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What I am about to talk abouut is extremely unlikely to a rediculous degree. So keep in mind, this is strictly for explaining a potential how for the purpose of (hopefully) interesting discussion.

I have heard talk about how the universe expands and contracts. And supposedly, once it contracts it explodes out again and restarts the universe. Now... If we suppose that everything happens mostly the same each time. Then we should be reborn every time the universe is reborn.

Now, a further discussion on this expanding and contracting universe is that the force of the contraction and the follow up explosion is so powerful, that it actually stretches back in time and further into the future each time the process starts over. So theoretically, however the universe was originally created, is now replaced with an earlier creation of the universe. (which so far is just another big bang). Assuming this is the case, we have NO idea how many times this has already happened.

Now..If you kill your grandfather in the past, you WILL cease to exist. BUT when the universe recreates itself, there is a chance you will not decide to go back and kill him, so you will continue to exist. You just won't know that that is the route you took to get there.

So that is idea one.

Of course we know about Schroedinger's box...
My other idea is that if the universe has defenses against such things from happening, then that defence might be as simple as switching your probability track. In other words, assuming there is a good, neutral, and evil path to every decision when you choose an evil path that was not your original path, you are not creating a new path, you are choosing a different one that exists at the same time. But in order to keep you alive, the universe might choose to route you back to the good path of probability. That way, even though you killied your grandparent, you swtiched to a reality in which they didn't die or you never tried to kill them and somehow they made it long enough to have your parents. The thing is, we tend to think of that time line as coincidental, but it doesn't have to be completely coincidental. For example.. In time line "A" your parents were born in 1955, you kill your grandparent in 1950...you should cease to exist..but instead, reality finds a timeline in which your grandparents gave birth to your parents even earlier than 1950, so now you can continue to exist. You are no long part of timeline "A" you are now on a totally different timeline. You might even be a figment of our imagination if you had originally started in our probabilty and now got switched over. But you will be as real to you as we are to ourselves, and its anyone's guess how many of the people you have met in your life will now be met in your new reality.

Brian/MainFragger