Grandfather Paradox

Any temporal paradox where an entity travels back in time and performs an action that eliminates the possibility of performing said action, usually by destroying or preventing the creation of the original entity, or preventing its time travel.

The original grandfather paradox was described by René Barjavel in Le Voyageur Imprudent in 1943. In it, a man travels back in time and kills his grandfather before he met his grandmother.

The game, Achron, solves the grandfather paradox as it does any other paradox by alternating the timeline between the possible outcomes (grandfather survives and grandson chronoports off the timeline and out of existence or grandson kills his grandfather so te grandfather didn't "make" him anymore) until either something intervenes and breaks the paradox, the events fall off the timeline and become locked, or the paradox somehow resolves itself.

Examples

• The classic: A unit goes back in time and kills its past self.

• A tank travels back in time and destroys some enemy units. As a result of destroying those enemy units a group of allied units are not slowed down by attacking them on their way somewhere else and therefore they miss a whole other army. That other army destroys the base that the original tank will be built at.

See also

Grandfather Paradox on Wikipedia Grandfather Paradox on TV Tropes