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...   


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! 

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.

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.

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.

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

Quote:


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?

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


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.

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.