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Comment on How long would it take for a ball rolling across the room to bounce off the wall and get back to you - but the room has a time traveling portal halfway through?

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Eq0@literature.cafe ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

That’s not the time travel I like because it doesn’t create any fun paradoxes!

I support the “unique universe” idea, with all the paradoxes that that can generate. So, you send the ball back to 1969. Has the ball then been bouncing up and down the room since then? You should have seen it when you threw your “new” ball, then!

Or the same ball cannot exist twice at the same time, then somehow the 1969 ball stopped existing when the now-ball got created. And you will never get your ball back because it disappeared in the past.

Or the universe fixes itself, then when your ball disappeared in the time portal, the 1969 version somehow reappeared in the room, but that is the paradox that needs the most “fixing”, so I don’t prefer it

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TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
Oh ok, no problem. I can switch to a model that doesn’t shy away from paradoxes and contradictions.

Next, you would need to address what to do with those problems. Can we allow the same thing to exist in two places simultaneously? How about information and items without any origin? Does it matter if the model isn’t consistent or doesn’t make sense? If so, it’s going to be a very flexible tool when writing a scifi story.

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