If you could change the past... should you?

sleepydvdr

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I watched the movie titled "Deja Vu" tonight and it got me thinking. If a tragedy happened today and we could go back and prevent it from happening, we probably would, right? My question is, when is it no longer fair to alter the time line? If we could go back and stop Hitler, should we? Altering that course of history would probably alter most everyone's history, even preventing and creating entire family lines. We could go way back and alter wars back in the medieval times and make even more dramatic changes than the WWII example. You get the idea...

In short, if something big happened right now and in 5 minutes from now, if we could reverse it, would that be the right thing to do? Or should we let time take it's natural course?
 
I once went back in time, about 80 million years, and tickled a ferret.....that caused the chimps to take over the world instead of the orangutans.....it's a shame, them orangutans descendent played some pretty mean bass guitar......The Doctor blocked me from his facebook after that.
 
This argument reminds me of the "but if we stop eating cows, they will go extinct" one. If we change time, people who exist now might not exist, but they would never suffer (like cows who are never born wouldn't suffer) but the people we save would be spared from extraordinary suffering. If we could stop Hitler and save the millions of people he killed then of course we should. They would have children that they never would have had, and others would not have children that they would have had. Who cares about the children, it's the people that exist now in the time we're at, or the time we travel to, whose suffering matters.

The bigger problem for me would not be that I might wipe out someone's future existence but that I might wipe out an event that caused more happiness or more relief from suffering than I would cause by changing a past event. Maybe my curiosity gets the better of me and I go back to Victorian London to discover who Jack the Ripper was, can't bear to see him murdering an innocent woman and kill him. Maybe somehow that leads to penicillin not being discovered, causing millions of people to die where they would have been saved. Is it worth the sacrifice of that one woman to save the lives of so many others? At that moment, in Victorian London, she matters more than them because she is there and suffering in front of my eyes. But when you look at the bigger picture, should she be saved? I mean you couldn't know at the time what the effects of saving her would be, but if you knew there was such a risk...
 
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This argument reminds me of the "but if we stop eating cows, they will go extinct" one. If we change time, people who exist now might not exist, but they would never suffer (like cows who are never born wouldn't suffer) but the people we save would be spared from extraordinary suffering. If we could stop Hitler and save the millions of people he killed then of course we should. They would have children that they never would have had, and others would not have children that they would have had. Who cares about the children, it's the people that exist now in the time we're at, or the time we travel to, whose suffering matters.

The bigger problem for me would not be that I might wipe out someone's future existence but that I might wipe out an event that caused more happiness or more relief from suffering than I would cause by changing a past event. Maybe my curiosity gets the better of me and I go back to Victorian London to discover who Jack the Ripper was, can't bear to see him murdering an innocent woman and kill him. Maybe somehow that leads to penicillin not being discovered, causing millions of people to die where they would have been saved. Is it worth the sacrifice of that one woman to save the lives of so many others? At that moment, in Victorian London, she matters more than them because she is there and suffering in front of my eyes. But when you look at the bigger picture, should she be saved? I mean you couldn't know at the time what the effects of saving her would be, but if you knew there was such a risk...


I agree with this.

This also reminds me of the old anti-choice "but what if you abort the next Beethoven" standby. If killing Hitler prevents people who now exist from being born, then we'd be none the wiser. The only person who would have knowledge of a post-Holocaust world would be the person who went back in time and stopped Hitler. It isn't as though everyone would have a void in their lives where their uncle would have been.
 
I don't believe in backward time travel. Even given that it were possible, I believe that the past cannot be changed. Novikov's Principle.

And even if that was BS, I'd have to say that I wouldn't change the past. The Butterfly Effect is too messy to even risk setting foot in it with no intent, let alone to attempt to change it.
 
it's like the 3 second rule when something falls on the floor...if some event that needed changing could be reversed in 5 minutes, then i'd go for it.
but past history? no, what's done is done. it would be too late already.
 
Time travel leads to temporal paradoxes. It would destroy space-time and therefor the universe.

Or it could lead to someone going back in time to stop you from time traveling, then someone could go back in time and try to stop them, and so on until we have a singularity (or very near a singularity) due to the mass of all those people at one point in space-time, in the past, that was not there. That might cause some people to have a bad day that day.
 
Time travel leads to temporal paradoxes. It would destroy space-time and therefor the universe.

Or it could lead to someone going back in time to stop you from time traveling, then someone could go back in time and try to stop them, and so on until we have a singularity (or very near a singularity) due to the mass of all those people at one point in space-time, in the past, that was not there. That might cause some people to have a bad day that day.

Underlined: Yes.
Bolded: No.

Worst case scenario is the Back to the Future effect, in which the past is rewritten by the person traveling back. Otherwise, it's all Novikov from there.

Though I suppose it's a futile point to argue, considering we're never going to do it anyway.