Temporal Mechanics: The Predestination Paradox

So we've debunked the Butterfly Effect. That was simple. But not all paradoxes can be debunked.

Like the Predestination Paradox. The Predestination Paradox is where a time traveller is caught in a loop that makes him go back in time to repeat the action which sent him back in time. 

Can you see where I'm coming from? Maybe not. Even for me, without an example it doesn't make a lot of sense.

There's an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation called "Cause and Effect" where the Enterprise-D is caught in what they call a temporal causality loop. It screwed me up something fierce when I first watched it, because before the theme song, the Enterprise blew up while Picard was telling everybody to abandon ship, and then when we came back from commercial break, Riker, Worf, Data, and Beverly were playing poker as if they hadn't just blown up, and then it happened again. And again. And again, each with a strange sense of deja vu and with them all having premonitions. Beverly knew Geordi was going to come into Sickbay with headaches that were making him dizzy (his visor was picking up the loop). They all knew the cards Data was going to draw, that is, except for the last time. They explain it all at the end. They were going to crash into a ship from about 60, 70 years earlier and there were two options to avoid it, Lieutenant Commander Data's solution, which caused them to travel back in time in the first place, or Will Riker's solution, which would end the loop. They used Data's idea every time except the last time.

The time before last, Data programmed a message into his brain that would subconsciously tell him what to do the next time around. The message appeared in all sorts of places. During the poker game, Data subconsciously stacked the deck so that the first four cards he drew were all threes, then the next 12 cards gave everyone three-of-a-kind. In an Engineering situation, he made every number on the screen threes. The significance of the number three was the number of pips on Riker's uniform, meaning his solution was correct, thus freeing the Enterprise from the loop.

Does it make sense now? Yes? No?

For the "no's", let's put it this way: Let's call "A" the first event of the day. "B" is the second event of the day. "C" is the third event of the day and "D" is the event which causes the people involved to go back in time to event "A" and live it all over again. A>B>C>D>A>B>C>D>A>B>C>D>A, etc., etc., etc., until event "E" occurs that breaks the loop, making it A>B>C>E. It's like being stuck in a rut, doing the same thing day after day, until you do something different to break yourself from the rut.  

There. Is that better?

Yes? Good. That's it for now.