a spatio-dimensional rip (shaped like a zipper) who goes to present Earth. The Capitain was able to chuck down a DVD with their plea (NOT to destroy the ozone layer) recorded on it. It backfired when the video got featured on You Tube and ridiculed as "Star Wars Twit" (Being bad at pronounciation dosen't help). Nevertheless, it might have pushed a younger vesion of the Capitain to go into space, directly and indirectly setting the events of the show into place.
Literature
- In Strange Attractors by William Sleator, almost any time travel to the past causes instability in the universe. As those instabilities add up, the entire universe can "go chaotic", essentially becoming a huge mass of paradoxes. The only noticeable effect of this is that electrical lighting flickers.
- That's nothing. The timeline in that series is so fragile you can cause paradoxes by going so much as five minutes into the *future*.
- In Ted Chiang's short story "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate", the titular gate can transport anyone exactly twenty years into the future, or twenty years back. This leads to increasingly more improbable shenanigans, starting with a Stable Time Loop involving a treasure map, and reaching its arguable peak when a character's wife meets her husband's younger self in the past, takes him to the bedroom, and upon descovering his lack of the, er, skills that the husband has in the present, teaches him how to please a woman, over the course of weeks. It's also implied that the husband married her in the present because, when he saw her, she reminded him of the middle-aged woman who took his virginity. This troper learned that in certain circumstances, adultery is quite justifiable.
Live Action TV
Tabletop Games
- In the Time Travel RPG Continuum, if a time traveler creates a paradox, they accumulate "frag," and if they accumulate too much, it eventually causes them to unravel. What's more, unchecked temporal paradoxes will eventually lead to the unraveling of reality itself. Much of the game centers around the players, who are part of "The Continuum" trying to fix paradoxes deliberately created by time travelers (known as "narcissists") who don't believe the official line on paradoxes, and who want to mess with the timeline for their own personal gain.
Video Games
- Chrono Trigger, just Chrono Trigger.
- Time Hollow for the DS subverts these, for the most part, by having a few people remember all alterations - as such, you can't hit the "prevent myself from adjusting time" snag by fixing the thing you wanted to change. There is, however, of all things, a cat that ends up in a near-ontological paradox avoided only by the fact that it's locked in time and cannot age.
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