Time Travel Paradoxes and Adopted!Harry is...TTTR

[Trisha Masen]

No: HPFGUIDX 57773

Richard (GulPlum) writes:
>Darrin admitted that I was confusing the
>hell out of him with my previous post and said:

>>This is the Bill and Ted version of time travel!

><cut stuff about Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure>

BTW, Keanu Reeves was Ted "Theodore" Logan

>>So, what you're saying is that because no one
>>went back in time to save Lily and James, they
>>were impossible to save, but, on the other hand,
>>no one would have known they needed saving until
>>AFTER they had been killed.

>Correct. Anything else would have been impossible.

One of the basic theories of time travel across most mediums (and sci-fi) is that you can't change the *reason* you go back.

Example:  If someone (let's say Dumbledore) went back a few hours on Halloween 1981 to say Lily and James, once he actually *does* saved them, his reason for going back no longer exists.  They're alive.  So why did he go back to save them?

Sorry if I'm making your brain hurt, Darrin

>>Why couldn't someone have gone back in time and
>>just gotten Lily and James and Harry out of there?

>Because the corollary of what's said above is that
>if they'd have been saved, they wouldn't have been
>able to have died in the first place.

>Hence the whole thing would have been pointless.
>Just remember one thing: YOU CAN'T CHANGE THE PAST.
>You can make it happen, but you can't change it.
>Whatever you made happen is what "the universe"
>knows to have happened. There is no alternate reality
>in which events occurred in a different way.

Again, you can't mess with the reason you went back in the first place.

---------
Additionally, regarding the Adopted!Harry is TTTR theory:
I really don't see how that could happen.  Again, most time travel theories are based upon the premise that you do not interact with your previous selves (Hermione stressed this once she and Harry used the Time Turner).

There are various theories as to why.  Hermione's was that you might attack your future self and you might die, thereby causing a paradox (because if you're dead, how can your future self travel back to kill you?).  Another theory is that two things comprising of the same matter cannot occupy the same space (this was done much better in the move "Time Cop" with Jean-Claude Van Damme).

Therefore, even if TR traveled to 1927 to transport his infant self to 1980, it's still his *infant self* and if he kills himself, he no longer exists.  Paradox.

Oh, geez, now my brain hurts.  I've got to leave this subject now.

~Trisha Masen
http://www.trishamasen.net/trisha.htm