Belz...
Fiend God
That's because we all want to forget that one. It was such a disappointing conclusion to the River arc. Rushed and silly.
Of time travel and Hitler
- Thread starter HansMustermann
- Start date
That's because we all want to forget that one. It was such a disappointing conclusion to the River arc. Rushed and silly.
The Great Zaganza
Maledictorian
- Joined
- Aug 14, 2016
- Messages
- 28,806
If you removed Hitler from history, it would have devastating repercussions to media, Art and academic history departments.
Are we sure saving millions of lives would be worth that?
Are we sure saving millions of lives would be worth that?
TragicMonkey
Poisoned Waffles
I think if anyone time travelled they wouldn't actually be able to change anything: either the changes once made would be incorporated into the time traveller's past and therefore have always occurred, making the change not a change at all, or else they'd just go down a different trouser leg of time from the one they're used to, while the 'original' version continues as it was in the other leg. Either way the attempted change only really affects the time traveller himself.
psionl0
Skeptical about skeptics
Not to mention that there is an infinite number of timelines that have never been visited by a time traveler. This is one of them. *
* as far as we know
Last edited:
Senex
Philosopher
Don't forget cable channel programming. The History, Military... channels would need years and years of new programming. I mean the Crimean War is kind of interesting but I don't think these wars can fill the holes in time slots that would be needed with the dissolving of WWII.
Armitage72
Philosopher
There was an adventure for the Champions superhero RPG called "Wings of the Valkyrie", published in 1987. The publisher recalled the adventure and destroyed it, making it somewhat rare these days.
A group of European superhumans who had lived through the Holocaust went back in time and killed Hitler during the Beer Hall Putsch. A chain of events in the following decades resulted in large-scale global nuclear, biological, and chemical warfare, and I think the US became a fascist government. The players, whose characters were temporarily shielded from the change in history, had to go back in time and stop the other time travelers, saving Hitler and making sure the Holocaust happened. Response to the adventure was not positive.
A group of European superhumans who had lived through the Holocaust went back in time and killed Hitler during the Beer Hall Putsch. A chain of events in the following decades resulted in large-scale global nuclear, biological, and chemical warfare, and I think the US became a fascist government. The players, whose characters were temporarily shielded from the change in history, had to go back in time and stop the other time travelers, saving Hitler and making sure the Holocaust happened. Response to the adventure was not positive.
Loss Leader
I would save the receptionist., Moderator
There was a remarkably weird episode of 'Quantum Leap" where Sam thought he'd been sent back as Lee Harvey Oswald to save JFK but was actually supposed to save Jackie - because she died in Sam's original timeline or something.
rdaneel
Illuminator
Yes, if you prevent WWII, over generations, the number of people you just deleted from history would far exceed the number saved by there being no war.
My parents were born before the baby boom, but they met at Ramstein Air Base in Germany. A place that wouldn't exist if there was no WWII.
You would also create an equal number of new people who never existed. Seems like a wash to me.
I wouldn't want you to do it though, as I'd be one of those deleted.
I recall an alternate history paper that speculated on the effect of an early assassination attempt succeeding. Using his files on all the German leaders, Reinhard Heydrich took over. Every bit as evil as the old boss, but brilliant, efficient and hard working. It was not an improvement.
TragicMonkey
Poisoned Waffles
The worst outcome of time travel preventing Hitler is that moustache style not becoming taboo. Ugh.
Armitage72
Philosopher
I remember another science fiction setting in which Tesla was able to get funding for all of the devices that only existed on paper in our world. The technological revolution stimulated the world economy, including Germany, so the Nazis never came to power. One of the side effects was that, due to the lack of stigma from the Nazis, eugenics was still widely practiced in the US.
Hitler appears again next week in the new Finnish-German movie Iron Sky 2: The Coming Race (Wikipedia) based to some extent on the old novel Vril, the Power of the Coming Race (Wikipedia):
But maybe time travelers should consider killing Steve Jobs instead:
But maybe time travelers should consider killing Steve Jobs instead:
*Sitting in my house on a normal night, playing videos games on the coach. Suddenly a futuristic looking man and a better looking, healthier, and more successful looking version of me appears in my living room*
Man: And this is what would have happened to you if hadn't made the choices you did!
Better Me: Oh my God that's terrible! I've learned my lesson, no more messing with my own timeline!
*The man hits a button on a device mounted to his wrist. They both vanish.*
*Beat*
Me: Well not gonna lie... that stung a bit.
Man: And this is what would have happened to you if hadn't made the choices you did!
Better Me: Oh my God that's terrible! I've learned my lesson, no more messing with my own timeline!
*The man hits a button on a device mounted to his wrist. They both vanish.*
*Beat*
Me: Well not gonna lie... that stung a bit.
Last edited:
Elagabalus
Philosopher
- Joined
- Dec 23, 2013
- Messages
- 7,051
Just go back and tell Georg Elser to set his clock back 13 minutes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Elser#Bombing
OK, maybe 15 minutes ... just in case.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Elser#Bombing
OK, maybe 15 minutes ... just in case.
Trebuchet
Penultimate Amazing
Rincewind
Philosopher
Checkmite
Skepticifimisticalationist
This is a silly and pointless thought experiment because time travel by humans is impossible.
Last edited:
Your conclusion doesn’t follow from the premise. Yes time travel is impossible, but that doesn’t mean that considering how things may have turned out differently had some particular event happened differently is “silly and pointless”. The ability to make a mental model and consider different possible outcomes is perhaps at the core of human cognition. Framing it in terms of time travel is just a way of thinking about that, not a literal expectation that time travel is possible.
Plus it’s fun.
Plus it’s fun.
Brainster
Penultimate Amazing
- Joined
- May 26, 2006
- Messages
- 21,805
For a long time after WWII, time traveler stories of this type (going back into the past to prevent or cause something) tended to focus on preventing Abe Lincoln's assassination. I can remember this being the plot of various stories, comic books, and an episode of the Time Tunnel.
The problem is that we can too easily focus on the positive effects of preventing one event in history, and fail to see the negatives. I mean, it's hard to see the direct connection, but suppose (say) Abraham Lincoln's death had set about a chain of events such that Charles Lindbergh had been elected president in 1936 or 1940. It's easy to imagine that might have led to a Nazi victory over Great Britain.
Hitler was a very evil man, but would killing him around 1939 have stopped the ticking time bomb that was WWII? As somebody pointed out, suppose it was Heydrich who won the subsequent power struggle? And of course one would assume that assassinating him in 1939 would not be an easy thing to accomplish unlike murdering him as a small boy. Of course murdering him as a child would probably not work; some other person would come to power in much the same way.
Let me point out this potential negative outcome: without WWII, the US might have stayed in the depression longer. Or without WWII, the millions who lost their lives would be the great-grandparents of hundreds of millions of more Europeans and Americans, who would today be contributing to global warming.
The problem is that we can too easily focus on the positive effects of preventing one event in history, and fail to see the negatives. I mean, it's hard to see the direct connection, but suppose (say) Abraham Lincoln's death had set about a chain of events such that Charles Lindbergh had been elected president in 1936 or 1940. It's easy to imagine that might have led to a Nazi victory over Great Britain.
Hitler was a very evil man, but would killing him around 1939 have stopped the ticking time bomb that was WWII? As somebody pointed out, suppose it was Heydrich who won the subsequent power struggle? And of course one would assume that assassinating him in 1939 would not be an easy thing to accomplish unlike murdering him as a small boy. Of course murdering him as a child would probably not work; some other person would come to power in much the same way.
Let me point out this potential negative outcome: without WWII, the US might have stayed in the depression longer. Or without WWII, the millions who lost their lives would be the great-grandparents of hundreds of millions of more Europeans and Americans, who would today be contributing to global warming.
jeremyp
Philosopher
Shark month instead of shark week.
The Great Zaganza
Maledictorian
- Joined
- Aug 14, 2016
- Messages
- 28,806
Nonsense.
Without the waste of WW2, we could already be fighting for our lives against Alpha Centauri!
Without the waste of WW2, we could already be fighting for our lives against Alpha Centauri!
Rincewind
Philosopher
You should see the weapons that Sid Meier came up with!
Elagabalus
Philosopher
- Joined
- Dec 23, 2013
- Messages
- 7,051
And an absolute necessity in the Trials and Errors Section of this very forum. No wonder so many of you (not you Rr) had so much difficulty with the Amanda Knox thread. End Rant.
Elagabalus
Philosopher
- Joined
- Dec 23, 2013
- Messages
- 7,051
******* Alpha Centaurians!! I feel like I was born to hate them! The only thing worse than an Alpha Centaurian is a Beta Centaurian! Weaklings, all alone in their own Incelular world!
TragicMonkey
Poisoned Waffles
Neighsayers shout themselves horse at the Centaurs, but unless they rein in the unstable rhetoric they're just making foals of themselves.
Neigh, you old nag, you are steadily cantering towards your own foally. Remove your blinkers before it becomes a gallop.
Last edited:
Checkmite
Skepticifimisticalationist
I'm not so sure I follow. The discussion isn't really about the possible outcomes if some particular event happened differently. Those things are explored in a shallow way; but those possibilities are only used as supporting arguments for one's answer to the primary question - that being "would it be right/moral/just to travel back in time and kill Hitler?".
In that respect, I think you have it backwards: it's not using "time travel" as just one way of framing a discussion about speculative history; it's using speculative history as a way of framing a discussion about the ethics of time travel. After all, Hitler and WWII in particular are of ephemeral relevance, really; if it's not ethical to go back in time and kill Hitler, it's not ethical to go back in time and change any aspect of history, for more or less the same logic.
Right, and that question is being addressed with specific ways in which history might have worked out differently, not just by saying "well, if you change one thing who knows what would happen" or something like that.
So it is looking at the possible outcomes if some particular event happened differently.
Okay, that's at least partly valid.
That's not though. The discussion has been about particular ways in which history would have worked out differently. If there were a different question, then the particulars would be different and so there's no reason to think that the conclusion would be the same.
Perhaps one of the larger conclusions of this discussion could be that history tends to turn not on the whims of single individuals, even those as powerful as Hitler, but on larger forces that would continue to be in play without them. That's a conclusion I suppose could be applied to other scenarios if one were to draw it here, though honestly I don't think that's really valid based on the discussion so far.
Is there some other conclusion that you see applying to more than just the specific discussion of Hitler?
The Great Zaganza
Maledictorian
- Joined
- Aug 14, 2016
- Messages
- 28,806
The argument for killing the big H is based in Consequentialism: if we have good reason to assume that killing Baby Hitler would save millions of lives , it is absolutely the moral thing to do.
But all forms of Consequentialism suffer from the cut-off problem: would it in the long run be better for humanity if Hilter never got run Germany? And what time-frame are we setting for "the long run" ?
50 years? 100? 1000?
So I don't think that the question can be answered either way.
Still, it would be awesome if brutal dictators would live in fear of time-traveling assassins.
But all forms of Consequentialism suffer from the cut-off problem: would it in the long run be better for humanity if Hilter never got run Germany? And what time-frame are we setting for "the long run" ?
50 years? 100? 1000?
So I don't think that the question can be answered either way.
Still, it would be awesome if brutal dictators would live in fear of time-traveling assassins.
Would you be better off "in the long run" if I gave you $100 today? Maybe and maybe not. There are plenty of things that could happen in the future that would be negative consequences of that $100, and there are plenty of possible positive consequences. But we don't know anything about them and there's no reason to think that the negatives are more likely than the positives. So in analysing the question we can treat them as equal. There are, on the other hand, known positives to getting $100. There may also be known negatives. You can weigh those against each other and decide if you think getting $100 today would beneficial for you in the long run.
I personally think the answer is yes.
The Great Zaganza
Maledictorian
- Joined
- Aug 14, 2016
- Messages
- 28,806
I agree - not avoiding a known negative because of an unknown positive requires a lot of assumptions before it starts to make sense.
Checkmite
Skepticifimisticalationist
I don't think you can separate it that way, though - not really. There are vast numbers of potential ways in which history would have worked out differently if Hitler had been killed; as has been pointed out, the possibilities are even quite different depending on when exactly you kill him. But although we can propose various scenarios, I don't believe anyone can make an honest claim that any one of them is the most likely of all, at any one point. And even if someone could, it matters little: history is replete with unlikely eventualities and purely chance circumstances.
As a result, nobody can really answer the question of "would it be ethical to go back in time and kill Hitler" by appealing to any individual proposed scenario: "No, it would not be ethical, because [specific situation X] could possibly result", because that could simply be sidestepped with "what if additional things could be done to mitigate that specific situation", which leads to additional lines of calculation and turtles all the way down. Rather, the answer would seem to be "No, it would not be ethical, because an indeterminate number of equally-negative or more-negative situations could result, and there's no way to predict the likelihood of any of them versus potential positive outcomes". And that IS a conclusion that could be applied equally to any proposed changing-history-via-time-travel scenario, no matter the particulars.
The logic you are using there applies to any decision, not just decisions made by time travellers. The future is just as unpredictable as the altered past, probably even more so, and yet we are able to make cost-benefit analysis of our decisions based on predictions of their likely outcomes every day.
I do wonder if we're being reasonable though by placing different moralistic standards on hypothetical "back in time" decision that we don't put on decisions we make in the here and now?
I mean if some GI had Hitler in his crosshairs midway through WWII would he have been expected to weigh the pros and cons of every possible branching path before pulling the trigger?
We aren't cluck-clucking SEAL Team 6 because maybe if they hadn't killed Bin Laden the War on Terror would had gone on a little longer and maybe a scientist working on a new battlefield drug to help soldiers in that conflict accidentally discovers a cure for cancer which prevents the man who is going to grow up to invent cold fusion from dying as a child which allows us to travel to space where we meet the Zorlackians and they teach us the meaning of Life, the Universe, and Everything.
But that's sort of what we're doing with "Time Traveler Killing Hitler" problem which is exactly the same, just with a different point of reference for the person doing the judging.
We couldn't "Butterfly Effect" every decision we make without going into an absurdist decision overload and shutting down when we make them in the here and now. Why should that standard change on some hypothetical "back in time" decision?
Our decisions now have the same potentially huge, far reaching consequences and we still both make and are allowed and expected to.
I mean if some GI had Hitler in his crosshairs midway through WWII would he have been expected to weigh the pros and cons of every possible branching path before pulling the trigger?
We aren't cluck-clucking SEAL Team 6 because maybe if they hadn't killed Bin Laden the War on Terror would had gone on a little longer and maybe a scientist working on a new battlefield drug to help soldiers in that conflict accidentally discovers a cure for cancer which prevents the man who is going to grow up to invent cold fusion from dying as a child which allows us to travel to space where we meet the Zorlackians and they teach us the meaning of Life, the Universe, and Everything.
But that's sort of what we're doing with "Time Traveler Killing Hitler" problem which is exactly the same, just with a different point of reference for the person doing the judging.
We couldn't "Butterfly Effect" every decision we make without going into an absurdist decision overload and shutting down when we make them in the here and now. Why should that standard change on some hypothetical "back in time" decision?
Our decisions now have the same potentially huge, far reaching consequences and we still both make and are allowed and expected to.
Checkmite
Skepticifimisticalationist
Yes but we have to make decisions in the course our daily lives, purely as a consequence of living. We have no choice. It IS a different question from going back and reversing or altering events that have already taken place, which nobody ever needs to do.
Brainster
Penultimate Amazing
- Joined
- May 26, 2006
- Messages
- 21,805
Anybody mentioned the essential time travel paradox/infinite loop? If you go back in time to kill Hitler then you grow up in a world where Hitler didn't do whatever you want to prevent, so you don't go back in time to kill Hitler.
The Great Zaganza
Maledictorian
- Joined
- Aug 14, 2016
- Messages
- 28,806
irrelevant to the issue, IMO.
Even if true, in half of the loops there would be no WW2 or Holocaust.
HansMustermann
Penultimate Amazing
- Joined
- Mar 2, 2009
- Messages
- 23,741
Well, the whole time travel thing assumes that you can see the consequences of your actions, and possibly stop yourself from doing them. Hence the question isn't why someone would be paralyzed with uncertainty, but rather whether having seen the alternative, they might decide that some 80 millions dead are the lesser evil.
