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Message started by Webb on Jul 1st, 2012 at 2:50am

Title: #1 Use for a Time Machine
Post by Webb on Jul 1st, 2012 at 2:50am
Hmmm, could it be ...

Kill Hitler or

Kill Hitler or

Kill Hitler or

Kill Hitler or

Kill Hitler

Title: Re: #1 Use for a Time Machine
Post by beaky on Jul 3rd, 2012 at 12:09am
I never got all the popular puzzlement over the "paradoxes" involved in traveling into the past... tinkering with the past would not change anything you remember, or your future. Simple logic dictates that you'd only create an alternate future, the moment you arrived in the past. Let's face it, if he hadn't enjoyed his 12-year spree, nobody would be interested in going back to kill him. Go back in time, kill Hitler, go home, and you'd find him still there in the history books, etc., etc. Nothing would miraculously stop you from killing some other Hitler-  no intervention by people of that time or other time travelers, no act of God allowing him to live when you thought for sure you'd killed him; none of that stuff. Those solutions to the paradox just don't make sense compared to the simple fact that the guy lived long enough to do the things you want to kill him for..  It's just like the "go back in time and kill your parents before you're born" paradox. You couldn't go back and prevent your own birth if you were never born. The most simple,elegant explanation of how you might think you've done it is the idea of infinite possible universes. So you might kill some alternate Hitler, leaving behind a timeline with who-knows-what changes unfolding (and a historical record of some mysterious person coming out of nowhere to kill Hitler), then return to your starting point, which is a universe where he did all the things your history indicates, and not a word about your exploits.
  Our past is not waiting to be changed by some future time-travelers; it's over and done with. 
  There's no undoing what has been; not in this universe, anyway.

Not that I wouldn't enjoy the opportunity, mind you... and he'd only be one person on my list... mwuhahahaha...   ;D


Here's a more intriguing possibility: what if the past we know was actually altered by time travelers, and historical events that we accept as progressing naturally happened because of someone from another future trying to tinker with their own past? That would explain a lot!  ::)


Title: Re: #1 Use for a Time Machine
Post by Xpand on Jul 3rd, 2012 at 12:21am
Nope, just go back to the dawn of civilization and kill anyone who comes up with the idea of god/gods. Many if not all world's problems would be solved and we would now be 200 years ahead in science and technology... ;D

Title: Re: #1 Use for a Time Machine
Post by jetprop on Jul 3rd, 2012 at 6:16am
If you killed hitler AFTER he did what he did,you'd only change the fact about his suicide.

You can't kill him before he did stuff because then he'd never have done those stuff,so you wouldn't kill an inocent person.

So;you couldn't kill hitler before he did the stuff that he did.

Title: Re: #1 Use for a Time Machine
Post by Steve Hess on Jul 3rd, 2012 at 9:17am
I'd go back in time over and over again to keep people from going off topic on forum posts.

Title: Re: #1 Use for a Time Machine
Post by Strategic Retreat on Jul 3rd, 2012 at 2:33pm
If it would be possible form a future to travel in time to kill Hitler or whoever else, and a decision was taken about this to happen, we would know already, don't you agree? I mean, in the historical chronicles of the WW2 surely would be written if Hitler was at any point of his villainous career assassinated by an odd bloke dressed in a strange uniform using a futuristic tech to move about or something. ;D

I mean witnessing an assassination mission in the style: "open a time portal near Hitler, get out of said portal, point your gun at the bastard, squeeze the trigger and keep it squeezed until the magazine is empty, re-enter the portal to go home. Mission accomplished" WOULD BE remembered as odd.

Of course, if it's true that multiple and parallel (but parallel in an eleven dimensional way, which you need quite a lot of LSD to contemplate) instances of a universe can be created by such an act, we'd fall in the "serpent that bites its own tail" fact that a task force form the future may have very well offed the worm already by traveling back in time from their future... but we will never know, since our timeline is different than theirs and does not contemplate such a thing having happened, rendering meaningless any serious talk about it. ;)

Title: Re: #1 Use for a Time Machine
Post by andy190 on Jul 3rd, 2012 at 7:00pm
The Allies thought of assassinating Hitler but they went off the idea because they feared he would be replaced by someone actually competent at the job.

If Hitler hadn't meddled with the War Plans then the Allies might not have won the war.

Title: Re: #1 Use for a Time Machine
Post by expat on Jul 4th, 2012 at 8:40am
A question that is hardly never asked, but what would the World/European population be today without the intervention of Hitler, or Stalin, or Saddam, in fact any dictator is history. Unsavoury I know, but war is a great way of thinning out the virus that man is..............

Matt

Title: Re: #1 Use for a Time Machine
Post by Strategic Retreat on Jul 4th, 2012 at 10:53pm

andy190 wrote on Jul 3rd, 2012 at 7:00pm:
The Allies thought of assassinating Hitler but they went off the idea because they feared he would be replaced by someone actually competent at the job.


That's true.



andy190 wrote on Jul 3rd, 2012 at 7:00pm:
If Hitler hadn't meddled with the War Plans then the Allies might not have won the war.


More like he had all the military power in his hands, and none of the various generals could do anything without his approval. Remarkable feat obtained by laying down a hierarchical chain of command that was a waking nightmare of overlapping competences and responsibilities that made so that no one but him could ever have the last word on ANYTHING. All of this because of his belief that struggle would make for better fighters.

In short; he promoted infighting between his own ranks! The worst enemy and double agent of Adolf Hitler was Hitler Adolf. ::)

How the hell was her going to win against a sanely structured army is beyond anyone's guess, since EVERYTHING he ever did went in the face of the most basics rules of strategy. Rules acknowledged more than two millenniums ago already, in that treatise of rule of warring called "The Art of War" written in China and commonly attributed to Sun Tsu.

The only things he got right, to be fair, was the developing of a war always in motion instead of WWI-style trench warfare (the infamous blitzkrieg), and the aerial support of the infantry by diving bombers (only way at the time to have some sort of precision on where the payload would land), in all the rest he was an incompetent moron... thank God for the small blessings.



expat wrote on Jul 4th, 2012 at 8:40am:
A question that is hardly never asked, but what would the World/European population be today without the intervention of Hitler, or Stalin, or Saddam, in fact any dictator is history. Unsavoury I know, but war is a great way of thinning out the virus that man is...


The second world war would have happened anyway. It's widely acknowledged that the way he first world war ended, especially between the French and the Germans, was just a scurrilous invitation to a re-igniting of the belligerences in less than two generations... and it happened.

Had an Adolf Hitler not existed... the war would have gone in wildly different ways impossible to fathom here and now, but would have happened all the same.

Title: Re: #1 Use for a Time Machine
Post by andy190 on Jul 5th, 2012 at 12:21am

Quote:
The second world war would have happened anyway.


Yes it would.

When French Marshal Foch saw the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 he said: "This is not peace. It is an armistice for 20 years".

Along comes 1939 & what happens?

Title: Re: #1 Use for a Time Machine
Post by Mike.. on Jul 5th, 2012 at 6:27pm

jetprop wrote on Jul 3rd, 2012 at 6:16am:
If you killed hitler AFTER he did what he did,you'd only change the fact about his suicide.

You can't kill him before he did stuff because then he'd never have done those stuff,so you wouldn't kill an inocent person.

So;you couldn't kill hitler before he did the stuff that he did.



Ever see The Minority Report ;)

Mike.....Ahh Precrime Unit ;D

Title: Re: #1 Use for a Time Machine
Post by Webb on Jul 5th, 2012 at 7:03pm

Title: Re: #1 Use for a Time Machine
Post by Steve M on Jul 15th, 2012 at 3:44pm

Webb wrote on Jul 5th, 2012 at 7:03pm:


But you would die of old age before you could post that.  :D As soon as you step into a time machine and transport yourself back to a time when time machines didn't exsist, you would be stuck in the past.  :-/

Title: Re: #1 Use for a Time Machine
Post by Strategic Retreat on Jul 16th, 2012 at 6:20am

Steve M wrote on Jul 15th, 2012 at 3:44pm:

Webb wrote on Jul 5th, 2012 at 7:03pm:


But you would die of old age before you could post that.  :D As soon as you step into a time machine and transport yourself back to a time when time machines didn't exsist, you would be stuck in the past.  :-/


Not quite.

If your machine is something you can't bring with you, but a big and cumbersome thing only existing on your time-plane, then yes, you'd be stuck in the past unless someone from the future were able to open a wormhole for you to use to return to your original time-space coordinates.

But if your machine is a portable type or it can project itself on other time-planes (think the TARDIS as an example), then you have no problems of the sort. 8-)

Title: Re: #1 Use for a Time Machine
Post by Fozzer on Jul 16th, 2012 at 7:50am
I just want the Time Machine to transport me 6 weeks, or so, into the future, when the dreaded "London Olympics" has finally gone away, and we can all get back to normal again, after suffering the expense and inconvenience of it for far too long.

Don't forget Chums, if you don't have access to a suitable Time Machine, seats for Fozzer's Space Flight to a luxurious hotel in the constellation of Alpha Centauri for the duration of the Olympics, is still available.
Many more Space Craft have been made available to cope with the enormous demand.
Book your flight now!

Paul.... ;)... ;D...!

Chaos begins to reign...>>> http://web.orange.co.uk/article/news/olympic_rush_begins_as_teams_land_in_london

Title: Re: #1 Use for a Time Machine
Post by Webb on Nov 8th, 2012 at 5:43pm

Title: Re: #1 Use for a Time Machine
Post by Strategic Retreat on Nov 9th, 2012 at 9:44am
Yeah... there's that too.

A hypothetical time traveler could have to reckon with the rippling cascading effects of his actions. Killing someone BEFORE he or she became evil, makes them innocent victims and AS SUCH, and not as evildoers, they could be remembered afterwards.

This without minding the fact that the situation in the late 30ies WOULD have fallen in war even with no Hitler about.

Funky time traveling mechanics... until it'll happen for real we can only speculate. ;D

Title: Re: #1 Use for a Time Machine
Post by Webb on Nov 9th, 2012 at 4:58pm
I once saw a Twilight Zone type show with this plot:

Man travels back in time and kills baby Hitler as he is on a baby carriage/pram walk with his nanny.

Fearful nanny then sees a distraught mother about to kill herself and her baby (wow, what a coincidence!).

She rescues the baby and takes him home.  Mother kills herself (we can't have her coming back later, can we?).  No one ever notices.

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