Re: Killed yourself in the past?
Dr Rush, ignore everthing posted above, it's all rubbish.
Seriously, everyone is entitled to there own opinions, so ignore that comment.
Here's my take. Someone going back and killing his younger self is a paradox because logicaly, if he was murdered as a young man he would not have the opportunity to grow older and commit temporal-suicide. Of course if he doesn't do that, then he
would get the chance to grow older and commit temporal-suicide, and so on and so on.
So how does one resolve this? Some of the solutions offered above involve parallel timelines and other invented phenomena to avoid the issue. I, however, will meet it head on.
When a person travels back in time, for any reason, he is in the past. His actions take place in the past. They take place before the present. Therefore they are part of the sequence of events that lead from that moment in the past to the moment when the time traveler left. The simple answer to your question is, a person CAN NOT kill his younger self in the past. It is impossible.
This is a much easier answer than saying that an entire universe is spawned from nothing or that the murderous time traveler some how evaporates upon completeing the deed. Anything you do in the past is part of the past, it already happened.
If you need it explained as a story, try this.
Bob is walking down the street and suddenly he hears a gunshot. A bullet ricochets off the building behind him. He looks around for the shooter and sees a wild man running his way waving a gun. He ducks into a store and yells to the man behind the counter to call the cops. Just then another near miss shatters some nearby sodas. Bob ducks and crawls away.
The gunshots meanwhile have attracted a crowd. The gunman runs into the store shouting "Where is he!?" The clerk pulls a shotgun out and holds the gunman until the police arrive, and they take him away.
Later that night Bob hears on the news of the gunman's escape. Just then he is grabed from behind by strong hands that begin to choke him. He struggles free and fights off his attacker. during a lull in the action, Bob demands, "Who are you? Why are you trying to kill me?"
The wild men responds, "Just trying to break the cycle!" and lunges at him with a knife. Bob deftly avoids his attacker and manages to crack him on the head with a frying pan. For good measure and in a fit of self interest Bob cracks him on the head again. To his horror he realises that the man is dead. Bob just killed him and he didn't even know who he was. Looking through the man's wallet, he comes to the startling conclusion that the man is an older version of him. Upon finding a little time machine in the man's pocket, Bob realizes that the man is him from the future.
This information drives Bob crazy and he grabs the time machine and activates it. Upon arriving in the past, he goes out and buys a gun, his broken mind determined to end the cycle...
It aint much, but if you want more, check out my Sig or go
here