Slashdot posted an article about a new theory solving the grandfather
paradox.

http://science.slashdot.org/science/05/06/17/1728230.shtml

My personal favourite theory is the one used by Isaac Asimov in his
book The End of Eternity. It's a bit like the B-theory where you can
only go back in time to fulfil what has already happened, but with an
interesting twist.

Basically, time flows forward but follows the "mostly likely options".
If you make a change at point X the changes propegate forward but at
some point in the future the timeline converges back to what it was
before. The book itself doesn't really go into details, it's not
important to the story, but it's plausable that the energy required to
do timetravel would be distributed to all the "random" changes needed
to get the timeline back on track.

Now, the grandfather paradox would be resolved in the simplest and
cheapest way energywise by simply twiddling some electrons in your
brain so that you didn't decide to to it at all. But say you were
insulated from the timeline changes yourself (as in the book) then
what?

The book itself makes the point of only removing people fro mthe
timeline that wern't going to have children or about to die anyway
since that solves the major problem. It's not entierly implausible that
it would be cheaper energywise to simply have a quantum force push the
bullet out of the way.

If you did actually manage to kill your parents and avoid them coming
back to life, well, you have a problem. Maybe the easiest solution
would be to have the entire human race die out. Solves the paradox
problem once and for all.

Now that would suck :)
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