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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/36692
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Have you considered having the act of time-travel be your decision-locking event? Under normal conditions, while all of us are riding along with the current of time, it doesn't matter whether recently past events are locked and immutable. We are all moving forward at a rate of one-second per second, so the past can safely be left in a free, unfettered state.

Only when a time traveler manages to slip out of the forward flow and jump backwards to a past decision point, does the universe have to defend itself against paradoxes.

So, in the interest of minimizing wasted energy with unnecessary defenses, the universe only locks the past as a traveler starts their backwards journey and only locks those moments which the traveler passes through on their way to their temporal destination. Upon arrival, any actions taken from the new current moment up to the moment of the traveler's departure from what is now the future, are locked and unchangeable.

So the traveler goes back in time but is powerless to change anything. He experiences the repeat passage of time exactly the same as when he first lived through it, with the possible exception that he might be able to think different thoughts while his body flawlessly repeats its original motions. The predestination would bind him right up to the moment when he originally pressed the button to start the trip. Then the defense mechanisms would destroy the time machine just to keep it from starting an eternal time loop. The time traveler is now back in the present, sitting in a smoldering time machine, but the fun doesn't have to stop there...

As an additional wrist-slap, the temporal defenses might punish the offending timeline in the hopes of discouraging future journeys. Any decisions made up to the moment of the traveler's departure could also be locked, even if their associated actions had not yet been performed in the traveler's original timeline. By aggravating the temporal defenses, the traveler not only forced himself to relive recent events without any hope of changing them; he has also forced everyone from his original timeline to experience a proximal future based on the strongly held intentions of decision makers from the moment of his departure. The traveler's attempt to change the past thus temporarily suspends everyone's normal ability to change the future.

This would not only make time travel useless, it would make it extremely dangerous for both the traveler and those left behind.

Original score: 2