Was thinking about this.. always when we talk about going into the past it would involve preventing disasters or catastrophes. People talk about assassinating Hitler before the holocaust.. What happens if there are time travelers that have fixed the past, and the stuff that is still in history is stuff they thought didn´t rise to the level of disaster that demanded fixing. Imagine the stuff they had prevented.
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Scary thought, eliminating catastrophes
- Thread starter petesede
- Start date
aboleth_lich
Temporal Novice
Under this scenario, I would have to naturally imagine that the disasters prevented through time travel would be of a scale exceeding those that were not prevented and warranted the potential risks posed by time travel. Namely, disasters of a scale that would have completely wiped us out. I'm picturing time travelers manipulating events to prevent a full scale nuclear war, or ensuring that we would have the suitable defenses and/or contingency plans for an asteroid strike or cosmic ray burst directed at the Earth.
Honestly, if developed further, this could be the basic premise for a fairly interesting series of sci-fi stories. Such a series could feature an elite agency of time travelers dedicated to tending to humanity's history and the spacetime continuum alike, preventing only the true disasters that would have completely wiped us out and also mending any damage caused to the continuum by time-travel. (Or, if we adopted the theories involving alternative universes being constantly created: perhaps we would say that this agency is tending to their metaphorical garden to create a continuity that may not be ideal but is one in which humanity at least persists.) The first entry in the series would naturally follow a protagonist who discovers- and is subsequently recruited into- that agency, and would naturally feature a heated debate as to why some of disasters, like World War II, were not altered at all by the agency due to their risk analysis contrasting the scale of the disaster to the potential damage caused by time travel. We could even have this rookie over step his bounds and make the future even worse in his or her attempts to improve it, learning first-hand of the extreme care required in selecting the what and the how of altering the past.
Honestly, if developed further, this could be the basic premise for a fairly interesting series of sci-fi stories. Such a series could feature an elite agency of time travelers dedicated to tending to humanity's history and the spacetime continuum alike, preventing only the true disasters that would have completely wiped us out and also mending any damage caused to the continuum by time-travel. (Or, if we adopted the theories involving alternative universes being constantly created: perhaps we would say that this agency is tending to their metaphorical garden to create a continuity that may not be ideal but is one in which humanity at least persists.) The first entry in the series would naturally follow a protagonist who discovers- and is subsequently recruited into- that agency, and would naturally feature a heated debate as to why some of disasters, like World War II, were not altered at all by the agency due to their risk analysis contrasting the scale of the disaster to the potential damage caused by time travel. We could even have this rookie over step his bounds and make the future even worse in his or her attempts to improve it, learning first-hand of the extreme care required in selecting the what and the how of altering the past.
mr_paradox
Chrono Cadet
Assuming that you could go back to 1935, how exactly would you go about preventing something like the holocaust. The nasty reality is that the racism against Jews before WW2 was just as bad a racism against blacks. So if you told someone in 1935 that the Hitler guy plans to eliminate Jews, probably no one would really care. It is possible to change minor events, but changing major events is pretty difficult if not impossible.
If they've gone back in time, they were probably limited to events that a handful of men, or fewer, could alter. Assassinating Hitler, maybe. Maybe assassinating Hitler caused a bigger screw-up in the timeline, such as Stalin going wholesale bonkers without someone holding him back by being a threat.
So if they changed events, I imagine it would be things that would be easy to prevent or did so over a much longer scale of time, i.e. pretending to be divine or staging events along the timeline.
So if they changed events, I imagine it would be things that would be easy to prevent or did so over a much longer scale of time, i.e. pretending to be divine or staging events along the timeline.
Not saying this from experience, but killing someone who is 18 and basically a nobody is fairly easy. It would be easy to kill off Hitler before he was an important person. But that leads to the beauty of time travel talks, as outlined in the Butterfly Effect... As you said, racism against the Jews in the decades before WW2 was really bad. If you killed off a teenage Hitler, would someone else, more competent, have replaced him and done the same bad things without making mistakes that cost Hitler the war?There are a lot of things that we can look at in history that were near misses for possibly wiping out mankind. Politically, one of the more important ones was the Bay of Pigs. If JFK had not changed his mind at the last second, and mostly for some unknown reason, the cold war would have been on a completely different path. There are also a lot of question marks about why Germany didn´t have the bomb. Germany having even an unreliable or small nuclear weapon would have completely changed their siege of Britain. Things like SARS and Ebola defied probabilities by not spreading to major population centers. All it takes is a flat tire of a taxi that was taking an infected man to an airport...Assuming that you could go back to 1935, how exactly would you go about preventing something like the holocaust. The nasty reality is that the racism against Jews before WW2 was just as bad a racism against blacks. So if you told someone in 1935 that the Hitler guy plans to eliminate Jews, probably no one would really care. It is possible to change minor events, but changing major events is pretty difficult if not impossible.
It could alter things kind of like in Terminator 2 we have the guy who is getting shot at by sarah for something he did in a different time but has not done it yet and does not believe in the start Miles was the one who made a technology that was used to make skynet and did prevent it but miles dies so one thing occurs and another thing happens. It is something that can can bring other changes too, in the Dragonballz manga and also animie even though they know Dr gero will make the andrioids they don't know where the lab is and also he has not done anything yet wrong so killng him now would not be good and this does bring changes like the ones doing the terror and murder are Dr gero as a android and another one and the other two when they wake up are strong but only want to fight goku as a game and not evil. So even if they had got rid of him the computer would of made them unless they find the computer than destory it and a different story could of happened.