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Bootstrapping Grandpa
I have heard it said that the Grandfather Paradox has no solution. Much the same has reached my ears regarding the Bootstrap Paradox. Given these musings, I'd like to formally solve both at the same "time".
If you go back in time to kill your paternal grandpa before he sired your father, and you strongly feel you won't regret it, all you have to do to solve the inherent paradox is leaving a message for someone in the future to go back in time and kill that same individual.
An elegant way of ensuring that the following perpetrator, whom you've directed to kill the target, will do everything just as you had done, begins with you scanning your brain, as well as your entire physical form, right after travelling through time. After securing the scan, going to sleep, waking up, and killing the individual who would have been your grandpa, you must 3D print a duplicate of yourself, imbued with the exact brain that you had right after travelling through time. Travel back in time to a spot near where you remember having initially arrived in the time machine. Create an exact copy of your time machine, scans, and other possessions. Put your duplicate on the exact spot you were when you woke up. Stand back, and your duplicate will wake up, kill your grandpa, create a duplicate of themself with the scans you provided, travel back in time, create exact copies of their possessions, stand back, let their duplicate wake up, and so on.
In reality, you once existed. You once had a childhood. You once lived. You went back in time and killed the individual that would have made this possible, only for your duplicate to kill the same individual in the way you had, then create another duplicate to accomplish the same task. A new timeline where a sourceless individual with fake memories, being instantiated, looks to an outsider like a bootstrap paradox. Where did they get the scans of themself? Where did they get the time machine design? They got it from the original timeline, which you destroyed.
Alternatively, you could send a message to the future to get someone else to come by, kill the "non-grandpa", and send the exact same message in the exact same way that you had. This person would then send the same message, which should cause the same person to arrive, which should cause the same chain of events to repeat ad infinitum. Much the same as in the previous solution, an outsider would ponder the origin of the task to kill a random individual. It came, of course, from the original timeline, which you destroyed.
The key here is to create a timeline that doesn't shiver. All manner of cause and effect must be precisely the same. If not, then you'll end up in a recursive loop of changing timelines, which means everything after the point of change is trapped in a quantum superposition. Nothing is certain, nothing is solid, Everything is wishy washy, very disgusting. I assume it would amount to something like the foolishness we see at the atomic level, extrapolated to the macroscopic world. Everyone would be phasing in and out.
Frankly I've had to ask myself if it's a good idea to share these ideas. At the end of the day, if backwards time travel is developed, then the people developing it would end up with the same questions and potential solutions I have discussed here. The Grandfather Paradox and the Bootstrap Paradox have been well known for many decades. I don't doubt my points on how to "bootstrap grandpa" haven't been made in a slightly different way by someone else. The difference that my publication of this makes is that I may have given them more popularity so that said inventors have more "time" to think about them before embarking on such a dangerous project.
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Let's take one of the worst time travel flicks as an example: Millenium (1989). Much of this film is rather serious with its time logic. The time travellers abduct people from past plane crashes right before they die and leave dead cloned bodies behind to squeeze all potential timeline changes down as little as possible. At the end of the film, a time traveller interacts with someone who was instrumental in the development of time travel. The time traveller asks the genius to give her back her laser, so the genius fiddles with it and dies. This is an "unsolvable paradox", so literally everyone in the future civilization tries travelling to the "far future" because they're about to be erased from existence. There is no making sense of this idea that the far future isn't equally subject to being erased from existence, the film just quits giving a damn.
What should you do as a time traveller in this situation? The number one obvious solution is at least writing down the secrets of time travel that the genius was going to discover, which mitigates the absolute most extreme portion of the paradox.
The next most obvious solution is travelling back in time to the guy died, then, request Mr Genius puts it down gently. Pick it up slowly, then send a message to yourself in the future at a point just before you went back, to go to the exact moment in time that you had, say the exact things you just said, and copy paste this exact message to be sent to yourself at the exact moment you had sent it. Then, go back to the future.
Obviously things depends on whether or not he was supposed to have the laser at all, and whether or not you should just travel back to when you dropped the laser. The ability to identify historical details such as this are a matter of clarity I intend to elaborate upon in a later article.
Regarding the finer details of travelling back to just before the guy died, one might interpret things such that now 2 of you are there (the original and the one who came back to prevent the death). It could be the case the only one of you is there because supposedly you've prevented your own existence, thus you never travelled back and now you're the only version of yourself. It could, of course, be the case that none of you are there, and you were destroyed instantly once Mr Genius died. I imagine one of you could be there if you really are going to bootstrap grandpa. Whether one of you are there, or two of you are there, the version of yourself that saw the death occur should send the message to the future.
If there is a second, earlier version of yourself that was now prevented from seeing the death occur, you'll run into trouble simply telling them to go back and do the talking. Permitting such will cause minute but recursive changes in tone of voice, facial expressions, stance, and the movement of air molecules that bounce around and impact other molecules. Merely altering the erosion process on a single square inch of paint on a wall should be enough to change stock market prices at some point in the future. This is the rationale by which I recommend sending a message, which can be copied precisely and delivered at an exact time. As for what to do with this second version of yourself if it appears, I struggle to resolve the matter. I hope to come up with an idea soon.
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