Time travel

If you could go back in time where would you go and what would you do?

I think I would go back to see the pyramids being built. Just to see if they did do it or it was aliens who built them.

Red

i'd go back to where hitler was exactly born then i'll grab him from his mother's arms and i'll slit his throat and make sure he dies...

Why 2150? Don't you know we will all have been destroyed in 2012!"!!!!!!

Red

I'd actually go back to Hitler's childhood to find out whether he was inherently evil from birth.  If he was, then I'd place him in some remote island in the Pacific.  If not, I'd let him have his nice childhood.

lol. nice one..

I'm not entirely sure. The Hitler idea sounds good in principle, but he was really just the first person to take advantage of the situation. Those people were so desperate, they would've listened to and followed what anyone said as long as it seemed like it might've gotten them out of the poor situation they were in.

For example, I'd like to stop the inventor of guns, but then someone else would've stepped in their place and guns would still be around when I came back. Then I'd have to figure out who invented them this time and go back and stop them and the cycle would never end. This, of course, is all assuming time travel is possible, but you get my point.

Good one, I'd like that too.

 Yeah. Something similar ALMOST happened in the United States in the 1930's, during the great depression. If any of you have head of Huey Long, he's the man who might've stood a chance at becoming a dictator over the U.S., if he could've unseated FDR in 1936- but he was assassinated before his campaign could go forward. If you haven't heard of him, look him up. It's a very interesting example of the differences between the US and European political systems, as well as societies, and in a few ways, the parallels.

I'm not sure you potential hitler killers get time travel, or the fact that that current events are dependant on past events.  Think of all the technology that came from WWII.  That war was the bridge from the dark ages of the industrial revolution to the modern world.  For example: jets, rockets, and radar.  Ok fine, I'd rather ride a train, and maybe we could do without satelite TV & satelite pictures on the internet, but these things shaped the modern world.  Our fictional time travel device may even be dependant on them in the sequence of technological progression.

What I find interesting is that if you go back in time and kill a bad person as they were born, you have just demonstrated the ability to practically and effectively change history.  If history can be changed, there is more that one potential future that can originate from any point in time.  Therefore any number of variables could change and said person turns out not-evil.  Now you have just murdered an innosent baby.  Good going.  Forget until innocent until proven guilty, it is now guilty because of your potential for guilt.  In that case someone needs to kill us all - we all have the potential to do evil.    

I would spend an afternoon with Archimedes.  Probably hang with Ben Franklin fow a while, and I would go to Socrates' trial.  I want to see if it really went down the way Plato put it. (I doubt it)

Hi Elwood, whilst I agree with you that going back in time and killing someone would be a bad idea, your variable theory is incorrect. Lets say that we could go back in time and just look at what happens as,say, Hiltler grows up. We already know how things turned out. The fact that we observe, unobserved, makes no difference to the out come of his life. He does not grow up to become anything other than what he became. We know this from historic fact and time travel made no difference. So we  go back in time and kill him we could not be killing an innocent because we know how thing would have turned out had we not killed him.

If on the other hand your taking about the many worlds theory from QM then again we would not be killing an innocent because in our universe he grew up to become what he became. It may well be that in another universe he grew up to become a pacifist, we might never know.

Good choice on who you would like to meet.

Red

Thanks Red.

I'm not sure I agree about observing someone in history not changing the outcome.  Although not a expert on the theory, Jeff Goldblum seemed pretty convincing in Jurassic Park when he noted that by mearly observing something you change it.  I believe he sited the hizenberg uncertanity principle (possibly incorrectly).  That has more to do with electrons (probability distribution of location/velocity) than the macrophysical world, but it is impossible to disprove on any scale.  How do you know what you observed would not be different if you had not observed it ?

QM as I understand it relies heavilly on probability.  That means even if you did not change anything, did not observe anything; just rewind the universe 100 years and let it play back, you would get a different outcome.  Just like rolling dice. 

Of course QM is a thory, not a law.  Continuing this line of thought dumps you into the age old debate of destiny v. free will with QM taking sides.  I plan to stop before we get there.  That is more than I care to type in my lifetime (unless... in a different now from the same past, I can type with more than 3 fingers.) 

Cheers on the uberinteresting topic.   

I'd love to go back to 1947, the Roswell incident. Did an alien craft crashland on Earth or was it really a recon ballon?

Red

Try this portion of my blog -

If I only get to go back once, I'd take care of my finances in lieu of gaining knowledge to mysteries I just don't care about.  I'd put a sizeable bit of money in Google at it's lowest purchase point.  Then, when I got back to the present day, I would close out my accounts and do whatever I'd want.