The Grandfather Paradox was first put out by science fiction author René Barjavel in his 1943 work “Le Voyageur Imprudent,” sometimes known as “The Imprudent Traveler.” A problem with time travel is called The Grandfather Paradox.
The term “grandfather paradox” was well-known by 1950, according to the Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction, and the idea became popular in science-fiction journals in the 1920s and 1930s.
Please bear with me here since the Grandfather paradox can be a little perplexing. The Paradox is a self-contradictory situation that can be explained by the following example: Imagine if you could travel back in time and kill your biological grandfather before he ever had the chance to meet your grandmother. This would mean that you would have disrupted an entire chain of events – one of your parents or both your parents would never have been born and thus, by logical extension, you would not have been born either.
Therefore, you couldn’t have gone back in time after all, since you won’t be there in the first place, because the timeline had been altered. However, if you were not born and, in that case never travelled back in time, then you would have been conceived and your grandfather would still be alive, enabling you to go back in time to murder him, among other things – making it a loop and contradictory Paradox. This theory states that there is no way to get out of being trapped in an eternal time loop. However, you would be unaware of this cycle.
Actually, you don’t even have to kill someone for you to become non-existent in the future. There are a variety of other ways you may alter history without affecting the course of time itself. The best-known example is probably from the film “Back to the Future”, in which the time-traveling protagonist unintentionally causes his parents’ marriage to fall apart and then struggles valiantly to mend it, meaning that he created the possibility for his parents never to conceive and give birth to him in the first place, because he drove a wedge between them.
According to the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, the Paradox is sometimes interpreted as a challenge to the viability of time travel. The parallel universe’s answer is one of many approaches to this issue that have been put forth to resolve this Paradox. It’s possible that there is a vast array of parallel universes, and if you go back in time and kill your grandfather, you do it in a parallel universe where you won’t ever be born.
Your existence is preserved in your original universe, nonetheless. Any alteration to the timeline in the Marvel Universe creates an alternate one. Some characters are aware of this and make use of it, such as Vance Astro of the Guardians of the Galaxy, who was able to become Justice through a timeline shift.
A similar situation has been seen in the recently released third season of The Umbrella Academy. The series explains that a Grandfather Paradox occurs when someone goes back in time to change something, but mistakenly goes too far back and changes the fact that they were ever brought into existence. In the opening scene of episode 3, they give the example of a young guy named Elmer killing his grandfather in order to avoid having to deal with him in the present.
Elmer couldn’t have existed in his timeline since he traveled back too far to a time when he hadn’t even been born. The Umbrellas unintentionally did just that, they went too far back in time, changed too many things that altered the chain of events in a manner that when they tried to return to their original time, they landed up as anomalies in a world they were never born at all. As a result, they shouldn’t exist in the present.
Thus, the Grandfather Paradox is a tricky situation, but is not all fiction. While this Paradox has appeared as a plot device in various science fiction shows and properties, it is also discussed in the world of physics, with none other than Stephen Hawking himself taking a major interest. This one really sends you for a loop, eh?
What do you think about the Grandfather Paradox? Do you think that there are ways to avoid causing anomalies if one accidentally creates one? Let us know in the comments section below!