Temporal Paradox: Difference between revisions

[[File:ParadoxWomanJ2 931.jpg|frame|[[Futurama|Torn From Tomorrow's Headlines!]]]]

 

 

A contradiction of causality within the timeline brought about by [[Time Travel]]. Theorized to be [[Time Crash|dangerous to the fabric of reality]], and known to be [[Your Head Asplode|dangerous to the brains]] of anyone who tries to get their head around them. [[Bellisario's Maxim|So don't]]. It's usually what [[The Professor]] worries about during a [[Time Travel]] story.

** Which takes us to the third game. {{spoiler|Arriving at Babylon they find the place ransacked because by retconning his past the vizier of course never died, got hold of the dagger, and proceeded to attack it, looking for the Sands of Time. Kaileena is captured, but when the Prince tries to rescue her the vizier stabs himself with the dagger, turning into a sand god or something, killing Kaileena and infecting the Prince with the sands. Princey manages to swipe the dagger though, escape, and sets about to kill the vizier again. Along the way he bumps into Farah, who had been captured way back when the vizier got the dagger, and discovers that the sands have manifested within him as the Dark prince; a seperate personality that tries to convince him to look out only for himself. He catches up with the vizier, is soundly beaten and thrown into a well, finds his father, who is dead again, and has a crisis moment where the Dark Prince tries to take over. He resists, fights the vizier again, kills him with the dagger, Kaileena appears and cleanses him of the sands, and all seems well. Then the Dark prince pulls him into his own mind, tries to screw it all up but he resists, gets rid of him too and gets the girl. Alls well that ends well. Aside from the dead father and ruined city.}}

* The flash game [http://www.kongregate.com/games/Scarybug/chronotron chronotron] revolves around the players ability to travel back to the begining of the stage (so that multiple version of the player exists at the same time). It is quite possible to either kill a past self, or bar their passage to the time machine - resulting in a time paradox "death", complete with a [[wikipedia:Penrose triangle|penrose triangle]] warning sign.

 

 

* In [[Dragon Ball|The Bardock TV Special]] Bardock attempts to stop Freeza from destroying Planet Vegeta to prevent the creation of a Super Saiyan. {{spoiler|He fails.}} In the Episode of Bardock spinoff it turns out that Bardock {{spoiler|wasn't killed in the explosion but was sent back in time to before the Saiyans discovered Planet Plant.}} He fights Chilled, {{spoiler|Freeza's ancestor}}, and during the fight he {{spoiler|becomes a Super Saiyan.}} This means that Bardock {{spoiler|is the Super Saiyan of legend, and that Chilled was the one who passed the legend down to King Cold and Freeza.}} That in turn means that {{spoiler|Freeza destroyed Planet Vegeta because Bardock became a Super Saiyan when he fought Chilled.}}

** What's more is that Freeza {{spoiler|ordered Dodoria to kill Bardock }}{{spoiler|[[You Can't Fight Fate|specifically because]]}} {{spoiler|he feared Bardock may}} {{spoiler|[[Self-Fulfilling Prophecy|become a Super Saiyan...]]}}

 

=== Comic Books ===

* In [[Pre Crisis]] [[Superman]] comics, all time travel works this way, which is why Superman's ability to time travel by exceeding the speed of light is not a [[Game Breaker]]; he can travel back to the past, but he can't successfully change anything. [[The Movie]] ignores this.

 

 

=== Film ===

* Willow contains a predestination paradox (if you assume, as the film does, that prophecy really is knowledge of the future): Bavmorda's attempts to destroy Elora are the very thing that causes her own destruction, which she would not have attempted to do EXCEPT for foreknowledge that Elora was going to cause her destruction.

 

* As ''[[Lost]]'' season 5 deals with a [[Stable Time Loop]], this type of paradox is emerging. Kate, Sawyer, and Juliet save Ben's life, allowing Ben to grow up and turn the wheel, which causes the time travel in the first place. There may be physical examples as well: in the future, Richard gives Locke a compass. Then Locke travels to 1954 and gives it back to Richard. While it's possible Richard now has two compasses (and must later give Locke the "newer" one,) or the compass was never created.

** The other major season 5 storyline has a similar problem. Jack's goal is to set off a bomb that will prevent their plane from crashing, meaning they'll never come to the island; completely erasing everything that's happened on the show. This means Jack will never have been there to detonate it. Interestingly, it is suggested that the explosion may end up doing the opposite of what Jack wants and leads to the plane crashing. The blast ends up creating {{spoiler|an alternate timeline where they never went to the island.}}

* Chronos, the Incarnation of Time from Piers Anthony's [[Incarnations of Immortality]] is immune to this, to an extent. He cannot be balked by paradox, he remembers the original and the new timeline, though no one else does. The limit is that he cannot interfere with his own workings ( the "Three Person Limit" ). He can exist once, go back in time and change things, but he cannot go back in time and stop himself from changing things, thus the three person limit.

* The ultimate time paradox story is [[Robert A. Heinlein|Heinlein]]'s ''--[[All You Zombies]]--'', {{spoiler|in which the protagonist turns out to be hisheritthey's own mother, father, son, daughter, grandmother, grandfather, grandson, granddaughter, great-grandmother, great-grandfather, great-grandson, great-granddaughter, great-great-grandmother, great-great-grandfather, and so on, ad infinitum.}}

* 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. {{spoiler|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.}}

* In ''[[Artemis Fowl]] and the Time Paradox'', {{spoiler|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.}}

* Played with in the latest ''[[Thursday Next]]'' book, where they find that despite the existence of the [[Time Police|Chronoguard]], no one has actually ''invented'' time travel yet, so they assume that the technology much have been sent from the future and eventually they'll find the spot on the timeline where someone invented it to [[Stable Time Loop|close the gap]]. As one character describes it, it's like they're running the technology "off of borrowed credit." This causes trouble however, when the Chronoguard begins to realize that no one in the timeline ''ever'' invented time travel. The resulting paradox causes the system to unravel and gets rid of any further possibility of [[Time Travel]] in the series (although it seems everyone in the populace has a [[Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory]]).

** But by the nature of the series, couldn't someone just enter [[H. G. Wells]]'s novel and bring out a working time machine?

* In ''Flatterland'' (a [[Spin Offspring]] sequal to [[Flatland]]), Victoria Line and the Space Hopper end up trapped in a black hole. They're rescued by slightly older versions of themselves with a portable white hole, producing both a reverse grandfather paradox and an object loop.

 

=== Newspaper Comics ===

* Unsuccessfully [[Invoked]] and thereby [[Subverted]] in ''[[Calvin and Hobbes]]'': Calvin tries to travel two hours into the future so that he won't have to write the story they're supposed to be writing for school. But the future Calvin doesn't have it, because he went to the future to get it two hours ago. Then they both travel to one hour ago because they decide that that Calvin should have written it... but he refuses on the grounds that whatever they threaten to do to him, they'll be doing it to themselves. In the end, the two Calvins return to the future empty-handed, only two find that the two Hobbeses have written the story for them. When Calvin starts reading it out loud at school, it turns out to be a story about {{spoiler|his foolish time-travel while the tiger(s) save(s) the day.}}

:The timeline of this whole thing is a little paradoxical, but at least the object/information obtained has an origin.

 

=== Video Games ===

** ''[[Remember 11]]'': Both Information Loop and Object Loop with Yuni's terabyte disk, which travels endlessly between 2011 and 2012 and back. [[Epileptic Trees|Possibly]] Reverse Grandfather Paradox in {{spoiler|"player's" involvement in the story, as "it" corrupts [[Dead Little Sister|Sayaka]], causing Satoru to devise a plan to summon and send it back in time, making "it" corrupt [[Dead Little Sister|Sayaka]]...}}

 

* At the climax of the Doc Gets Rad chapter of ''[[The Adventures of Dr. McNinja]]'', villain {{spoiler|Sparklelord}} is sent back in time to the moment when he originally entered from [[Another Dimension]]. This version apparently overwrites the original copy of him, but without any accumulated memories, thus condemning him to repeat the same sequence of events for eternity. So there is an infinite quantity of him entering the loop, but nothing coming out... huh? Presumably, the only reason the universe doesn't implode is that the comic runs on the [[Rule of Cool]].

* Trying to understand a complicated series of events in [[Irregular Webcomic]] seems to lead to this conclusion. Two characters are captured for [[Organ Theft]] purposes. Their future selves come to save them, but end up being captured as well. The original pair having their organs stolen survive by stealing the organs from their future selves, but eventually come across their original organs, and put those in them as well so that when their organs are stolen, only the spares are taken. [http://irregularwebcomic.net/1871.html It's all very complicated]. Of course {{spoiler|The characters end playing a part in destroying the universe by destroying the only time machine in existence instead of using it to become their future selves.}}

** For a more minor example, at one point Jade complains to John that [[Running Gag|her pumpkins keep disappearing]] so John sends her some pumpkin seeds for her birthday. However, these get sent back in time, and it is receiving that present that inspires Jade to start gardening in the first place.

** For another, we have one of John's conversations with Karkat, who is trolling him backwards through time. Karkat claims that John told him that humans hatch as slugs instead of being born, and John tells him that's completely false but thanks him for the pranking idea. Sure enough, in John's next conversation with Karkat, he tells him exactly that and Karkat believes him.

* [[SSDD]], Doctor Cook claims that he got on the Maytec board of directors using stock market information from a PDA that was accidentally sent back in time. But then he locked up the present day version of the PDA and made sure it was never sent back, he noted that the future version didn't disappear or anything.

** Also the Anarchists were prevented from stealing the ''Wildfire'' time machine and using it to build the ''Inglourious'' fifty years earlier. Unfortunately they still have it, centuries before it wasn't built.

 

=== Web Original ===

'''Tank:''' ''Name overwritten. You may now call me Sheila."'' }}

** {{spoiler|Sheila killing Church because of the friendly fire setting?}} Guess who changed the default setting.

 

=== Western Animation ===

* This happens in the ''[[My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic|My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic]]'' episode "It's About Time". Twilight Sparkle meets her future self, who tells her that she was able to get here because of the time spells located in the Star Swirl the Bearded wing of the Canterlot Archives. Later in the episode, she goes there (for entirely different reasons) and ends up using a time spell...to go back and tell herself about the time spells. Hmm, now where did she learn about the location in the first place?

** The whole episode is this. Past Twilight is so bewildered and amazed by the concept of time travel that she can't shut up, and future Twilight doesn't manage to tell her what the actual thing she's supposed to be averting is before she gets sucked back to the future: all past Twilight knows is that future Twilight was from the following Tuesday. So she spends the week panicking about it, ends up with all the injuries future Twilight had when she visited, and by Monday night concludes the only way to stop whatever will happen by Tuesday from happening is to stop time. {{spoiler|So she goes to the archives, but as Tuesday morning arrives, nothing happens, but she finds the time spell and goes back in time to warn herself not to worry about the future...}}

 

== Unclassed, multiple or [[Timey-Wimey Ball|confused]] Examples ==

* Improperly invoked in ''[[Light and Dark - The Adventures of Dark Yagami]]'', after Blud learns that Matt survived a car crash with "Yotsuba", he decides to write Matt's name in his Death Note in the future to kill him in the past. This results in the past changing, with Matt dying and Yotsuba surviving. Dark claims the reason why Blud is telling him and Light this now, rather than at the point in the future when he writes the name is "Its one of those time [[Rouge Angles of Satin|parradoks]] that they have in [[Back to The Future]]".

** Dark's exact words are "Oh I didn't tell you my death note can also kill people in the past and I am going to write his name in it in the future to kill him in the past and stop him stealing the death note." [[Sarcasm Mode|Hope that clears up any confusion.]] It doesn't help that the flashback scenes go from "Present Day" to "Meanwhile in the Past" to "Back in the Future"

=== Web Comics ===

* ''[[Something*Positive|Super Stupor's]]'' Clockstopper can change history with his "Time Punch". (And he'd [http://www.superstupor.com/sust02132009.shtml rather be surfing] [[Shout-Out|TVTropes]] than fighting crime.)

** Well, three of the girls do not remember ever being anything ''but'' girls, so presumably their memories were altered. [[Plot Hole|As for Jo...]]

* In the Surreptitious Machinations arc of [[General Protection Fault]], Empress Trudy travels back in time to give her younger self the necessary information on what she must do to take over the world. Near the end of the arc, Nick and Ki's son Todd reveals that the entire [[Bad Future]] he and Empress Trudy came from was the product of a temporal paradox, since it could not have happened without Empress Trudy advising her younger self, which would not be possible if it did not previously exist. It is heavily implied that {{spoiler|Pandemonium}} was responsible for the existence of the alternate future in the first place. As a result of the future being changed, Todd, the Empress and all other objects from the alternate future fade from existence, but the Empress teleports to a different time just before she fades, and the Gamester finds and recruits Todd.

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Narrative Devices]]

[[Category:Time Travel Tropes]]

[[Category:Self-Demonstrating Article]]