Into My Mind: Time Travel

As I'm driving home yesterday I started thinking about the concept of time travel and how it has the potential to screw up our existence in ways probably none of us would really care about (seeing how we'll just accept whatever changed as our current reality).

Blog writer's note: This is the kind of crap that pops into my head when my music is obviously not loud enough.

Anyhoo, I move on to our most prolific time travel story to date: Back To The Future (I,II & III).  In my mind, if the first movie stayed true to how time travel would truly affect our time line, the movie would have ended the minute he saved his father from being run over.  At that point, Marty would have ceased to exist.  Story over.  No disappearing photograph as the universe attempts to compensate for Marty's transgression.

To quote Dr. Manhattan of Watchmen fame

Thermodynamic miracles... events with odds against so astronomical they're effectively impossible, like oxygen spontaneously becoming gold. I long to observe such a thing. And yet, in each human coupling, a thousand million sperm vie for a single egg. Multiply those odds by countless generations, against the odds of your ancestors being alive; meeting; siring this precise son; that exact daughter...

Thermodynamic miracles.  Each and every one of us.  Generations before us being in the right place, right time, the exact egg, the exact sperm, to create us.  The minute Marty showed up in the past and started interacting with people he would have not only probably wiped out his own timeline but countless others.  The same people may meet and couple in that time, but the offspring will be different because Marty jacked up the timing.  So simple.

Or is it?  See messing time is purely conceptual.  If one were to actually travel back in time, the universe may decide it was always supposed to be this way and our current timeline would remain unaffected since it was meant to happen.  Spooky huh? Want another one?  Marty saving his dad could have created a paradox.  See if he disappears then the DeLorean is stranded in the past...but if Marty never drove it there it should disappear too and return to it's original place in time...but then that would mean the time messing NEVER OCCURRED and Marty should wake up and meet Doc Brown like he was supposed to...then Marty goes and does the exact same thing creating an endless cycle.  Or the universe could just implode on itself erasing all of existence.  Hey, I don't make the rules here.