In yet another weirdly fascinating piece from the folks at MEL Magazine, writer Brian VanHooker spoke with several astrophysicists about the question we've all been pondering: can a time traveler go back in time and literally screw themself?
Astrophysicist Heloise Stevance replies that there are two main paradoxes you'd want to worry about. The first is the "causal loop." "This is where you go back in time and cause an event that will itself be the cause of the thing you just did," she says. "For example, say you go back in time to give yourself the blueprint for the time machine — which event happened first?" According to Stevance, this would complicate the timeline so much that it would result in a paradox.
What does a paradox look like, though? "Since we're in the realm of broken physics, your guess is as good as mine," Stevance says. "Giant glitter explosion? Let's go with that."
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While that covers the basics, astrophysicist Joseph Lorenzo Hall offers a few biological matters that could complicate things further. For one, you could run the risk of bringing a pathogen back to a time before it first appeared. So, say you invented the time machine in lockdown last year, then celebrated back when you were still in decent shape in college and you didn't know that you had COVID. This could result in you introducing COVID decades before it originally appeared. The lesson here is, before you go back in time and fuck yourself, get a COVID test.
Now you know. And knowing is half the atemporal sexual escapade. More horny paradox details at the link.
What if you went back in time and fucked yourself? [Brian VanHooker / MEL Magazine]
Image: Public Domain via PixaBay
