So, I've been thinking about time travel...

[conuly]

And I've been thinking about verb tenses. If five years from now I will go back in time and become my own great-grandmother, was I my great-grandmother, or will I be my great-grandmother? The way we view time, the question is only answerable with a lot of yelling and headaches.

We can overlook paradoxes like "If I kill my own grandfather, don't I cease to exist" by claiming parallel universes, but how do we deal with the grammar?

Of course, this is all a moot point since, as of now, there is no time travel, but what if there were a kind of time outside of time? And all the parallel universes that may or may not exist would have their own time, going at their own speeds (one second per second to them, but it might be faster or slower by our perspectives), and time travel would be more like... wandering through the hyperspace of time. The time outside of time.

This all made sense in my head, and I swear I'm not on drugs.

It's sort of like... in that time, everything would go in a neat chronological order, and it wouldn't do that awful "we have no grammar for this!" thing because it would make sense.

This was random. Sorry.

Comments

[hopefulnebula]

Don't tell me you haven't read that chapter in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe... at least I think it's that. One of the Hitchhiker's books.

[ladytalon.livejournal.com]

That's the first thing I thought of, as well. (Though I can't remember which of the books it was in, because they all run together in my head; I have an omnibus and read the first four straight through.)

[codeman38.livejournal.com]

That was my first thought as well...