Temporal Paradox - Solution - Timeline Corruption Hypothesis

Timeline Corruption Hypothesis

Another idea is that any change in the timeline, even without personal interaction, while allowable, would cause a "butterfly effect" in the timeline. All history after the time traveler visited would be affected by minute changes the traveler had made in the past, and the history, depending on how severe the time traveller's actions were, would sooner or later be completely changed. This has been coined the "timeline corruption hypothesis." The 2004 film The Butterfly Effect and the Multiverser RPG system prefer this view. There's also the Ray Bradbury science fiction short story "A Sound of Thunder", in which the butterfly effect is caused by a real butterfly.

Note that the timeline corruption hypothesis is not intended to solve the temporal paradox. It seems to be part of the multiple universes hypothesis, in which a change in the timeline creates a new universe.

The most well-known example of this theory is the 1985 film Back to the Future, in which the protagonist Marty McFly goes back in time and interferes with his parents' first romantic encounter, thus erasing his own existence (as well as that of his siblings). However, the effect only happens gradually, exemplified by a family photo in his possession: each of his siblings begins to disappear limb by limb, starting with the oldest and working down to him (the youngest of the three). This allows Marty to correct the error and restore the timeline, albeit with a few minor changes that are due to his interference. This effect has one contradiction - If a person, somehow, causes himself to not be born in the past, then he would not have been able to do the thing that caused him to not be born for he would have not existed, thus causing time to corrupt.

This theory also figures prominently in the 1989 sequel Back to the Future Part 2 in which McFly's enemy, the now-elderly Biff Tannen, travels from 2015 back to 1955 to give his younger self a copy of a sports almanac with the final scores of professional sports games from 1950 to 2000. The younger Biff uses this information to change history, so when Doc and McFly return to 1985 from their own mission in 2015, they find Hill Valley drastically changed. Marty proposes going back to 2015 to stop Biff from going back to 1955, but Doc explains that it would do no good since they were on a different timeline and 2015 would also be different. The only way to restore the timeline is to return to 1955 and take the almanac away from Biff so he will not use it to change history. Note that this does not create a bootstrap paradox because Biff, from timeline A, traveled back in time and created timeline B, thus there is a clear(ish) logical reason as to where the almanac came from.

This idea also appears in a Family Guy episode, in which Peter goes back in time with the help of "Death" so that he can relive his teen life. When he arrives in the past, rather than spending time with his present-day wife, Lois, Peter ignores her. His actions cause a corruption in the timeline, and when Peter returns to the present day, all of reality is radically different. Also, in Source Code, a military officer is sent back in time to help prevent a bomb explosion. After the bomb is stopped, he still finds himself still in the past. In other words, a totally new universe.

In the Simpsons' Halloween show Treehouse of Horror V, there is TIME AND PUNISHMENT where Homer attempting to fix the toaster,accidentally creates a time machine and travels to the age of dinosaurs, inadvertently altering his time far for the worse. His attempts to rectify matters alter time over & over in amazing ways.

The timeline corruption hypothesis is also used in the Red Dwarf episode, "Tikka to Ride", when the Red Dwarf crew travels back in time (with Lister's intention of ordering 500 curries) and accidentally kills Lee Harvey Oswald, saving Kennedy's life. Three years later, in an alternate reality, it is revealed that through a series of chain events, the USSR won the Space Race and put the first man on the moon, meaning that the Dwarfers never travelled into deep space in the first place, trapped in an alternate 1966. The Dwarfers manage to correct this by trying to make Oswald shoot from a different floor, before making an impeached Kennedy assassinate himself, as the man on the grassy knoll.

Philip K. Dick also explored timeline corruption paradoxes. In the story "Orpheus with Clay Feet", Slade, a character from the future, goes on a time travel vacation to the past where he can visit famous science fiction writer Jack Dowland and become his muse. Slade, however, fails to inspire Dowland as he had hoped, and Dowland never becomes the master he should have been.

Timeline corruption is an important motif in Star Trek: Enterprise. Captain Archer and the Enterprise crew become embroiled in an ongoing Temporal Cold War with the Suliban Cabal, a race of hostile aliens from the future who deliberately manipulate the timeline for their own ends. One of the results was that Earth's early 20th-Century history was changed so that the Nazis controlled much of Europe and proceeded to invade North America. Of course, the humans had to find a way to stop the Suliban and restore the timeline. Similar events occur in other Star Trek series.

In the videogame World of Warcraft, the Bronze Dragonflight (tasked with the safety of the timelines) frequently asks the heroes (players) to help them fight the Infinite Dragonflight, who would want to change important events of the past. Although this may vary depending on the point of the view of the player, most of the events are negative ones - Thrall's escape from his prison, leading to the formation of the new Horde, enemies of the Alliance; the opening of the Dark Portal, in which a corrupted Medivh opens up a link with the world of Draenor, starting the orcish invasions of Azeroth and ensuing wars; and the Culling of Stratholme, a defining moment in which Prince Arthas's fall to madness leads to the rise of the undead Scourge and his eventual merge with the Lich King - but they insist that the outcome of preventing such events would be "much worse".

The videogame series Command & Conquer contains a miniseries called Red Alert, whose three games depict what "happened" when Albert Einstein traveled back in time to prevent Hitler from rising to power. This resulted in the Nazi regime never coming to power, allowing the Soviet Union to become a formidable threat to the Allied Nations; instead of just tension during the Cold War, the Soviets launched a full-scale invasion against the United States. Later in the series, the Soviets steal the time-travelling technology for themselves to kill Einstein, preventing his technology from helping the Allies; however, this leads to Japan's Empire of the Rising Sun emerging as a new superpower.

In the videogame The Journeyman Project, a Temporal Distortion Wave threatens to alter the present. The player is tasked with retrieving a CD-ROM disk that has the correct timeline stored on it. Upon returning to the present from the far distant past, it is revealed that the timeline has indeed been corrupted by four key events in the recent past. This idea of avoiding corrupted timelines is seen throughout the Journeyman Project Trilogy. Although, it is only a story element in the later games as opposed to a major gameplay moment.