The tenses of time travelFirst of all, I want to make it absolutely clear that I have no excuse for not working right now. I have a big project coming due in the very near future, and it's not more than half done, and I really should be working on it. That being established, let's move on to the actual procrastination.One of the biggest problems when you try to imagine the nature of time is the English language. I mean, let's face it - the English language isn't constructed to be able to deal with time travel in any of it's varied forms, except for the normal one, and even that one has problems. How, for example, do you tell someone you told someone in the past to do something in your current future? "I told him to take out the trash next Thursday." Are you referring to the Thursday after you told him, or after the current conversation? This gets worse if you and he are travelling in opposite time directions (i.e. his future is your past and vice versa). "I'm going to tell him to have taken out the trash last Thursday?" It just doesn't work. Let's take another example: the hackneyed "kill your father and take his place so as to be your own father" example. (This provides the obvious advantage that you will always have been more like your mother than you are like your father. If you do this over and over your genetic structure will be more and more identical to your mother's. However, you will have to either a) ensure through some means the sex of your child will be the same as yours, or b) travel, whenever necessary, to a time when perfect sex changes are possible. Option b also allows you to do this if you are female to begin with (or the reverse if you are male), so is recommended. You may want to stick with artificial insemination, to ensure that your upbringing is as much like your upbringing as possible. (See what I mean about tenses?) End of aside.) One example of the tense problem has been shown in the aside. Another - how do you refer to your original father/mother progenitor - the one that you cuckolded? How do you refer to yourself? (For example, you could be your own father, mother, and grandfather. You are then an extremely odd person. Remind me to get your phone number. This would mean that you are your father, your father's father, your father's father's father, your mother's father, your mother's father's mother, and so on - yet while you are all these things, you are not your entire family tree, although you are. See what I mean?) Neither of the two other languages I know - Hebrew and Spanish - are any better. This will cause problems. However, there is a solution. Once time travel is actually established, a language which accounts for these intricacies can be developed, brought back in time, and established, so everyone can have always have been comfortable speaking in said language. That will mean none of this discussion would ever have existed, which is probably a good thing.
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