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Randomised grandparents for time travellers

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This business service is there to provide randomising in regards to grandparents.

Can be done the cheap and easy way, the Economy Plan - just using anonymous donations from the sperm and egg bank.

Or for the plutocrat market the "The Man (or Woman) in the Iron Mask Plan (TM)", where anonymous husbands and wives are provided,complete with iron masks and fake ID, these folk are swapped out at regular intervals

Obvious the "The Man (or Woman) in the Iron Mask Plan (TM)" does involve considerable forethought, but for plutocrat dynasties it should be possible.

It's more for those having just invented the time machine and possibly over-celebrating and, as these things usually do like good idea - when seen through the bottom of the bottle - you determine to test the old paradox out....

Oddly enough this might just explain the number of totally random shootings..

not_morrison_rm, Jul 26 2014

Heinlein http://en.wikipedia...iki/All_You_Zombies
having become your own father and mother...doesn't cut down on the mother/fathers' day cards? [not_morrison_rm, Jul 29 2014]

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       I think the answer to the 'Grandfather paradox' is analagous to Schrodinger's cat - in the same way that the question of whether the cat is alive or dead is only resolved when you observe it, the question of who your grandfather is is only resolved when you try and kill him. I.e. if you go back in time and kill your grandfather it then follows that you must subsequently discover that your gramdmother had an affair and that the person you thought was your grandfather is not. In fact, anyone you go back in time and kill will turn out not to be your grandfather through some convoluted sequence of events.
hippo, Jul 28 2014
  

       Er, yes, I'm just trying to get this on rational footing, and a lucrative service.
not_morrison_rm, Jul 28 2014
  

       Just make certain not to go back in time and shoot the entrepreneur or any of the technicians working for the company, or you'll be sure and screw things up. In fact, I think the best bet at not being randomly shot by some time traveler would be to work for this corporation.
RayfordSteele, Jul 28 2014
  

       Are there a lot of insane time machine inventors & is there a big market for this among them?   

       It's just I wouldn't have thought many insane inventors have the marbles (required strangely enough to fuel the device) to build one so you're starting off from a relatively small sampling of time machine inventors in the first place (which aren't known for being overly numerous anyway).   

       Sane ones presumably test the paradox on someone else's grandfather.   

       I hope you've done a proper cost analysis for unit price set against development & production costs considering the number of unit sales expected (wouldn't want to see you make a loss)?   

       How much are you charging? <never said he was sane>
Skewed, Jul 29 2014
  

       It's not just the grandfather that you have to worry about. It's the developers of every technology that is used on the time machine, or every person that could conceivably alter its destiny. Consider the red-headed geek that dances with Marty's mother. Somewhere in fate that guy's family slipped down a notch or two; and quite possibly his kids were radically altered or erased from existence.
RayfordSteele, Jul 29 2014
  

       //Consider the red-headed geek that dances with Marty's mother.   

       Nobody tell him, it's not true...might be too much of a shock...   

       As for Skewed, in fact the charge will be nothing, as your grandparents were part of the pilot program.   

       I mean, didn't you think it strange they seemed to be a little different every time you visited? Are you quite sure?
not_morrison_rm, Jul 29 2014
  

       [RatfordSteele] //Just make certain not to go back in time and shoot the entrepreneur or any of the technicians// - but that's answered by what I said earlier. If you do go back in time and shoot a key technician who helped to develop the time machine then the superposition of multiple possible histories will collapse and resolve itself into something which now 'works' and avoids a paradox. So, you will discover that you've killed the technician's identical twin who was visiting them for lunch, or you'll discover that in fact he or she was not critical to the project but spent their time goofing off and stealing others' work.
hippo, Jul 29 2014
  

       All this is beginning to remind of Heinlein's "All you zombies" story. Link as expected..
not_morrison_rm, Jul 29 2014
  

       I'm not certain who this Ratford guy is but he sounds like Ratbert's slightly-less-gullible cousin.   

       It would be interesting to take a video camera back in time to film the increasingly improbable sequence of events that led to the sparing of your ancestors lives as you deliberately try and target them.
RayfordSteele, Jul 29 2014
  

       At a tangent but relevant to time travel I dusted off Braid again and my daughter and I were going thru it. Time travel, short hops and long, are an integral aspect to the game: Mario with a 4th dimension and tricky puzzles. It is probably the most clever video game I have ever seen.
bungston, Jul 29 2014
  

       [Rayford] oops, typo. Yes - the stories would get less and less plausible until you discover you were adopted.
hippo, Jul 29 2014
  

       The whole killing-your-grandparent paradox isn't. I mean it isn't a paradox. Any more than it's a paradox to drive over a bridge and then blow it up, meaning that you couldn't have driven over the bridge to... but of course you already have.   

       The apparent paradox arises not from travelling in time but in assuming that time stays still while you travel back and forth in it. The sequence of events:   

       (1) Grandfather has son A, who has grandson B
(2) Grandson B goes back in time and kills grandfather
(3) Grandson B goes forward in time.
  

       contains no paradoxes. The only "odd" things are the magical disappearance of the grandson from the "present" when he travels back in time, and the equally magical reappearance of the grandson when he returns to the "present"; and these odd disappearances and reappearances are equally odd whether he's killed his grandfather or not.
MaxwellBuchanan, Jul 29 2014
  

       Maybe what happens is when the grandson goes back and kills his grandfather he neutralizes his action of killing his own grandfather because he is never born. Because he is never born to kill his own grandfather his grandfather survives to have a son who has the grandson. The grandson therefore does not exist when he kills his grandfather, but exists in a reality where he does not.
rcarty, Jul 31 2014
  

       I don't think energy.-mass-time/universe will allow your lump of spacetime to have no origin. The person you killl will ultimately not become you grandfather. Lowest form wins.
wjt, Jul 31 2014
  
      
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