Inspired by this thread on time travel by terentii. Say you got the superpower of time-travel through accidental tachyon exposure. You don’t need a machine and it’s instantaneous. Just concentrate and clap your hands.
Here’s the kicker though - you’re limited *only *to the last ten years in order to prevent catastrophic paradoxes in the space-time continuum destroying the universe (although the damage may be limited only to our own galaxy). So, today you could travel back to the 6th of August 2003. If you stayed there for a year you could leap forward to the 6th of August 2014; you’ve always got a ten-year space to travel back and then forwards again; although like the rest of us you have to wait for the future.
Now think of all the potentially preventable tragedies that have happened in the last ten years. If you could prevent a murder without risk to yourself in the present it would be your moral duty to do so. If the (recent) past and present were as one to you, would you have the same duty? Where do you start?
You can save lives without a time machine by donating money to charities.
Honestly, if you don’t do anything to save lives now, the last thing you will do with a time machine is save lives.
Personally, I think everyone has a moral obligation to save as many lives as they can without doing too much damage to their own mental health. Why not?
I think I’ll go win a lottery first. After that I’d feel safer helping people out in the present time with the money. Time paradoxes can be a bitch. As it is, once I begin to travel, I’m not sure what the present time even means anymore.
Impossible: you can’t fix all the world’s problems.
Kill Hitler…and learn that Stalin conquers Europe and isn’t in the least better. Prevent the Hiroshima Bombing…and learn that ten times as many weapons, of much larger yield, were used in the Korean War.
There are simply too damn many little bad guys, neighborhood rapists, suburban murderers, crazy freeway snipers, jerks who put poison in supermarket produce. They are myriad; they are legion. You couldn’t stop one per cent of one per cent of them.
On both the large scale and the small scale, you’re screwn. The world is not within the power of even a time traveller to repair. It would daunt both Superman and Garth.
True. Plus some tragedy preventions could be a headache as they would depend on whoever you warn having any possible reason to give you any credibility: *“People surrounding the entire Eastern Indian Ocean! Head for high ground or sturdy concrete construction at least 10 metres above MSL and be nowhere near the beach next Boxing Day!” *:dubious:
If you’re under ten years old, maybe - the time limit is to prevent the grandfather paradox. Unless you killed your past self I suppose, but then you’ve only yourself to blame.
On making a difference on 0.0001% of the world’s evils with your time-travelling omnipotence; reminds me of an adaptation of that starfish on the beach story, where a man is throwing dying starfish back into the ocean. Someone asks him why he bothers since there are so many - he says ‘it matters to that one’.
I feel you’re under the same obligations as you are already. Are you right now watching a murder about to happen? Then you have the obligation to do whatever you are prepared to do to prevent it – if you have a black belt in karate, you might be good with directly intervening, but for many of us, our obligation would be to call 911.
Right now, you don’t have any obligation to seek out potential murder situations, so you don’t have that with time travel either.
Plus, given what ALREADY happens when people decide to take law enforcement into their own hands, think about all the time traveling dingbats who would only make situations worse.
When I go back in time, what happens to the timeline of the past 10 years that I and seven billion others have already experienced? Does that timeline continue on without me? Or does it come to a sudden end at the moment I go back in time? Or do I bifurcate, with one ‘me’ continuing forward in time while the other ‘me’ goes back 10 years? If the second alternative, do I have the right to kill off seventy billion person-years of lived experience which, whether good or bad, are fundamentally the property of the persons who’ve lived them? Who am I to say ten years of their experience should be wiped out?
And when I go forward again: WTF does that even mean? Who says there is a single ‘the future’ from the point of departure for a ten-year jump forward? Maybe there will be just one ultimately, but it doesn’t exist yet, just an astoundingly large number of possibilities. At least there is just one past.
Then future you has an obligation to come back and stop it. But don’t touch yourself. Only one you can occupy the same space at the same time. My citation is Timecop.
I would frequently feel obligated, but I’d also demand days off.
I like the bifurcation model (execpt that when I go back, I don’t stay in the present.) Going forward, in this model, is the equivalent of “stepping out” for however long it takes reality to get to the designated time. I prefer the backwards-only model, though.
I’d like to see more fiction use this model consistently. It avoids paradoxes comletely. No need for a 10-year limit. If you go back and kill your mother before you’re born, you never appear in that timeline. You never go back and kill your mother … but that timeline already existed (obviously). Any number of time travelers can play this game, without fear of anything other than cluttering up the meta-universe with new timelines.
Unfortunately, nearly all fiction uses time travel models that aren’t feasible, like the “Back to the Future” trick of people disappearing from photographs. (That was perfect for that movie, though, which didn’t make any pretense of realism; it was just good fun and I’m all for that.)
However, given that model, would I still feel obligated to go back and fix things? (Note: I doubt I’d be able to verify that this was the model. But assuming I could.) It wouldn’t actually alleviate any suffering, it would just create a new branch without that particular suffering (and with all sorts of new suffering, no doubt). Still, I’d feel compelled to do something. Of course, there’s no end to that path. Like a typical ordinary person with good intentions, I’d focus on those issues that came to my attention, but wouldn’t go looking for troubles to fix.
I was thinking Back to the Future Part I rules; you vanish to the past, when you return is up to you. Doc’s dog Einstein travels forward 1 minute in Part I - when he arrives a minute in the future he doesn’t encounter himself a minute older; for that minute he is completely absent. So, the future would be one where you disappeared for whatever period of time.
I figured I’d have to give you the same time to jump forward so you don’t end up ‘trapped’ in the past, in that if you choose you can see roughly the same periods of time. You’d still be ageing in the past after all.
Yeah, I think the risk of the butterfly effect makes any moral obligation dwindle down to nil. Even if you save people and then take them to the future to avoid them messing up the past, the actions you did while saving them could mess up the future.
The only people you might be able to save are those who died from not being rescued in time from something that didn’t involve other people. And, even then, it would have to be someone people still didn’t know where they were, otherwise the fact of finding them might have affected history. And, at that point, how do you know it wasn’t your rescue that resulted in them never being found in the first place?