716: Time Machine

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Time Machine

Title text: We never see any time travelers because they all discover it’s a huge mistake. This is also why your friend at the lab suddenly looked a year older recently.

Explanation

This explanation may be incomplete or incorrect: If you can address this issue, please edit the page! Thanks.

In this comic, Rob discovers time travelling, which has been a huge mistake. So Future-Rob decides to arrive in the present and decides to kill present-day Rob to prevent him from discovering time travelling.

Transcript

Rob is working at a workbench. Future-Rob appears out of nowhere with a baseball bat.

Future-Rob: Hi, Rob.

Rob: Whoa, you're me!

Future-Rob: You're about to have an idea for a time machine.

Rob: I am?

Future-Rob hits Rob over the head with the baseball bat.

WHAM

A friend approaches Future-Rob working at the workbench, with Rob nowhere to be seen. The baseball bat is stashed behind it.

Friend: Hey, Rob. What's up?

Future-Rob: Nothing.

This happens somewhere roughly once a month.

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Discussion

Isn't this a paradox? 188.29.164.36 11:01, 26 October 2013 (UTC)

Yes, the grandfather paradox. However, a number of solutions have been proposed for it, which are also described on the linked page. NealCruco (talk) 22:32, 10 November 2013 (UTC)

The blood on the bat doesn't really imply Rob dying, he could've been bleeding from a head wound and not actually died. 173.245.55.24 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

<<ooh woo! You said Ro-ob!

I've come here from January 2015 to tell you Cueball has a real name.

I used Google News BEFORE it was clickbait (talk) 10:58, 27 January 2015 (UTC)

Is there a category for named versions of Cueball? I can think of at least three now where he’s called Rob. Besides this one, there’s 782: Desecration and 1168: Tar. 162.158.146.94 00:45, 26 June 2019 (UTC)

I think one interpretation of the comic is actually funnier than the one given here, and might have been Randall's intention. I think he's referring to the retro-suicide paradox variant of the Grandfather paradox, and solving it so that present Rob was killed by future Rob, and thus future Rob's last memory is from that same moment, which is the moment when the timeline was affected. Once a month, he suddenly finds himself in a situation where he has the corpse of an unexplained perfect copy of himself and a baseball bat in his hand, and has to cover it up, and doesn't know why. Implying that the first time he invented time travel, he knew that would kick off a chain reaction in time like this, and went back and started the cycle. Each time after that, as soon as he invents time travel, he realises what must have happened, and thus continues the cycle. Drkaii (talk)

Hey whoever added the link to qntm.org, thank you from the bottom of my heart for introducing me to my new favorite website ever. I am a kid in a time zone store. Take The A Train To Watertown (talk) 04:27, 14 March 2023 (UTC)

There's also an X-Files episode from 1997 with basically the same plot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchrony_(The_X-Files)