Y'all Read For This?

This started out as a Facebook post but got very quickly out of hand, as time travel tends to do...

Let's say you could travel back in time at will, but know that doing so would destroy the universe. Would you do it?

Take into consideration this: The kind of time travel we're talking about would create a new, alternate timeline wherever you touched down, so you could never go back to your own timeline and would never have to deal with the consequences. You could travel back as far as you want, as many times as you want.

You could also never travel forward in time (well, no faster that we all currently do). This causes another issue. Say you were born in 1989, like myself, and in 2014 at the age of 25 you traveled back to sometime like, oh just randomly, November 15 1996... don't question it, it's random...

Now you live in a world where there are two of you, adult you and 6 year old you. Fine, just avoid the little bastard or whatever.

You could build a new life for yourself using the knowledge you have about the next 18 years. Bets, stock and house market info and such could have you pretty cushy, not to mention knowing about important events ahead of time would allow you to be in position for some awesome video and photo memories. You could travel to New York in September of 2001 to capture the Holy Grail of photos, the 9/11 selfie! Or avert the disaster or whatever... boring.

Say you have a nice life built for yourself and no reason to wanna go back in time again. Around rolls 2014 and you know that your younger self is probably about to take a trip back in time to a 1996 movie premiere and destroy everything you've built. What to do? You know you can't convince him not to, he's you and you know how much of an asshole you are. Hell you destroyed your own timeline just to see a relatively decent movie on the big screen, and steal some asshole's idea for twitter, fuck You, You's an asshole!

Your only two options are to either kill your younger self, or preemptively travel back in time again, thus destroying everything you've built and have to start all over again but probably even further back in time if you want to avoid other "Yous". What to do?

Me, I'd solve this by going back and "Terminatoring" the situation. I'd probably go after my dad since I don't know him and I think I could get away with a murder in the 80's, they were basically cavemen back then. Yeah, I'd have to sit around and wait a t least 7 years for Space Jam, but I suppose that's just time to build my empire to make sure I get the best seat in the theater (2/3 away from the screen, center) and on my downtime maybe "invent" some stuff like Google and silently wipe out some of the more annoying media personalities we've all come to know.

So yeah, what would you do?