You may have heard about the pos­si­bil­i­ty that the Large Hadron Col­lid­er is be­ing sab­o­taged from the fu­ture.

That may sound pre­pos­ter­ous, but it re­al­ly is quite rea­son­able, once you think about it a lit­tle.

Let's start with the ob­vi­ous:

Sup­pose you trav­el back in time and kill your grand­fa­ther. Then you would­n't ex­ist. And you could­n't trav­el back in time. And that's a para­dox.

Then there is the an­ti-­para­dox:

Sup­pose you can't trav­el back in time. Be­cause you did­n't save him, your grand­fa­ther died. Er­go you don't ex­ist.

That's not a para­dox, but sup­pose time trav­el is pos­si­ble: that means you can go back in time, save your grand­fa­ther, and thus make your own ex­is­tence pos­si­ble, er­go al­low­ing you to save him.

As soon as you al­low for time trav­el­ing to be pos­si­ble, the so­lu­tion for para­dox­es is ob­vi­ous: you can´t change change the past be­cause the fu­ture won't let you. The fu­ture "fac­tion" that tries to pre­serve the past will al­ways win, be­cause the past is fixed.

So, if you trav­el back in time and try to kill your grand­fa­ther by shoot­ing him in the head, an­oth­er per­son from the fu­ture will ap­pear be­hind you and dis­arm you. Or ap­pear be­hind you and kill you as soon as you had the idea to trav­el in time in the first place.

Or your kid will drop a coke bot­tle on your time ma­chine just be­fore you used it to kill his great-­gramp­s.

The ex­act mech­a­nism used to pre­vent you from be­com­ing a para­dox is un­known to you be­cause you need to go fur­ther "for­ward" to know it.

Now, back to the LHC: if in the fu­ture there is knowl­edge about time trav­el, and there is knowl­edge about how the LHC may de­stroy the world[1]_ then maybe some time tourist de­cid­ed to see how hu­man­i­ty dressed in the pre-ice-age er­a, comes to 2009 and while eat­ing a sand­wich, some­how spooks a bird which then drops a piece of bread in the ma­chin­ery.

Which of course, brings me to the best time-­trav­el show on TV: "Mick­ey Mouse Club­house­".

If you don't have an un­der­-4 kid, grand­son or nephew, you prob­a­bly don't know it, but let me give you a sum­ma­ry of each darn episode.

1. Some­thing "bad" hap­pens (Goofy has a cold)

2. A so­lu­­tion is pro­­posed (Give Goofy some Min­nie­strone soup)

3. A fly­­ing ideogram of a mouse called Too­­dles shows a col­lec­­tion of tool­s:

   • Gi­ant can­dy cane

   • Roller skates

   • Pic­nic bas­ket

   • See­­­saw

4. Some­thing else "bad" hap­pens (Pete wants the soup)

5. The tools are ex­ac­t­­ly what's need­ed to solve the prob­lems pre­sen­t­ed to ac­­com­­plish the pro­­posed so­lu­­tion (Y­ou can use the see­­saw to move gi­ant rocks block­­ing your path).

This is ob­vi­ous­ly a case of the fu­ture pre­vent­ing some­thing from hap­pen­ing. How else would Too­dles know what tools to choose be­fore they are need­ed? There was no way to guess that a gi­ant rock would block the ravine through which Mick­ey and Min­nie would try to es­cape from Pe­te! [2]

So, when­ev­er you need to think about para­dox pre­ven­tion, re­mem­ber Mick­ey and his friends and just call Too­dles.