Tuesday, 31 December 2013

Awesome website, awesome stuff

Not sure if I'm slow, I just discovered this awesome site called Quora. It provides a platform for people to discuss their topics of interest, much like reddit. I think I must be slow to discover it because I already have two friends in my google contacts there! Some of the questions the users posted are really interesting. Here I'm going to share an interesting paradox I stumbled upon:

A  baby girl is mysteriously dropped off at an orphanage in Cleveland in  1945. "Jane" grows up lonely and dejected, not knowing who her parents  are, until one day in 1963 she is strangely attracted to a drifter. She  falls in love with him. But just when things are finally looking up for  Jane, a series of disasters strike. First, she becomes pregnant by the  drifter, who then disappears. Second, during the complicated delivery,  doctors find that Jane has both sets of sex organs, and to save her  life, they are forced to surgically convert "her" to a "him." Finally, a  mysterious stranger kidnaps her baby from the delivery room.

Reeling  from these disasters, rejected by society, scorned by fate, "he"  becomes a drunkard and drifter. Not only has Jane lost her parents and  her lover, but he has lost his only child as well. Years later, in 1970,  he stumbles into a lonely bar, called Pop's Place, and spills out his  pathetic story to an elderly bartender. The sympathetic bartender offers  the drifter the chance to avenge the stranger who left her pregnant and  abandoned, on the condition that he join the "time travelers corps."  Both of them enter a time machine, and the bartender drops off the  drifter in 1963. The drifter is strangely attracted to a young orphan  woman, who subsequently becomes pregnant.

The bartender then goes  forward 9 months, kidnaps the baby girl from the hospital, and drops  off the baby in an orphanage back in 1945. Then the bartender drops off  the thoroughly confused drifter in 1985, to enlist in the time travelers  corps. The drifter eventually gets his life together, becomes a  respected and elderly member of the time travelers corps, and then  disguises himself as a bartender and has his most difficult mission: a  date with destiny, meeting a certain drifter at Pop's Place in 1970.

The  question is: Who is Jane's mother, father, grandfather, grand mother,  son, daughter, granddaughter, and grandson? The girl, the drifter, and  the bartender, of course, are all the same person. These paradoxes can  make your head spin, especially if you try to untangle Jane's twisted  parentage. If we draw Jane's family tree, we find that all the branches  are curled inward back on themselves, as in a circle. We come to the  astonishing conclusion that she is her own mother and father! She is an  entire family tree unto herself.
That is why, time travel must not be made possible, not within the same universe at least.

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