Seriously, with your philosophers, its impossible to get a simple result...
That's the world to you.

Which is why I prefer Mathematics. Don't particularly care what the numbers are, providing they come out right.

This all depends on if history is indeed "set in stone", so if you went back, say, to 1938 intent on stoping World War II, you might make a mistake causing Hitler to invade Poland, and then realize that it was your time travel and intervention that led to war in the first place.

But if you had never time-travelled in the first place, you never would know that it had started with you.

Excerpts from a time travel forum circa 2104: linky. Very good read. =D

time travel would be usefull but what happens when you cause a paradox

for istence
i whant to kill my self so i go back to the past and shoot my self... so i dont grow up to whant to shoot my slef so i dont shoot my self? so i grow up whanting to shoot my self

What? No.. I don't have a time machine. You must be mistaken

Alec wrote: time travel would be usefull but what happens when you cause a paradox

for istence
i whant to kill my self so i go back to the past and shoot my self... so i dont grow up to whant to shoot my slef so i dont shoot my self? so i grow up whanting to shoot my self

One interesting theory I heard recently on the subject of time-travel induced paradoxes was the following:
Taking the go back and shoot your own father paradox, the most likely result of shooting a gun at your father is that the bullet hits him and he dies - but this prevents the bullet having been shot in the first place, thus he doesn't die, thus you're there to shoot him - and this oscillates backwards and forwards until something rather *less* likely happens that resolves the paradox - if you repeat the situation enough something hugely unlikely can happen - maybe the bullet disappears in a quantum fluctuation, maybe it gets deflected by a rather unfortunate passing pigeon, etc.

Assuming you shot him before your birth.

It's not a paradox if you shoot him after your birth though. Unless he teaches you something that allows you to go back and shoot him, in which case the paradox is again triggered and you're prevented from killing him.

Apollo wrote: Assuming you shot him before your birth.

Yeah, lots of movies and show episodes show how by going back in time, and attempting to stop it their problems when they were in fact the start of all the chaos, the reason for the tale to be interesting.

Once again, do you think history is changeable, or are things just bound to happen because they are?

History is never changeable. I wouldn't if it could. Then we'd never learn it the hard way, which is i.e. the most effective way. ;)

A valid point.

Not even the horrors of Stalin's/Hitler's reign of terror?

"no Hitler means no Third Reich, no World War II, no rocketry programs, no electronics, no computers, no time travel."

You could argue that Turing would still have created computers, even without the incentive of WWII, as he was interested in them anyway.

Who said that, Sentynel?

WW2 did a lot more to teach us something then World War one. You can argue that.

It's in the link I posted at the top of page 4. Read it, it's funny.

Turing would have done his work, sure, but it was the decryption projects in WW2 that actually got computers seriously off the ground.