Predestination Paradox - Examples

Examples

A dual example of a predestination paradox is depicted in the classic Ancient Greek play 'Oedipus':

Laius hears a prophecy that his son will kill him and marry his wife. Fearing the prophecy, Laius pierces newborn Oedipus' feet and leaves him out to die, but a herdsman finds him and takes him away from Thebes. Oedipus, not knowing he was adopted, leaves home in fear of the same prophecy that he would kill his father and marry his mother. Laius, meanwhile, ventures out to find a solution to the Sphinx's riddle. As prophesied, Oedipus crossed paths with a wealthy man leading to a fight in which Oedipus slays him. Unbeknownst to Oedipus the man is Laius. Oedipus then defeats the Sphinx by solving a mysterious riddle to become king. He marries the widow queen Jocasta not knowing she is his mother.

A typical example of a predestination paradox (used in The Twilight Zone episode "No Time Like the Past") is as follows:

A man travels back in time. While trying to prevent a school fire he had read about in a historical account he had brought with him, he accidentally causes it.

An example of a predestination paradox in the television show Family Guy (Season 9, Episode 16):

Stewie and Brian travel back in time using Stewie's time machine. They are warped outside the space-time continuum, before the Big Bang. To return home, Stewie overloads the return pad and they are boosted back into the space-time continuum by an explosion. Stewie later studies the radiation footprints of the Big Bang and the explosion of his return pad. He discovers that they match, and he concludes that he is actually the creator of the universe. He explains his theory to Brian, who replies with "That doesn't make any sense; you were born into the universe. How could you create it?" Stewie explains that it is a temporal causality loop, which is an example of a predestination paradox.

A variation on the predestination paradoxes which involves information, rather than objects, traveling through time is similar to the self-fulfilling prophecy:

A man receives information about his own future, telling him that he will die from a heart attack. He resolves to get fit so as to avoid that fate, but in doing so overexerts himself, causing him to suffer the heart attack that kills him.

Here is a peculiar example from Barry Dainton's Time and Space:

Many years from now, a transgalactic civilization has discovered time travel. A deep-thinking temporal engineer wonders what would happen if a time machine were sent back to the singularity from which the big bang emerged. His calculations yield an interesting result: the singularity would be destabilized, producing an explosion resembling the big bang. Needless to say, a time machine was quickly sent on its way.

In all five examples, causality is turned on its head, as the flanking events are both causes and effects of each other, and this is where the paradox lies. In the third example, the paradox lies in the temporal causality loop. So, if Stewie had never traveled back in time, the universe would not exist. Since it would not have existed, it could not have created Stewie, so Stewie would not have existed.

One example of a predestination paradox that is not simultaneously an ontological paradox is:

In 1850, Bob's horse was spooked by something, and almost took Bob over a cliff, had it not been for a strange man stopping the horse. This strange man was later honored by having a statue of him erected. Two hundred years later, Bob goes back in time to sight-see, and sees someone's horse about to go over a cliff. He rushes to his aid and saves his life.

In The Big Loop the Big Bang owes its causation to the temporal engineers. Interestingly enough, it seems the engineers could have chosen not to send the time machine back (after all, they knew what the result would be), thereby failing to cause the Big Bang. But the Big Bang failing to happen is obviously impossible because the universe does exist, so perhaps in the situation where the engineers decide not to send a time machine to the Big Bang's singularity, some other cause will turn out to have been responsible.

In another example, on the show Mucha Lucha in the episode "Woulda Coulda Hasbeena", Senior Hasbeena goes back in time to stop a flash from blinding him in an important wrestling match, when the three main protagonists try to stop him due to dangerous possible outcomes he unleashes a disco ball move thereby blinding himself in the past causing the future he knows to that day.

Another example is in "The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time", when the player travels to the future and meets a man in a windmill, who tells him about a mean Ocarina kid who played a song that sped up his windmill and dried up the well. He then teaches Link the song, who plays it in the past, causing him to learn the song in the future. This also an example of a Bootstrap Paradox, as the song itself was never written, but taught back and forth between Link and the man in the windmill.

In most examples of the predestination paradox, the person travels back in time and ends up fulfilling their role in an event that has already occurred. In a self-fulfilling prophecy, the person is fulfilling their role in an event that has yet to occur, and it is usually information that travels in time (for example, in the form of a prophecy) rather than a person. In either situation, the attempts to avert the course of past or future history both fail.