“Can the future influence the present, and can the present influence the past?”(1) This is the question posed by the philosophical concept of retrorandomness – the product of time travel towards the past. Time travel has been a common staple in science fiction writing, so many of its explanations owe their origins to tales of protagonists discovering its often confusing implications. Many people may already have a good understanding of some hypothesized time travel behaviors thanks to popular media, such as Back to the Future, Star Trek, and many other works of fiction. Currently, scientific knowledge is too premature to know whether time travel is possible, much less how it behaves, so questions and answers are open for anyone to contemplate. The most famous question of time travel is that posed by the time paradox, in which the time traveler invokes a condition that makes the circumstances that led to the time travel, or the time traveler's presence, impossible. Many theories have attempted to respond to this paradox, introducing behaviorally diverse concepts such as merging timelines, multiple dimensions, or a nature of time in which everything is predestined. The act of time travel can produce radically different effects, depending on the solution applied to the time paradox. The biggest difference between the expressed solutions to the time paradox is the extent to which they assume deterministic behavior of the timeline. The Timeline Protection Hypothesis(2) is a strictly deterministic solution to the time paradox, which hypothesizes that any action that can cause a paradox will ultimately fail, due to some unforeseen twist of fate. This paradox assumes that all time travel to the past becomes (or will become) part of the... paper medium... thus will remain an elusive tool for science fiction and philosophical contemplation. Mentioned “Retrocasualty”. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 22 July 2004. Web. 05:51, 11 October 20102) “Time Paradox – Timeline Protection Hypothesis”. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 22 July 2004. Web. 05:51, 11 October 20103) “Time Paradox – Harmony Theory”. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 22 July 2004. Web. 05:51, 11 October 20104) “Time paradox – Time fusion hypothesis”. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 22 July 2004. Web. 05:51, 11 October 20105) “Time Paradox – Timeline Protection Hypothesis”. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. July 22, 2004. Web. 5:51 a.m., Oct. 11 2010