If you could travel through time to the past, is it possible to stop your parents from meeting and thus thwarting your own existence?

It’s worth a shot! Where do I buy my ticket?

Haven’t you seen Back To The Future?

Nope, because you wouldn’t have been born in the first place, and therefore unable to travel back in time and prevent your parents from meeting. Oh, and because time travel isn’t real.

@jeffgoldblumsprivatefacilities YOU SO SMART

Quote:

The grandfather paradox is a proposed paradox of time travel first described (in this exact form) by the science fiction writer René Barjavel in his 1943 book Le Voyageur Imprudent (The Imprudent Traveller).[1] Nevertheless, similar (and even more mind-boggling) paradoxes had already been described, for instance by Robert A. Heinlein in “By His Bootstraps”. The paradox is this: suppose a man travelled back in time and killed his biological grandfather before the latter met the traveler’s grandmother. As a result, one of the traveler’s parents (and by extension the traveller himself) would never have been conceived. This would imply that he could not have travelled back in time after all, which means the grandfather would still be alive, and the traveller would have been conceived allowing him to travel back in time and kill his grandfather. Thus each possibility seems to imply its own negation, a type of logical paradox.

Despite the name, the grandfather paradox does not exclusively regard the impossibility of one’s own birth. Rather, it regards any action that makes impossible the ability to travel back in time in the first place. The paradox’s namesake example is merely the most commonly thought of when one considers the whole range of possible actions. Another example would be using scientific knowledge to invent a time machine, then going back in time and (whether through murder or otherwise) impeding a scientists’ work that would eventually lead to the very information that you used to invent the time machine.

An equivalent paradox is known (in philosophy) as autoinfanticide—that is going back in time and killing oneself as a baby—though when the word was first coined in a paper by Paul Horwich he used the term autofanticide.[2]

The grandfather paradox has been used to argue that backwards time travel must be impossible. However, a number of possible ways of avoiding the paradox have been proposed, such as the idea that the timeline is fixed and unchangeable, the idea that the time traveler will end up in a parallel timeline, while the timeline in which the traveler was born remains independent or the possibility of the time traveler saving his grandfather’s life instead of killing him so that he could later be born and travel back in time so that he could save his grandfather’s life, exactly the opposite of the original paradox.

Source

have you seen the Wizards of Waverly Place? the movie?

My dad was a homeless hippy when my mom met him. I’m sure I could have diverted her elsewhere.
I mean it was one of those love at first sight things, because other than the story on how they met, I don’t remember my mom ever saying anything positive about my dad.

Either way though, it could be done.

But then I wouldn’t exist, and if I didn’t exist, the world wouldn’t know what awesome is, so why would I want to do that?

You either fail in that attempt, because you apparently exist, if we are talking about 1 singular reality, or you succeed in wiping out the existence of yourself in an alternate reality, if we are talking about a many-worlds scenario. Meaning, the moment you “alter” history, you are not altering the course of events for your own reality, but that of another reality, while leaving your original reality intact.

In the fourth dimension, would you be able to alter the past as we in the 3rd dimension alter the future, or does that invoke the grandfather paradox? And if it does invoke the paradox and one could not effect the past, would they merely be able to observe/visit the past and not be able to have an effect on it? I mean, even in the fourth dimension, a timeline is a timeline. I feel like you’d have to travel to a further dimension to have any ability to truly “time travel”.

I really have no understanding of theoretical dimensional physics… Fascinating though…

No, because I’m sure my “parents” would have met one way or another, and I still would have been conceived. My parents may not be the parents I have now, but some other couple. I believe I was destined to be born, because my soul wanted it, and my parents could have been any man and woman.

As we already have time tavel, and have had for some time, this is no longer simply a theoretical question.

Read this book

It would be very difficult for me to get my parents not to meet. They lived on the same street and went to the same school and grew up together… Plus, their families were good friends!

But really, sometimes, I believe that if I wasn’t born, I wouldn’t have to live life (too lazy, too much effort) lol. just sometimes…

If you could travel through time you could shoot lasers out of your eyes and talk to singing mermaids.

The Butterfly Effect is a cautionary tale that suggest just that.

In a unique universe, yes and no. In a multiverse, no.

Excellent idea. Sign me up. If my parents had known what a rotten kid I would be, I doubt that they would have had me.

The old Grandfather Paradox, I’ve never believed that when traveling in spacetime, like traveling anywhere really, can someone exactly retrace their steps and end up where they were once before. Not exactly, so therefore, nothing to worry about. I’m not sure why such a sinareo is allowed to go on as a viable possibility to hypothesis about. Considering the formentioned, doesn’t it reason to say, that the case is closed, you cant and won’t be able to go back and kill your grandfather because you can never achieve the exact reality that exsisted before, a parrallel yes, but nothing being duplicated stands nothing to worry about being eliminated from the duplication because it has every right to exsist, in fact it’s mandatory that it does, in order to create this paradox, to bring life to a question like this. Without getting into too much detail, the reason why I don’t believe there’s those kinds of reprocussions in time travel is directly related to why upper dimentional spacetime, or the infinite parrallell universes pose no threat. There’s not the same, there parellel…Tried and compared, never considered in and of themselfs the real deal.

Well, OK, then!

@Carbonproduct….tried and compared????????????// sweet…...hahahahahaha
which dimension did you travel to….....?????? Besides the one I’m in….....

@Open Your Mind
It’s not possible, as of yet if ever, to travel cross dimentioally, our Tempral Lobe in our brain doesn’t allow for it at the present time, maybe when we reach higher civillization status, we will be able to manipulate the Tempral Lobe and cross anyway.

Fact from fiction, truth from diction. What most people forget about time travel is that the univers is as conneted as the human body. For instance if time travel were possible I could not send my brain back to the time of Caesar, my lungs back to the American Revolution, and my heart to the Battle of the Bulge while leaving my body here. The brain would die because there would be no blood or oxygen to keep it alive. The lungs would die because it had no nose or windpipe to get oxygen into it. The heart would die because it had no blood, no air, and no brain to tell it out to beat. My brainless, lungless, heartless body would surely die for all the organs would die for lack of oxygen because no lings or heart to handle that. Likewise you could not send the moon, or Saturn back in time while leaving the rest of the solar system here, either it all goes back or none of it could. To do that how many sextillion watts of power for instance would you need to send the whole universe even the parts unknown—- back in time with you? If you sent the moon back in time for instance, would not someone miss it in the sky? Going back in time—if could be done doesn’t stop at the Earth, or at the moon, because if it did you would go back to an Earth with no sun, or solar system to support it.