Let’s get the day off to a light-hearted beginning, since it is sure to go rapidly downhill.
I love this comment by Ethics Alarms’ favorite squid, Extradimensional Cephalopod. I wish I had written it, and in fact started out to do so during the brief outbreak of Republican Presidential candidates being asked by silly reporters looking for a “gotcha!” whether they would murder Baby Adolf Hitler if they could go back in time. It is an ethics question, after all. My idea was to speculate on the possible results of such a mission using pop culture, science fiction and serious physics theories, but I rapidly discovered that a lot of research would be necessary, and the ethics nexus was deteriorating quickly. Thus I was thrilled to see EC boldly go where my boldness had failed me.
Here is Extradimensional Cephalopod’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Hoping That Future Presidential Candidates Won’t Be Asked About Whether They Would Kill Baby Trump.”
[I do have one question: is “Back to the Future” now the favored label for the category of time travel story where someone changes the future by altering the past? Not “The Terminator” or Star Trek’s “City on the Edge of Forever”? In “Back to the Future II”, we are told that altering the past creates a parallel alternate future, which I assume means that killing Baby Hitler just means that Hitler goes on his merry way, except in the new, improved, no-Hitler parallel universe. Come to think of it, “The Terminator” movies, last I checked (but I dropped out two sequels and a TV spin-off ago), suggested that the future can’t be changed, though those robots in Future Hell seem to think so. Right?
See, this is why I gave up the first time. Heeeeeeeeere’s Extradimensional Cephalopod!
As a well-rounded geek, I’ll take on your time machine question:
Journalist: “If you could go back in time and kill baby Hitler, would you do it?”
Me: “What kind of time travel, Novikov self-consistency, many-worlds, or Back to the Future?”
Journalist: “Uh…”
Me: “That answer would get you thrown from the Bridge of Death if this were a Monty Python movie. How am I supposed to answer your stupid time travel question if you haven’t studied enough about time travel to ask it properly? Okay, I’ll answer it anyway, but I’m running for president, here, not starship captain.
“Novikov self-consistency: It is literally impossible to kill baby Hitler.
“Many worlds: It would have no effect on anyone other than me.
“Back to the Future: It would effectively kill everyone who was born as a result of Hitler’s actions, erasing people who already exist to create people who don’t. So no, no I wouldn’t. There is no positive outcome to undoing an event in the distant past, because it would literally be our undoing. All we can do is move forward.
“Counter-question: are you advocating a Minority Report-style punishment of pre-crime?”
Replace “Hitler” with “Trump” and you have the same problem. Also, I would be sorely tempted to vote for any candidate who answered the question like that, without bothering to learn anything else about them.
Ethics Alarms 
I was gonna do an essay on the whole vapidity of the question anyway and then just decided: if a person doesn’t already realize why the question is stupid to begin with and why the question is just a rotten gotcha question to ask of a political candidate anyway, that person is probably too far gone to recover.
Well done EC
Well done, EC. That is the response “I’m my own man” Jeb! should have given to the reporter. Yet, he decided to take a shot at it and got it all wrong, as concisely pointed up by EC. His response should have been premised with something like this: “Really? We are facing 17 trillion dollars in debt, we have an entitlement crisis looming on the very-near horizon, a floundering economy, and more social problems we hardly wrap our heads around, and you want me to answer a hypothetical question that can’t be answered? Have you lost what little media credibility you had left? But, all right, I’ll take a shot . . . (cue EC’s comments)” But, no. He didn’t showing that, not only is he not very articulate, he is not very bright. We are doomed.
jvb
Jeb is a sad, wishy-washy dim bulb. He would rise greatly in my estimation if he just got out of the race.
I feel like that other lady the other day, who somehow got here & then couldn’t find her way back out & was soooo glad to see me looking all around with that big quizzical expression written all over my forehead, where am I, how’d I git here, & waahh!! how can I get back to where I was & what I was doing.
What was I doing … ?
Ditto, except the dim bulb part, which my upbringing never approved of relating anyone’s mindedness to the forbidden R word, rhyming with regarded.
Don’t know why but he always reminded me of a Pugsly type individual. Don’t trust the personna he’s donned for the campaign.
I’m not sure if my theory is accepted with time travel experts:
Well, my answer is no. You see, if I go back in time and kill baby Hitler, my grandpa doesn’t enlist in the navy to fight in the war. Consequently he doesn’t meet the Canadian woman of his dreams at a navy ball up in British Columbia, who would give birth to my mother years later. Consequently, if I did kill baby Hitler, it would undo my existence. But if I were never born, I would not be able to travel back in time to kill baby Hitler. The resulting paradox would so confuse the great time seamstress as to cause a tear in the fabric of the space time continuum, causing the universe to implode into an oblivion of nothingness, and killing (or perhaps unexisting) all of us (well everyone who existed), including the oppressed peoples of the outer galaxies, who would be unsurprised (or wouldn’t be, because they wouldn’t exist either) that we exercised our human-privilege to such a cataclysmic end.
My head hurts.
Then my work here is done.
Well said to all the time travel replies. Who’s the dumb journalist who thought that was a relevant question for a politician?
I think that’s the 3rd category in EC’s hypotherical answer above.
Time travel as most discuss it is hoakum. *But* the only protection that I can imagine against a self-contradicting loop like most people describe, is to find an individual, whose existence is so remote from the effects of WW2 (in this hypo), to be your “time traveling assassin”. Give him the task to go back in time to purge history of Hitler. Ideally his existence isn’t “undone” because he’s been selected from an unaffected family line.
Now, Hitler being dead, the present “you” (if you even exist) no longer has a motive to send back this “time assassin”, so in addition to sending the time assassin back in time with his killing instructions, you ALSO have to send him with *unique instructions* convincing enough to convince HIS now future self to go back in time and kill Hitler.
This is still ultimately undone of course, because there is always an element in the loop that originates with a person who either will no longer exist as a result of the altered history or will no longer have the motive to send back a time traveller in the “first” place.
Of course it’s all hoakum… If time travel were possible we’d know because there’d be hundreds of them arriving “daily”. And don’t tell me there’ll be “laws” and “protocols” against that…because there’d also be criminals and bad actors who wouldn’t follow those laws.
My favorite variation was the cable “Outer Limits” reboot episode about a narcicist who wanted to have sex with himself, since he was the only human being he could ever love. He has a sex change operation, then goes back in time to seduce himself as a man. Unfortunately, as a man he was a misogynist pig, so he abuses his female future self, and she shoots him…and disappears when he dies. But if she never existed, who killed her male self?
The other interesting aspect of the show was that Joey Buttafucco played a bodyguard.
Let’s ask Caitlyn Jenner to check this out…
No, we’re just in one of those universes where time travel is never discovered….
Or how do we know that at some point in our distant future, time travel has been discovered by our future culture that HAS advanced well enough. Not only that, they have discovered that NOT only is the future not yet determined, but the past, while it was the past was NOT yet determined either.
What if this same culture recognized that at key turning points in mankind a development and history, had something else occurred, life would have been WORSE for humanity. What if, their algorithms then determined, that as history was flowing, Hitler, from among many possible courses history COULD have taken, was the *optimal* choice to *allow* to live.
What if all their algorithms determined that something awful was brewing for the 30s and 40s and tben determined who would be the catalysts and discovered just which babies were going to grow up to be EVEN worse than Hitler?
Their algorithms showed an *inevitability* of a horrendous war, and decided that corralling the historical “future” outcomes down to Hitler, reduced the overall destruction of what would have been while keeping history flowing to our future selve’s ultimate destination…?
And that our future selves HAVE been assassinating people in the past to guide history to the “least worst” alternative?
(Supposed to be a head explode jpg)
boom
tiddily boom
There’s a hypothesis out there that time travel has been invented an infinite number of times, creating unstable loops until it settles down to the only stable reality, one in which it is never invented.
I like the Orson Scott card version of Time travel in the Pathfinder series, which basically amounts to the time traveler being immune to any changes. Effectively there’s a meta-time in which the the whole universe from beginning to end changes, although he never described it that way. It allows time travel to create permanent duplicates among other things. Creating a reality in which you were never born doesn’t matter, because the reality in which you were born used to exist, and you’ve simply moved from there to here.
Isn’t that just scenario #1 from EC’s answer?
As I understand it, his first answer involves a version of time travel in which changes are literally impossible, but time travel still occurs. The hypothesis of it auto-uninventing involves real changes.
If changes are impossible, then time travel is impossible. The mere introduction of future matter into the past IS a change in that past…
Not if it already happened.
Or maybe our particular time is just not particularly desirable for the time-tourism industry. Everyone wants to either go see the dinosaurs or go visit their great-great-great-great-great grandchildren, but only those who live in the future in which hybrid cars were mandated in the year 2020 and GMO modified cows expel ozone instead of methane. This is, of course, the only recognizable future earth which exists, as all the others are under water.
Replied to wrong comment, hope y’all can figure out where this one was supposed to go.
Criminy. We’re discussing alternate time travel, time loops and self-contradicting time lines and how to reconcile where branching-time lines connect with original timelines and now you’re gonna expect us to put together alternate sub-threads to their original ones?
Cerveza Time!
I recall an episode from the original Outer Limits. The Man Who Was Never Born. Folks have been so fascinated with time travel since that novel by H.G. Wells that it crops up all over the place. The Grandfather Paradox (going back in time and shooting your own grandpappy, thus invalidating your own existence) should be proof by itself that time travel is a fantasy. Besides, it requires a situation where there is a physical place called The Past. I rather doubt it!
Excellent comment, EC. However, expecting a politician to be any smarter than is necessary to tie his/her own shoelaces is probably a mistake. Keep in mind these idiots once passed a law stating all phone lines had to carry data at a rate of 14,400 bits per second…several years after 56K modems became standard equipment. They also seriously considered a law requiring seat belts on motorcycles. There is NO WAY one of them would understand theoretical physics.
That’s because politicians deal in a field in which the consequences of one’s actions are inherently spatially remote, obscure and difficult to link, long-term, or speculative because they must be compared to what didn’t,/i> happen, and because voters can’t be bothered to think about all that stuff, and as a general rule aren’t even taught how by their parents or by schools.
As a result, politicians have incentives to look like they have magical, immediate solutions, and no incentive to worry about the remote, obscure, long-term, or preventative consequences, because they only answer to voters (and to large corporations), and voters (and large corporations, which answer to stockholders on a quarterly basis) tend to decide based on what is right in front of them and what instant gratification they could garner. The entire system is set up to reward irresponsible promises over good, stable results, and it doesn’t help that both parties can blame their failures on each other.
Actually, replace “the entire system” in that last sentence with “the entire culture.” The underlying legal structure of the system is close to the best it can be at the moment, or it was when it was created and was warped over the decades by sloppy citizens and their politicians. The limiting factor is the culture and education of the people who are holding their leaders accountable. That’s more accurate, and easier to fix than a “system.”
Also, curses, botched a close-italics marker.
Frankly, applying Occam’s Razor, they got into politics in the first place because they were/are too damned stupid to make a living in private enterprise.
If it was a baby Hitler to be disposed of, I’d go back in time AND MAKE Reid, Pelosi, obamy, Feinstein & other big abortion mouthpit pols come right along & bring that new contraption that crushes a baby until it’s heart spurts out pretty much whole, which they can charge for more money.
I’d tell them to do what they do best , abort the infant, put it in the crushing machine, sell the parts & don’t come back to 2015 until it’s all done.
Of course, they’d never carry out one wit of what they’re always spewing out for others to do. They could never practice what they preach. Weak, spineless cowards. Their fault then, that hitler baby grew into a monster.
As the placard says:
What do we want?
Time travel!
When do we want it?
That’s irrelevant!
It’s not irrelevant;
It’s a hippopotamus
— Groucho
Thanks, all!
Jack, to answer your question, I just called it “Back to the Future” because I couldn’t remember if it had an official name, and that was the first series that came to mind that demonstrated the concept of someone being able to erase themselves from history by accident; it came to mind first because it was the picture you used for the post. The parallel universe mentioned in Back to the Future II is inconsistent, but then so is “Back to the Future” time travel in general.
If I’d been less hasty, I would have acknowledged that the many worlds version of time travel would have an effect on other people than me, because having changed the past I would vanish from this universe and therefore be unable to be president. I would supplant myself (or just show up as a double, as Phlinn describes) in the universe without Hitler, where no one would have noticed a change.
Also, the Novikov self-consistency version can also create stable time loops, making it possible for us to have caused Hitler’s rise to power by attempting to prevent it.
Honestly, the Novikov self-consistency version (two-way causality) and maybe the many worlds version (one-way causality) are the only ones that make any logical sense. texagg04 points out the inconsistency with Back To the Future method, because it tries to eat its cake and have it, too. Then, of course, there’s the Wibbly-Wobbly Timey-Wimey Ball, but I decided to leave that one out, because while fun, it doesn’t contribute much to serious discussions.
Let’s pretend that somehow the larger ramifications of altering the past can be avoided – and that eliminating Hitler avoids the excess suffering while mostly keeping the flow of time unchanged. Just pretend.
This dumb gotcha hypothetical ultimately boils down to a false dichotomy anyway. Kill baby Hitler OR let the holocaust happen.
Well, if I’ve got the magic ability to time travel AND I know the conditions that molded Hitler into the monster he became AND I know that *in this hypothetical* I won’t drastically alter the time line – then the ethical option is *NOT* to kill baby Hitler.
It’s actually to kidnap him and bring him back to the future OR kidnap him and take him to America or something. Anyway, he wasn’t genetically predetermined to be a monster.
*with the intent to raise him in better circumstances*