TIME TRAVEL IS USELESS

Time travel would be useless. You could go back 100 times and fail every single time. There's a theory in physics called the Novikoff self-consistency principle. Basically, it says that if you traveled into the past, the universe wouldn't allow you to create a paradox. Imagine going back to stop your parents from meeting. You miss the train, you get the date, they meet somewhere else by accident. Or it gets even stranger. Your attempt to keep them apart becomes the reason they meet in the first place. According to Novikov, you could visit the past, you could participate in it. You just couldn't change it. Because whatever you did there was already part of history. Novikov developed this idea while studying Einstein's theory of general relativity. And Einstein's equations actually allow for structures called closed timeline curves. Loops in space time where the future bends back and reconnects with the past. The mathematics is real. The geometry is allowed. Technically, the universe permits it. But this is where Novikoff's principle gets really strange. You wouldn't have a one in a billion chance of creating a paradox. The probability would be absolute zero. So imagine traveling back to 1920 to prevent a famous fire. You find the building. You warn everyone. You rush inside to help. And in the chaos, you bump into someone carrying an oil lamp. The lamp shatters and the flame spreads. You didn't prevent the fire. You caused it. There was never another version of history. It was always you. That's the mindfuck. Inside a loop like that, what would free will even mean? You could affect the past because your actions happened there. But you couldn't change it because those actions were already part of it. Going back to rewrite history. But you were actually going back to complete it. You were never going to change the past. The past was waiting for you.