Is everyone mad? Do you not see the obvious concerns?
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Back in October, Republican presidential candidates were contemplating using a time machine to go back and kill Baby Hitler, to prevent the rise of fascist tyranny.
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Donald Trump is clearly promoting fascist and eliminationist policies.
I’m a scientist! I can put two and two together and get the obvious answer: Baby Donald Trump is in great peril if grown-up Donald Trump should get the nomination and be elected president. After a few years of a Trump presidency, swarms of physicists (who are mostly Democrat, I should note) will be rushing to develop a time machine with the specific purpose of killing a baby.
That’s why we need to develop a time machine immediately, to protect innocent Baby Trump. I expect pro-life groups all across America to immediately drop whatever else they are doing, and instead funnel all of their money into physics research. Not only will it protect one baby, not only will it defend trillions of past potential future human lives, but I suspect that most of them are Trump voters who want him to be president, anyway.
I anticipate a few concerns about this program.
Why do we need a crash program? It’s a freakin’ time machine. Because, obviously, if the baby-killers get it first, they will erase Donald Trump and all memories of Trump. Our researchers would be working away at our time machine, and then suddenly they’d be wondering why they’re doing this — they’d know nothing of the horrors of Trump, and would be baffled at why they’re developing a machine to kill Baby President Kardashian. We must be first.
What are your specific plans on how to use your time machine? Clearly, we must invest in a long-term defense: defending only Baby Trump could be defeated by murdering Toddler Trump, or Obnoxious Adolescent Trump, or Spoiled Twenty Year Old Asshole Trump. What we’re going to have to do is send back a robot to protect Trump from pre-birth to presidential candidacy. This has the advantage that sending back an emotionless cybernetic automaton to guide him through his youth might also enhance his empathy.
Wait. Why do you want to protect Donald Trump? Well, I don’t actually. I think he’s a nasty polyp on the colon of the body politic, and nipping him in the bud might be a good idea. But I’m also an SJW, and you know how we defend the right of the most odious people to exist, and he’s pretty dang odious.
But really, I just want a time machine. Once we send the robot back to the mid-1940s, I’m setting the dial to the Cambrian and going on an ancient metazoan collecting trip. (Where I will meet an army of robots tasked with defending primeval chordates? Only time will tell.)
Sadly, I suspect if I had a time machine I’d use it to get my marking done so that it didn’t take up my weekends and evenings.
I’ve wondered what the chance is that, if you travel far back in time and collect or kill something (because you didn’t remember the advice your father gave you on your wedding day), you happen to kill an individual whose removal from a population dramatically changes evolutionary history.
How about a machine that could cause an anvil to land on Trump pere‘s testes sometime before badger-head was conceived?
I don’t know. If I had a time machine I’d be too busy gleefully sending Christians back a few centuries to meet “Jesus”.
It’s a bit of a derail; I apologise. But I can’t help wondering what all those Republican presidential candidates who are so sure it’s morally okay to (and that they themselves would indeed) kill BABY Hitler would say when asked if it’ okay to abort FETUS Hitler. And if they would do it.
Here’s the big moral problem with time travel that’s never talked about. Let’s say you go back and kill Hitler. Hitler is responsible for the deaths of millions of lives. Those millions of people don’t die because you’ve killed hitler. Now there are new people being born that wouldn’t have before, true, but maybe some of these people who originally died married people who in our timeline had married someone else. Suddenly, someone who was born in our timeline isn’t born in this new timeline. Maybe your grandpa bumps into someone he didn’t in our timeline and misses meeting your grandma. Multiply the chance for these littler alterations by a few million since that’s how many people are alive because of our alterations, and multiply that by the number of generations between then and now, and you have wiped out and created people on a scale that dwarfs the event you originally altered.
So remember kids, don’t mess with History, even if it’s to eliminate a Hitler or Trump.
as odious as trump is and all he stands for and all of the talking heads who are saying that it is early days yet and some mainstream republican leader will emerge I have to make an observation.
No one is forcing people to approve of him, No one is forcing people to show up at his rallies and cheer when he spouts his racist and fascist statements. removing him will do little to eliminate his supporters nor change their minds .
uncle frogy
Not only does Emily make a good point about unintended consequences, but where does it stop? Okay, Baby Hitler has been killed. It makes sense to then kill Baby Stalin. Sorry, Baby Pol Pot, but you’re not going to make it to toddlerhood either. Okay, we got Baby Mao and Baby Amin. By killing Baby Kim Il-Sung, we don’t have to worry about his son or grandson.
Don’t worry, we’ll get to Baby Baby Doc soon enough, but we need to take a break from baby killing to catch out breath…
Okay, back. Are we just going to stick to people in recent history? Because Baby Torquemada is looking like a juicy target. While we’re at it, a whole lot of wars can be prevented if we start looking at past European royalty in the crib.
Break time again! Let’s relax by killing a few serial killers in infancy.
That was good, but before we start let’s review how history has changed. Who the hell is Grand Ruler Ebenezer of the People’s Kingdom of New Bolton? Never mind, just tell us where he was born.
Sorry, where were we again? Never mind. Pledge your allegiance to me, my people! We will make those bastards in the Republic of New Bolton pay for their impudence!
@6
There’s a game called Genius: The Transgression (where you play as mad scientists) that kinda plays with what you brought up.
To wit, in the setting, the current timeline where hitler killed 6 million jews is just the latest in a series of “go back in time. and kill the evil german dictator” plots, with the german dictator getting worse each time. Hitler’s just the most recent dictator to take up that mantle.
It’s gotten so bad, the time police just clone hitler and let time travelers kill him to blow off steam, rather than letting them kill off hitler and let some new even worse dictator take his place. They even give tours of the secret cloning facility.
I blame SkyNet for this mess.
Remember, the first thing you need to do with a working time machine is to travel to 1790, so that you can get the first patent when the US establishes the Patent Office.
Then buy stock in Apple and Nike when they go public. And encourage Disney to not produce Songs of the South. And distribute Smallpox vaccines to Native Americans in the 18th and 19th Centuries. And convince the ancient Chinese that consuming rhino horns does nothing but cause indigestion. And keep Fox from canceling Firefly. And…
@Ariaflame
That sounds like a brilliant plan to me. The downside would be finding the space and time where I could work. (Granted, I could just use my apartment/office at times when I know I am at the other — grade from midnight to 6 AM, then travel home to sleep while my past self is at work.)
… And then use the time machine to take a vacation somewhere warm and sunny, because I’d probably need it after that kind of double-booking.
Careful! That’s dangerous! http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=3918
Speaking of alternate time lines, here’s some personal weirdness I discovered about myself:
Honored First Wife has gotten into “Man in the High Castle”. I can’t stand it. Apparently, I’m fine with FTL travel, cosmic communities of non-human/human sentients, humans that can transform matter with their minds, etc. but I’m not fine with Germany/Japan winning WWII and turning the U.S. Into an occupied overtly fascist state.
Hmmmm… Maybe I just don’t have a problem with “things that are absurd” in my TV diet.
It could also be the last thing you need to do (before raking in the profits, obviously). It’ll work out somehow, as long as you make it there at some point.
…. What if we put Trump into a wormhole or some shit like that? I don’t really care what’s on the other side. We could tell him he won a raffle to go on a super-fancy vacation, which will make the other rich dudes very jealous. Or, you know, if we just gave him our nice shiny “time machine” as a present, he would almost certainly push the button (which does … whatever), and that could solve our problems without much trouble for the rest of us.
Microraptor @11
NO! Say you can make Firefly last a few more seasons. One of the most popular characters on the show was Jayne, and with the new, long-lasting Firefly, the actor in this timeline is presented with more movie roles, becoming one of the biggest movie stars of his generation. Capitalizing on his fame, he decides to run for political office, and not just any office…
Do you want to be responsible for President Adam Baldwin?
consciousness razor @15:
No, you need to patent the time machine first. Otherwise someone might steal it and patent it before you.
Tabby Lavalamp @16:
Uh, we’ll just arrange for some sort of scandal that completely derails his career. Or we’ll just arrange for Summer Glau to get all the action movie parts and become president instead.
Microraptor @17
Then they kill baby you so you never get a chance to patent it.
As for Firefly, if you’re going to save it, I guess you can go back further and have them cast someone else as Jayne. With all this time meddling, maybe a young Paul Newman?
You know what? Screw Firefly. What I’d really do is go back and get them to use a different type of blue body-paint on Farscape so that Virginia Hey didn’t have to leave the show.
@Emily #6:
You’re quite right, but the situation is even worse than that. It’s not just a matter of two people not meeting. It’s a matter of the right sperm reaching the egg first. You just have to be in the past and interact: a couple who step around you while you’re standing on the pavement will have the rest of their timeline delayed by two seconds. Shout ‘Thief!’ in a marketplace or ‘Fire!’ in a theatre and you could change the destiny of a nation within a few generations.
I already time traveled, to eliminate The Baby of Greater Doom than Trump (uberTrump?).
Cuz, since I succeeded, there’s no way for you to know about it (Unless I tell you. oops).
seriously, back to reality:
I can’t past the inherent contradiction of changing the past and knowing it was changed. No matter how long it takes to develop a time machine, if it travels into the past to accomplish its mission, that would be our past and Hitler survived (obviously). And if you change your past, maybe you change it in a way that makes you not invent the time machine… ie grandfather paradox. Sorry, I don;t see any way around it, being as clever as I am, so QED its impossible. more dreams to you…
Crazy time travel nonsense. Anything you go back and try to do we will undo. Let the timeline alone. Besides, you never finished your time machine project. Not allowed.
Take Trump out and someone else is going to lead American fascism. I just read this article on Fox, about the toddler the two terrorists left behind: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2015/12/08/picture-innocence-baby-orphaned-by-terrorists-at-center-custody-battle/?intcmp=hpbt1
And the comments are horrifying. Here is a selection:
(warning, you might want to look away, seriously).
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Nature or Nurture?
Her Nature is a Terrorist,
but can Education change her?
I don’t think so.
She’ll be a Terrorist for ever. I know these animals.
Someone wrote, “People! Have you lost all sense of decency? This is a BABY. ” and people replied:
Kaboom Farook
They grow up, don’t they?
ITS TIME GITMO HAD A NURSERY
The Daughter of a Terrorist will be a Terrorist.
Terrorism is in their Genes.
Baby ISIS being fitted for a new line of exploding clothing line.
The kid be better off shot in the head vs going back to a Islamic family….
All family members should be deported, including the terrorist baby.
And so on and so on.
Ben Elton wrote a novel ‘Time After Time Again’ in which Isaac Newton somehow or another had done some arcane calculations and discovered that the was a future time loop that was going to occur in which it would be possible for someone to travel back in time from our near future to a time in Istanbul in 1913.
Some Cambridge academics discovered his calculations, and realised that it would be possible to send someone back in time to prevent the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, and prevent the outbreak of the Great War, which was actually the pivotal event of the 20th century.
No Hitler. No Russian revolution. No Stalin. No Second World War.
Because there was no actual time machine, no matter how history was changed, the time loop still persisted regardless, so the paradox of why the time machine would be discovered when the apparent need had disappeared vanishes.
People seem to be fixated on the “butterfly effect” version of causality, where the timeline is fragile and deeply vulnerable to meddling by the most trivial of causes. But if Archduke Ferdinand had not been assassinated in Sarajevo, all the tensions that suddenly released after that event are STILL PRESENT. The actions of individuals may be highly mutable, but entire societies and nations have a lot more momentum than that. I do not believe for a moment that World War 1 could have been averted by any single simple act, because it took a multitude of acts by many actors over years to set the stage for it.
Change the past? Sorry, no can do.
https://loa-shared.s3.amazonaws.com/static/pdf/Leiber_Change_Past.pdf
Well, at least, it’s really really hard.
As far as Hitler and the rest go you don’t need to kill them. You just remove them from their childhood and put them in a better one.
How about we go back and kill Adam and Eve before they bring sin into the world? And then there would be no Hitler, no Pol Pot, and no kids who walk across my lawn.
And no me, but I can’t have everything.
As far as Hitler and the rest go you don’t need to kill them. You just remove them from their childhood and put them in a better one.
In Trump’s case what would that look like? One where he started without a million dollar bankroll?
Probably wouldn’t need to kill him; just parent him a bit better.
re 25:
agreed. I remember being taught in High School History, that the assassination of the Arch Duke was just an incidental trigger for WW, not the actual cause of it.
Like you noted, Europe was “in tension”, from many causes, and the Arch Duke was a convenient excuse to initiate the bloody (literal) resolutions. (ie. being under tension, they finally snapped {hair trigger effect})
So time travel to prevent WW1 would entail much more than stopping the assasination (even Doctor Who would be severely tasked).
The other boondoggle to using the TARDIS to “fix” history. Details, details, details, lots of details produced the history you dislike and try to fix. Flotilla of TARDII (pl?) may be barely sufficient, if at all.
TARDIS is interesting postulate but thinking about the full implications… I get lost…
without WWII would we have developed A-bombs or H-bombs?
what effect would there be on space exploration without the V-2 or V-1?
radar?
uncle frogy
They could just as well steal it after you’ve patented it, then use it go to whenever the patent office opens. If the past wasn’t “fixed” for you whenever you changed it, then it also isn’t fixed for them. Either they could cut in line ahead of the you which also made it to the patent office, or by getting there “first” they somehow ensured you were never there. Whatever is supposed to happen, it’s not going to be a consistent set of events, since after all we’re talking about backward time travel (not traveling forward in a closed loop or anything like that). The point is, however the rules of this game are supposed to work, your competitor could still get the patent, as long as they can steal your time machine and use it just as effectively as you. If this were a magical power that you had, which couldn’t be stolen and used like a machine, then it might be a different story … but anyone else with the same powers, if there are any, would still be able to wreck your plans. So, maybe the lesson is simply don’t let anyone steal your time machine — as long as you manage that, then the order in which you do things is apparently arbitrary because you’re a time traveler. But if you can’t safely use it either, nor can you risk anyone else using it, then it seems like the only winning move is not to play.
Like I was suggesting before, in some highly idealized circumstances, maybe it would work as a Greek gift to ruin someone else’s life, but you’d have to be sure it’s not going to come back to bite you in the ass somehow. But understandably, most people don’t consider giving Baby Hitler a time machine, with the expectation that he’ll probably end up killing himself with it somehow, or in any case failing to do all of the evil shit he would’ve done otherwise. They always want the precious gadget for themselves, so they can have a a fun adventure and save the day; but it’s a bit like the One Ring, so destroying it is probably the best option. Use it to go to Mount Doom and throw it into the fire. That’d be my advice, although nobody will ever need to follow it.
The way to prevent Hitler’s political career could be to bribe the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in the year 1907 to accept and keep Hitler as a student.
There’s another problem with the idea, which is that the only limit to where you would want to make changes to history — even if they were benevolent changes, no killing involved — is how far back your knowledge of history goes. Every change would alter the subsequent events so that perhaps the later events wouldn’t happen. Stop WWII by altering the timeline, and WWI still happened. Stop WWI somehow (perhaps by convincing the various European countries not to entangle themselves in treaties), and you still have the Napoleonic wars. Then there’s slavery throughout history — it wasn’t just Africans in America, there were Europeans enslaved to each other, Africans enslaved by Muslims, Africans enslaved by each other, Muslims enslaved by Chinese, etc. ad absurdum. There’s Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great, any number of leaders who killed huge numbers of people. There’s pretty much everything about Britain in Asia (they basically invented the basics of the modern drug trade to get the Chinese addicted to opium in order to weaken the Chinese position, and that’s just one thing they did). There’s the genocide of the native Americans by Europeans, the genocide(s) between native American cultures before the Europeans showed up, the Islamic destruction of native African cultures, the persecution of African farming cultures by African grazing cultures… there is no point in history where you can stop and say “okay, here is where all the trouble started, if I fix this everything will be great for all time.” (And even if you stay away from political causes: why not stop plagues, or introduce sustainable technologies before unsustainable ones are created, or provide medical training — just teaching people to wash their hands regularly would save any number of lives through history.) And if you make a change, then all subsequent history is at least slightly changed, possibly rewritten entirely. Without WWI there would be no WWII, so preventing WWI would be even better than preventing WWII, but without the Napoleonic wars there would be no WWI… even the American Civil War altered history outside the U.S. in all sorts of ways. Even if you somehow built your time machine so that you would remain unchanged, every time you changed anything, you would have to spend years looking at subsequent history before you could determine whether you had made a mistake — and there would still be some event which occurred earlier in the timeline which you would eventually discover and want to alter.
Setting physics and paradox completely aside: the human race will never develop regular time travel as evidenced by the fact that we don’t already have it. If time travel were ever to be regularly used, eventually the technology would become common place at every point in history. Thus, time travel would eventually be discovered in all time periods.
Why would they be baffled at why they’re developing a machine to kill Baby President Kardashian? Seems like a good endeavor.
Set the controls for the heart of the Statherian.
re @35:
seems the History Channel has gotten to you. As often postulated on Ancient Aliens; the beings we think of as aliens were actually time traveling humans from our distant future. As explanation for all those ancient mysteries that can only be understood with modern mathematics and technology. So maybe there is evidence of time travel that we leave as “mysteries”.
Leaving aside the actual point of the OP, we exist in a spacetime manifold in a dynamic universe: changing the time coordinate without simultaneously changing the space coordinates necessarily puts one not just elsewhen, but elsewhere*.
(Or: one needs spacetime travel, not merely time travel)
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* Obviously, the converse is similarly applicable.
slithey tove,
It’s an acronym, so in English the plural would be TARDISes.
Ummm… you then went on to state a paradox about time travel, one that’s basically equivalent to Fermi’s paradox. And if you bought in to slithey tove’s nonsense, they’re literally the same thing. So maybe you just don’t know about all of the fantastic evidence that’s out there, documented on the History Channel or anywhere else for that matter. I mean… I’m not saying there is fantastic evidence of alien time travelers, but there is fantastic evidence of alien time travelers.
That doesn’t actually follow, because it isn’t the case that time travelers must go to every point in history. Maybe they simply don’t care about 2015, or maybe they have some reason to avoid it or any other specific period of time.
@ 41
I think that would not be any particular period of time but Every period of time as there is no evidence of time travelers in fact the evidence is the same for the existence of gods.
@39
absolutely elsewhere at the same time as else when!
uncle frogy
READ BULLETIN 1147, PEOPLE!
http://www.tor.com/2011/08/31/wikihistory/
“Maybe we can go around you.” Svetz hesitated, then plunged in. “Zeera, try this. Send me back to an hour before the earlier Zeera arrives. Ford’s automobile won’t have disappeared yet. I’ll duplicate it, duplicate the duplicate, take the reversed duplicate and the original past you in the big extension cage. That leaves you to destroy the duplicate instead of the original. I reappear after you’ve gone, leave the original automobile for Ford, and come back here with the reversed duplicate. How’s that?”
All of this is why my .sig for ages was “Time paradoxes will have given me a headache”
All this was elaborated upon long ago by Asimov in “End of Eternity”.
sonderval, before Asimov was Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder”.
(More apposite to the post, “Let’s Go to Golgotha!” by Garry Kilworth)
Of course, if you killed baby Hitler, none of us would ever exist, given that all our direct ancestors’ lives were heavily affected by WWII.
Oh, wait, that’s not sure either, because that thinking depends on the “it was just Hitler and not centuries of anti-semitism, really, the Germany weren’t Nazis complicit in mass murder at all” version of history…
Giliell:
Possibly; it may just create a new timeline.
@Emily #6. What you’re talking about is close to the Grandfather Paradox, which is actually an argument against the possibility of time travel. It goes like this…suppose you have access to time travel and you go back and kill your grandfather before he met your grandfather (it’s always your grandfather for some reason, never your father or grandmother). So, one of your parents wouldn’t be born and neither would you. So that means you wouldn’t be here to travel through time which means you WOULD be born and could go back to kill Gramps.
@Uncle Frogy,
I could write a long screed in response, but who wants a history lesson, (if you do Wiki is accurate enough on the subjects concerned) :), but apart from possibly the development of the A/H bomb, the others were all being developed to varying degrees by countries other than Germany before WWII even started. Even the A/H bomb and the principles behind it were known before WWII even started. Now admittedly, WWII apparently gave us the urgency needed to spend the time, money and manpower on developing all three. But at best, all you can say is that without WWII it might have taken longer for them to develop and mature, not that they wouldn’t have been developed at all. I have even seen some make the counter claim that without WWII some of these technologies might have been developed sooner if all the resources poured into the war had been spent differently. But that is something we can never know.
If you accept the multiverse theories, then going back and changing our time line wouldn’t necessarily alter ours, but, as John Morales posts, simply create a new one in parallel. Perhaps that is why, even if someone did invent a time machine, we would never see any changes to our existing time line. Though, ignoring possible paradoxes, assuming that there isn’t multiple possible universes how would we know ours had changed anyway. As everything those alive would experience would be based on their new time line and the past of that time line and they would have no knowledge of the previous time line. The only person to know would be the time traveller if he could return to the actual time line he left.
So, yeah, about that time machine. I’m thinking that maybe I shouldn’t have stepped on that butterfly the last time I used it.
@51
I know some of the history what I was trying to say was that the way it is now was heavily influenced and shaped by the war and killing that did take place and also to indicate that there were many things that were developed when they were because the war made the money available. I do not think people were any more or less enlightened then nor now in fact I suspect we are the same so I have my doubts how freely the needed money would have been made available. It is not that easy now days.
The point being it would not be like it is today in many many ways.
uncle frogy
Another potential multiverse explanation of things might be that time travel makes history so unstable that only universes where it is impossible can develop intelligent life. In those where it is possible and time travel is developed, people spend all their time trying to edit history to their taste and eventually make the universe disappear in a big paradoxical glurp.
But PZ, time travel is impossible. The laws of grammar forbid it.
In two hundred years there will be three species remaining on planet Earth: humans, cockroaches, and algae. Among humans, there will be a slave class that eats the cockroaches and algae, and a master class that eats the slaves. And all of them will be Christian. Don’t ask me how I know.
dianne @53
If Trump gets elected, we all know who to blame.
Algae cockroach sushi can be nice. Uhm, so I’ve heard.
Numinaster @25:
This was one of the points of Stephen Fry’s novel Making History: if you used a time machine to drop contraceptives in the water supply for Hitler’s parents’ village, someone like Rudolf Gloder has a chance to step up, and that’s not in any sense an improvement: