Time travel stories without paradoxes

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Discussion Overview

The discussion centers around time travel stories, specifically those that avoid paradoxes such as the grandfather paradox and do not involve alternate timelines. Participants share examples from movies and literature that fit this criterion.

Discussion Character

  • Exploratory, Debate/contested

Main Points Raised

  • One participant lists examples of time travel stories without paradoxes, including the Terminator series, 12 Monkeys, and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.
  • Another participant suggests that traveling into the future at a constant rate is free of paradoxes and mentions that some movies simply tell fictional stories without exploiting time travel paradoxes.
  • A different participant adds The Time Traveller's Wife and Star Trek: First Contact to the list, noting that Star Trek often presents mixed approaches to time travel.
  • There is mention of a Robert Heinlein short story, All You Zombies..., which relies on pre-destination.
  • One participant references the Novikov self-consistency principle as a conjecture related to the discussion.

Areas of Agreement / Disagreement

Participants share various examples of time travel stories, but there is no consensus on a definitive list or criteria for what constitutes a story without paradoxes. Multiple competing views on the nature of time travel and its implications are present.

Contextual Notes

Some participants express confusion about certain stories, indicating that understanding the mechanics of time travel in these narratives may depend on individual interpretations.

greypilgrim
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Hi,

I'm looking for time travel stories (preferably movies) without paradoxes (grandfather paradox and similar). Also, I'm not looking for stories that try to explain changes in the past with the creation of alternate timelines. I'm talking about stories where people travel into the past and do things which in the end don't change the present from which they departed. Coming to my mind:

- Terminator series
- 12 Monkeys
- Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

And maybe Primer, but I'm too confused to tell.

Any more?
 
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Travel into the future at one second per second is free of paradoxes. So is relativistic time compression.

Movies which did not exploit time travel paradoxes? That is simply how they told a fictional story.
 
The Time Traveller's Wife
Whichever one of the Harry Potter stories has the Time Turner.

Star Trek: First Contact. Star Trek in general plays it both ways - City On The Edge of Forever destroys all of history; Time's Arrow is completely pre-destined.

There's a rather odd Robert Heinlein short story called All You Zombies... that relies on pre-destination.

I'm sure there are loads more.
 
Thanks, I found that this conjecture is called the "en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novikov_self-consistency_principle" . On the Wiki page there are also all the examples we found and a lot more.
 
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