Can one change the past?

[The-Great-Dude]

Well if you're about to fall off a chair and you go back in time I guess you can stop it...

[Herman]

If time travel was possible, i believe yes, the slightest (sp?) thing could change the future. But seeing as nobody from the future has come back to this time with a time machine, i doubt they will ever be invented.

[FlyingJesus]

If you did go back and change something, you wouldn't be changing the past, you'd be changing the present.

[Neversoft]

If you did go back and change something, you wouldn't be changing the past, you'd be changing the present.

You'd change both.

[Eamonn]

I think that if you made a time machine you could change minor things because maybe the minor things wouldn't of been the main reason you built the time machine & therefore you still may of made it? If that makes any sense.

[FlyingJesus]

You'd change both.

You can't change the past because if you're there doing it then it's the present.

[Kymux]

Listen to his question:

If he went back to save his wife then he wouldn't have had to save his wife, therefore he would never have created a time machine. So none of it actually happened to anybody around him, only himself.

Therefore, creating a paradox.

[Neversoft]

You can't change the past because if you're there doing it then it's the present.

You would go back into the past and change what happened, so it is changing both. When you go back to the present, what you changed would be in the past and where/when you are now would be the present. If you didn't go back into the past in the first place, it wouldn't be changing anything. This is damn confusing.

[Herman]

This is damn confusing.

Time is confusing. It's pretty much a mystery tbh.

[RedStratocas]

Well thats HIS case. What if someone built a time machine simply to go back in time? Then you could do whatever you wanted back in time.