time paradox

Science fiction likes to make a big deal out of this term and throw technobabble around to make it look clever in an attempt to make the audience confused and thus ready to buy whatever crap the writers come up with. Basically, a time paradox occurs if you time travel and change the past so that it erases the possibility of you going to the past in the first place. Which means that events will occur as if you never traveled to the past, undoing your changes so you will travel to the past again, and so on ad infinitum. Some writers think that it can destroy the universe. Or unleash killer flying time monkeys. Well, we haven't invented time travel so we can't test these theories.