Actually, my most honest way to answer this is that I wouldn’t save him, because I have no idea what he looked like and thus wouldn’t know which kid to try to save. That’s assuming I even knew where i was or why i was there in the first place.
It appears that most of you would make the moral choice based on the moment and save the child, allowing the natural consequences to follow.
Since the price of gas has gone so high, people aren’t using their cars as much. The result has been a reduction in deaths from car accidents. If you knew that you could save even more lives, would you advocate for still higher gas prices?
Not to seek a derailment, but higher oil prices lead to shortages, conflict, wars… There isn’t any tidy way to change just one element. At best, you could try to stop certain disasters or assassinate certain people, using your future knowledge to pick out the ones you know will be destructive later on.
It’s 1981. Will you affect or end the life of a university student named Osama bin Laden? Maybe an eight-year old named Monica Lewinski? With some minor effort (a phone-in bomb threat or injuring the incompetent pilots the day before in a staged car accident) you could probably avert the Air Florida Flight 90 crash in 1982 and save 78 people. Of course, you just being there in 1981 is already changing things. I just assume there’s no Twilight Zone-like way to return to an intact (except for the one big ironic twist) 2008.
I figure screw the future. I have no way of knowing if selective actions will make things better or worse, nor if events will unfold in the same manner if I involve myself or not. Get a job, scrape up some dough, buy Microsoft stock (and keep in mind that doing prevents someone else from buying those shares, with unknown ramifications) and get as much pleasure as you can before AIDS hits big.
At some point, I’d just have to visit my younger self, of course. He probably won’t take my advice - snotty little self-important brat - but maybe Mom will. If she doesn’t have me arrested as a crazy stalker, I can convince her who I am by comparing young Bryan’s fingerprints to my own. Once that happens, Mom’s too savvy to refuse to take investment advice from a good source.
Yeah, and I’ll save Adam Walsh on July 27, 1981. After that, he’s out of my hands.
Not the only one, I had to as well.
While morally I would like to save him, without foreknowledge of the effect it would have on the future I would have to say no. Especially as I could have walked by him in the street and not recognized him anyway.
I guess first I’d need to ask him if he thinks it would be cool to design a race of super-powerful, indestructible artificially intelligent robots and give them free access to the national defense, energy, and information grids. If he says no, then I save him.
I’d save him, but only if I had some sort of weapon/extra knowledge/other advantage. I don’t want to take his place.
Save Adam Walsh, but Susie-Ann Bunnell is on her own!
If I could back to 1981 there are things I’d probably consider changing, but since most time travel stories with this kind of scenario end up badly, I might not.
Saving Adam Walsh? No, with my luck by saving him, and thus changing the fate of his father, America’s Most Wanted would never air. Because it didn’t air, a nondescript bail jumper from GoatPuddle arkansas is never caught. Because he is never caught, in 1995 he robs my wife as she leaves work, shooting her in the head. Or he becomes a dangerous serial killer.
Nah, the only thing I would do is find some lottery numbers and play them.
First of all, I’m operating on the assumption that I can never change my future, just a future. In other words, by saving Adam Walsh I will create a split timeline. This has to function like this, because otherwise:
- I would be unable to save him no matter what I did – the Edith Keeler scenario.
- If I did save him and that action modified my future, then it creates a loop where I never knew Adam Walsh existed and so of course I didn’t know to go to that particular store on that particular day and keep Toole (or whoever) away from him.
- Hi, Opal.
I agree with Scylla that the only moral choice is to save the child. Whatever happens next is outside my control. I’ve just created a split timestream anyway, so who knows. In a sense, I’m now ‘playing God’, since this world is very much at my mercy. I have knowledge of almost 30 years that haven’t happened yet. Yeah, I could just go down to the race track and start betting on horses, then stick the money in a bank account… but why stop there?
In this scenario I very much hope I have a chance to grab a stack of true crime books about serial killers/rapists at large between about 1980-2008 and some sort of weaponry and take them back to 1981 with me. Can you imagine the sort of vigilante I could become? Dahmer was also living in Wisconsin during this time period. Dennis Rader in Wichita (I would be too late to save his earliest victims, but I think I’d nail Dahmer before he had a chance to molest or murder any of his known victims.) If I have access to 2008 intel, I could go well beyond just making myself rich on the Dotcom bubble. Sure, Pol Pot might be a bit beyond my ability to track down and dispose of, but I bet I could grab the local phone book and track most of these guys to their front doors. I’d prefer to bring a gun with me from 2008 – maybe some model that was invented after 1981, along with some unmarked bullets, to confuse the cops. And if I know I can escape through my time machine back to “my” 2008… well, Kira from Death Note would look like a boyscout compared to me.