The Most Difficult Philosophical Question I Can Think Of
An elderly man comes to you one day and something seems familiar about him, but you initially dismiss it. After five minutes of chit-chat, the crazy old fool says he is you from the year 2067!
He says that in the year 2042 a decade after time travel was invented, that you will have to travel back to the past and impregnate a woman. He rattles on that it's imperative and that it will have a great impact on the future.
He says the woman's name is Martha Merrygold he gives you an envelope with explicit instructions not to open it until the day of your arrival after your time travel trip.
You follow the instructions to a tee and you are now in the past after using a large chunk of your life savings to get there. You are 73 years old but because of advances in biotechnology, you look a bit like you are just shy of 33.
You open the envelope and there you find a picture of your mother. What do you do? Should you do the deed and suck up the fact that you are your own daddy?
Or do you choose to do nothing which will in effect end your life prior to your birth and erase you from the timeline forever?
One other disturbing thought, it was his instruction that you do not open the envelope until you had arrived. Did the old man trick you into making the choice that he made?
Or because he made the choice he made is that evidence that you will do the same?
You've got a wife, two sons, three daughters, and five grandchildren at home. Your return trip 'back to the future' is at twenty-one hundred hours in just two days from now, the clock, as they say, is ticking. (time dilation added for effect)
Hey, you said you wanted difficult.. (ツ)_/¯ enjoy the trolley problem!
Inspired by @son-of-satire's curious query.
Oh and that's totally worth more than one SBD btw ; -)
Bonus questions right up your alley regarding the use of bidbots.
...it might not be too difficult...
😂
In order for you to ever be born in the first place, someone had to impregnate your mother. If you didn't exist yet, there would be no you in the future to go back and impregnate your mother in the root timeline, which means that someone else had to have impregnated your mother. That means that you don't need to impregnate your mother and old you is probably a self-loathing jerk that's just messing with young you for some sadistic reason.
Also, genetically, you can't actually make yourself by having sex with anyone, that's not how it works. You'd only make a new person with similar but slightly different genes than what you have, not you. You'd be giving yourself a brother or sister that is also your son/daughter, not creating yourself.
If anything, going back in time and impregnating your mother severely reduces the probability that you actually get created in the first place. Since you cannot be your own father, you could impact the ability of your actual father to create the real you in the root timeline by adding the variable of another man (you) and another child.
So, I would take this as a warning that I have some mental issues when I get older and I would seek to change that future. :)
Right that's kind of a twist on the grandfather paradox. If you don't do it then you would not have gotten the message to do it in the first place. But maybe the old you is just trying to protect his own existence because some other you did the exact same thing to him. You bring up a good point about making new people. I think that time travel would trigger the butterfly effect and ultimately the world would change more radically than one might think. There would be a bunch of new people and allot of old people would probably not exist at all. Meaning the entire history of the future gets changed your family might not exist at all in the future even if you did do it. You make lots of interesting points.
Well, it wouldn't be me lol heheh but if I were that character, I would just continue the cycle, so he would go back in time, find himself, give him the envelope, time travel, open the envelope, find himself, give envelope, follow instructions, go back in time, find self, follow instructions, go back in time balbalbla.
Something comes to mind...
IT'S THE CIRCLE OF LIFE! :p
Ahh good to get your take on it!
Damn you answered fast, before the
music stopped even! Reminds me of
Love that movie. Did a whole Freudian analysis of it in my humanities class in CEGEP.