Is there a time paradox, where your future self, who won the lottery, travels back in time to tell you the numbers he picked to win?
Which he got from his future self, and so on.
Is this a simple causal loop, or is the infinite loop itself a paradox?
Is it equivalent to the paradox, where a time-traveller gifts all of Shakespeares’ works to Shakespeare, before he wrote them, raising the question ‘who originally wrote Shakespeare’s works?’
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Not possible. My future self would, at some point, have to realize what the numbers were for any paradox to establish a starting point.
There’s no paradox if the Many-World interpretion and the block universe are true.
There’s just endless realities where “you” are given correct and incorrect numbers by a “future self”, and most of the “yous” will be cursing the fucking idiot future self for giving you numbers that didn’t win anything.
Yes, but apparently the big news is I had a sex change.
Well, let’s see. Why don’t you try going back to visit your past self with some useful information, such as not to buy beachfront property in the 21st century, and then come back and tell us how that went?
I tried giving myself the lotto numbers in 2003 and the ticket vanished. I think that there is a supernatural supervisor blocking such things. Or I, or we, are in a zoo? I stopped trying to make supernatural short cuts.
I’d say it was a plain outright paradox, which demonstrates that it is just not possible to send information back in time that way, but @RedDeerGuy1 has first-hand experience.
In fiction, of course, it’s up to the author to imagine how time travel might work, if they want to for their story, and to consider the ramifications, if they want their story to feature a thought-out situation . . . but I have yet to encounter sci fi that really engages this sort of issue in a really intelligent and consistent way.
I would recommend the game book GURPS Time Travel ( preview here ) for a discussion of various possible ways to run games that feature various types of time travel in game universes.
Note too that IF time travel IS possible, actually winning the lottery is not necessary. You just need to know the winning numbers, or a stock market price that went up, or something like that.
It is just a variation of the general paradox of being able to change the future by altering the past. Link
Cool!
I’ll be interested what thoughts you have about it.
Why not be greedy and go back in time with another week’s numbers so that you win the lottery twice? What could possibly go wrong.
Not as much of a paradox as going back in time to kill your father, since that would prevent you from living long enough to travel back to do that.
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