How to Fix a Paradox
The T.T.C. Staff

Paradoxes in time are a huge problem for the inexperienced time traveler. They are extremely easy to form and tend to occur around “newbies” just because first-timers generally tend to visit at-risk areas such as their own timeline or the timeline of relatives. Once a paradox forms, it is extremely difficult if not impossible to fix them. But this article will attempt to explain a couple of ways to aid the unwitting paradox maker.

First of all, there are two main types of paradoxes: the closed paradox and the open paradox. Closed paradoxes, or closed temporal loops, generally don’t need to be fixed as they are self-contained and self-perpetuating. In fact in most cases if breakage of the loop occurs a separate, unfixable paradox will most definitely form. For example, take the Christopher Reeves movie, Somewhere in Time, the protagonist played by Christopher Reeves is given a watch by an elderly woman. He then proceeds to gaze upon a painting of a beautiful woman and falls in love with her through the painting and decides to travel back in time to be with her. Which he does and she does and then he gives her the watch. Sadly Christopher Reeves’ character meets a tragic demise and so the woman lives to be an old woman just to see him one more time as a young man and gives him the watch. The watch is the physical manifestation of the closed temporal loop. The couple transfer possession of the artifact from one to the other and back as the loop cycles around endlessly. Because the loop is clearly closed, it is stable and does not create a tear in the universe.

This brings us to the second type of paradox, the open paradox. This type of paradox does rip a hole in the universe. Almost instantaneously, in fact. For those of you unaware of what exactly an open paradox or open temporal loop is, it’s like a closed loop but without the stability and all of the confusion. The classic example is of the traveler who goes back in time and accidentally kills his grandfather…or himself. Anyway, the point is that if the grandfather or past self is dead, then the traveler would either not have been born or would have died before traveling into the past. Either way, the traveler would not have been able to go into the past to inflict the triggering event, thereby erasing the triggering event so that this process could start all over again. Without any real resolution, the loop can’t close. Since dramatic consequences occur from this unstable loop, there really isn’t much you can do on your own. Your situation, should you create one of these babies, is basically hopeless and if after reading this article you create an open time loop, tell us what happens. We’re literally dying to know. One thing to try though is to pinch yourself, maybe it’s a nightmare.

Hmmm. This article seems kind of unhelpful. But on a lighter note, according to some great philosophers like Kant, time is already fixed which means that paradoxes and all of that are already in existence somewhere if they’re going to exist so there’s no sense in worrying too much about it since there’s nothing you can do that you haven’t already done at some point on your timeline. Yeah, we don’t really believe that either, but it if it makes you feel better about the unnatural process of time travel and manipulating the timeline, then take what you an get. And try to avoid crossing your own timeline as much as possible.
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