Good news for anyone with a hankerin’ for going back in time to kill their grandfather before he had kids: a physicist named Germain Tobar from the University of Queensland in Australia says go for it since time travel paradoxes aren’t real. So feel free to kill your grandpappy without fear of deleting your own existence.
He didn’t explicitly frame it that way, but he does think that time travel paradoxes are bullshit. Tobar’s work uses Einstein’s theory of general relativity as a foundation and then builds from there. He says that, according to his calculations, events can exist both in the past and in the future simultaneously, independent of one another. Space-time will adjust itself to avoid paradoxes, thus allowing you to cause whatever mayhem you want throughout time without creating contradictions.
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If true, famous time travel stories like The Terminator and Back to the Future wouldn’t be possible. A Terminator sent to the past to kill John Connor would not be killing John Connor in the future, theoretically. It would only kill John Connor in the past and space-time would find some way to adjust to ensure that John Connor is still alive in the future to continue to be a pain in every robot’s shiny metal ass.
Tobar’s anti-paradox theory can be best surmised with Ian Malcolm’s line from Jurassic Park: “Life finds a way.” Go ahead, fuck up or fix the past as much as you’d like. Life will find a way to undo the changes you’ve made.
If you go back in time with some disinfectant spray and some sponges, you could whip that Chinese wet market into such a pristine shape that Covid never spreads to even one person. But then you’d come back to the present to find that some dipshit in, like, Texas French kissed a bat and Covid spread anyway.
So go ahead, build your time machine. If Tobar is correct, all you’re going to be able to do is watch history unfold, so kiss that dream of snuffing out Baby Hitler with a pillow goodbye.
