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| Cover of Fantastic SciFi with a Porges story (The Shadowsmith) |
In a
science fiction story written in 1962 by Arthur Porges, entitled The rescuer, the inventors of a time
machine discover that a man has entered the machine to travel back in time. To
stop him, they destroy the machine with the man inside. When they are tried for
murder and destruction of valuable property, they explain:
This man had taken with him a
repeating rifle and five thousand rounds of ammunition. His intention was to
arrive at Golgotha in time to rescue Jesus Christ from the Roman soldiers. In
short, to prevent the crucifixion. And with a modern rifle, who can say he
wouldn’t succeed? And then what?... What of the effect on the future, the
entire stream of history, secular as well as religious?
The story
is an excellent example of the paradox of predestination
mentioned in a
previous article, with several more that make us doubt the possibility of
time travel. But is there no way to avoid the paradoxes? Is it possible to
devise a theory that would remove them making time travel feasible, at least in
principle? There have been several attempts to achieve this.
