So, another take on killing Hitler

[conuly]

Enjoy!

I'm not sure killing Hitler would be all that catastrophic, though I suspect it'd be ultimately ineffective. Like I said back on the XKCD feed page, the only way to stop all the various genocides is to go back far enough to start from scratch and get it right this time, hopefully without any messy time loops. I hate time loops. They confuse the narrative terribly.

(Would altering history so dramatically that all the genocided people and genocidal people never existed in the first place in and of itself constitute some sort of mega-genocide? And will it all even out if we at least manage to save some mammoths in the process?)

Comments

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

It's true, killing Hitler would be ineffective. The guy to kill, or to otherwise remove would be Count Alois Lexa von Aehrenthal, who engineered the Bosnian Crisis that led to World War I.

I don't think one necessarily has to kill anyone. Unless (as some surmise) the fabric of Time is self-healing, it frequently ought to be enough to just divert people, redirect them, make them miss the Fatal Meeting by five minutes, or just change their minds on a certain topic.

"Would altering history so dramatically that all the genocided people and genocidal people never existed in the first place in and of itself constitute some sort of mega-genocide?"

I say no, because people who never existed can't be killed. But if those people didn't exist, some other people would exist instead, and there's no guarantee they'd be any better.

Running things too far back gets risky, because we can't tell from here what was really going on: "the winners write the history books". Suppose Moses remained an Israelite slave, and the Israelites remained in Egypt, indefinitely? Suppose Saul of Tarsus and Augustine of Hippos never became Christians? Suppose Genghis Khan didn't fall off his horse and die, just as the Mongols were poised to over-run Europe? Suppose Baldwin of Jerusalem had been miraculously restored to perfect health?

I think it might not have made much diffeence, alas.

[conuly]

The guy to kill, or to otherwise remove would be Count Alois Lexa von Aehrenthal, who engineered the Bosnian Crisis that led to World War I.

Actually, I'm thinking there are a lot of things you could do concerning WWI that would eliminate or at least minimize the Holocaust. But anything to *prevent* the war would change many of the boundaries that we-in-the-present find so comforting.

So maybe what you want to do is keep the Great War but change the Treaty.

But I still think calling a do-over on all of history is the way to go. Forget Moses and Genghis Khan and all that. Go back to the origins of humanity and work from there. It's like landing on a new planet except with more time travel and less space travel.

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

The problem is that the further back you go, the greater the probability that you'll cause a change which will truncate your own line of descent, thus leaving you back at Square One with a pair o' docs.

The real problem with humanity is that we outbreed our resources until the Four Horseman of Population Control ride in to thin the herd: famine, pestilence, war and death. So okay, this process has made our species very fierce, tough and tricky, but the price has been too high.

It seems to me that stopping ANY war, famine, epidemic or genocide would be ineffective as long as the tendency to overpopulate went unchecked. However, limiting that tendency at the origin of humanity would have the highest probability of eliminating the time-traveler, and indeed the whole time-traveling culture.

It would also have a chance of eliminating humanity entirely, since our species has been through a couple of evolutionary bottlenecks that we might not have survived if we weren't such prolific breeders even in the face of starvation. Our species had desertification and ice ages to live through, and might not have made it without the very evolutionary traits that are threatening us with extinction now that there are over 7 billion of us on the planet.

Anyway, the simple biological intervention would seem the most expedient: push the average age of menarche back ten years; push the average age of menopause forward ten years. That ought to take care of everything, as long as that pair o' docs doesn't show up.

Sheesh, those guys are as bad as the Physics Police for messing up an otherwise sweet deal.

[conuly]

The problem is that the further back you go, the greater the probability that you'll cause a change which will truncate your own line of descent, thus leaving you back at Square One with a pair o' docs.

That's assuming that you can kill yourself by killing your grandfather. Time travel doesn't have to work that way, though. It could be that once you time travel you're out of the loop and you can't wipe yourself out from existence.

(Well, we're assuming it works at all, naturally.)

Anyway, the simple biological intervention would seem the most expedient: push the average age of menarche back ten years; push the average age of menopause forward ten years. That ought to take care of everything, as long as that pair o' docs doesn't show up.

That and maybe pushing ovulation to the farther end of the cycle. I'd be perfectly happy getting my period every 35 or 40 days.

But if we COULD go back in time and start over, I'd bring condoms. And the technology to make more. I mean, really, what's the point if I'm going to go back in time and NOT bring the tech? We'd just reinvent religion that way.

[conuly]

Or, if the time travel thing is keeping you up, how about "travel to a parallel universe where humans either a. never evolved or b. at least never multiplied past a few thousand and stone age tech"?

Same difference, I should think. Sure, it doesn't stop genocides... but honestly, if we have time travel, I find it hard to believe that we don't have parallel universes anyway, so ultimately we can't really stop genocide in that scenario, we can just move ourselves to a world where we can pretend really really well. (I'm aware we can't time travel. Well, not in any fictional sense that's actually useful.)

And I know, everybody says we have no proof that humans wiped out all those species that went extinct as soon as we entered their territories, but honestly, sometimes correlation DOES equal causation.

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

If the "multi-verse theory" is correct, so that apparent time-travel is just switching to a parallel time-stream, there's not much point in time-traveling. Particularly if the odds of ever finding your own time-line again are one to infinity-minus-one.

We definitely contributed to the extinction of the megafauna once we learned to hunt with fire but I think even if we hadn't come along, they wouldn't necessarily lasted. Too big, too specialized; 'diminishing returns'. Of course, they might not have gone extinct, but rather evolved into more efficient forms, if they'd had the chance.

We'll never stop war, plague, starvation and genocide until we find some better way of keeping our numbers down.

[conuly]

If the "multi-verse theory" is correct, so that apparent time-travel is just switching to a parallel time-stream, there's not much point in time-traveling.

Well, you might find yourself happier somewhere else. Let other people suffer, you're in the place where you're happy.

We'll never stop war, plague, starvation and genocide until we find some better way of keeping our numbers down.

I think if we'd started with workable contraception earlier (and less silly religious prohibitions on same) then we'd be in a better position now. The worldwide birth rate continues to drop, even in places where it was historically quite high. I don't think I'm stretching too far to say that people in general don't want more kids than they can feed and, especially nowadays, educate.