Even if it was considered murder, how do you prove it in court?
Personally, I think you can’t murder someone who doesn’t exist. However, using a time machine all willy-nilly to de-exist people doesn’t seem like a nice thing to do, unless it was Hitler. But then only to stop the Holocaust, not because you are trying to get into Eva’s pants.
It all depends on how time works. Without defining and explaining how time itself treats ripples in the timeline, the question is meaningless. Its a pet peeve of mine whenever I see time travel used in movies and TV. The important questions are:
Is there one timeline or multiple parallel timelines?
Are we the furthest in the timeline and there is no future, or are we simply a part of an infinite line?
When a timeline is changed, does it create a new parallel timeline or does it ripple through the entire timeline a) instantly, or b) over a period of time?
Whoever is outside the timeline and changes it, does the change affect that person or create a new parallel timeline or affects a version of that person while the time traveler still remains outside the timeline?
I keep coming back to this thread trying to decide what to post, and I think a lot of the problems I’m having stem from the sorts of issues YogSothoth brings up.
De-existing people through time travel doesn’t seem equivalent to murder, but I can see that it would be immoral by a simple thought experiment: If someone threatened to de-exist me (and I believed them), then I would be scared that they might follow through. I suppose this should be my answer to the poll for now.
But… I don’t really have an understanding of what the time travel is doing and there are multiple scenarios:
If time travel is possible and it can cause me to cease to exist, then it seems almost inevitable that someone will erase me eventually, whether intentionally or not. (After all, Rick’s change won’t just erase Jessie. Jessie’s parents will surely pair up with different mates, creating a domino effect of changed relationships and changed offspring. So there are thousands of people who cease to exist just in the first generation of that change.)
But maybe my existence now is the final end state of the universe in which case, all changes via time travel have already been made and I’m in no danger.
On a different line of thinking: in a multiple-timeline sort of multiverse, it’s not me that changes, is it? It’s the time traveler who moves to a new/different timeline and my timeline only changes because he left it. In that case, it seems like a perfectly reasonable solution to our problems. By all means, go find the time line that makes you happy! We might call it immoral if you use your time traveling to become Hitler, but if you just reshuffled who married who, that’s not such a bad thing.
Let’s test that morals clause: Let’s say time has been changed to eliminate a coupling(and the resultant child), and you were the result of one of the new couplings that resulted. Would you want time to be fixed so that everything was changed back and you never existed?
Did Jessie’s mother and/or father “kill” Jonah, who would have been born had they arranged for a different sperm to nail that egg?
Rick has done nothing but change which sperm nails which egg. You can’t murder a “could have been”, only ones actually created.
She’s lovin’ him with that body, I just know it!
I don’t think that’s super relevant.
By analogy to normal crime: If someone steals a million dollars and gives it to me, I’m probably pretty pleased with the outcome. But that doesn’t imply anything about whether the transfer was a crime, or moral.
Am I outside the timeline looking in, and myself that is looking will cease to exist after the change in the timeline? Is there a parallel timeline in which a version of me still exists? It must right? Because I’m viewing this timeline to decide whether or not something’s moral. If there is only one timeline and it instantly ripples throughout, then the question is moot, I won’t exist to consider the question