What would you do if you were suddenly teleported to the past? For me the answer is simple. I'd kill myself. Before we get too hasty here, I'm not suicidal, I swear. I have too much nothing to do to die. But, if I were teleported to the past, in order to not alter a single event in history, I would find a remote area and discreetly kill myself. No matter what atrocity I could prevent, it's not worth messing with the timeline to prevent. As a result of preventing one tragedy who knows how many more could occur? Is this the right thing to do though?
Teleported to the past?
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--> @WaterPhoenixWhere or what do you think the past might be?
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--> @zedvictor4Anytime anywhere, however, if it was a case where I was transported to my past body with my memories intact, I would try to re-enact my life as closely as possible.
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Well O.K...Simply as a hypothetical fantasy situation....Because the past is billions of years if not infinite...What one would do would be relevant to the moment and environment one found oneself in....As a "sudden transportation" is not suggestive of a great deal of choice in the matter.
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--> @WaterPhoenixif I were teleported to the past, in order to not alter a single event in history, I would find a remote area and discreetly kill myself. No matter what atrocity I could prevent, it's not worth messing with the timeline to prevent. As a result of preventing one tragedy who knows how many more could occur? Is this the right thing to do though?Consider you've opened a one way portal from a later time to an earlier time. When you come through that portal even just the act entering the new time stream adds your net matter and heat energy the old timeline's universe for however long the portal is open. Consider that however discretely you kill yourself. Your corpses matter must disperse in this new timeline and your old timelines self proceed towards the teleportation event with that incremental increase in heat and light increasing over iterations until those increases effectively zero out the chance you would continue to teleport to that time and place. Eventually, there would be sudden increase in heat and corpses that would eventually prevent you from ever trying to teleport in the first place. All attempts to travel to past are likely futile, perhaps even self sealing.
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i feel like theres some paradox to this but i cant quite figure it out
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--> @oromagiThat is one theory I guess.
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--> @WaterPhoenixHow far into the past would you have to go to enact the suicide plan?
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--> @RagnarWhatever the smallest unit of time is.
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--> @WaterPhoenixWhat is a unit of time?
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--> @WaterPhoenixIf not any significant amount of time, you would be unable to measure any changes before catching up with your origin point. And your death would still have a full impact on the future.I think your self removal, would only make any sense if at least a year ago. Even then, I doubt any changes you could try to make would do harm, at worst you would be one more crazy person shouting the end is nigh something something China pandemic.Regarding the danger of the butterfly effect, the TV series The Flash showed the most simple consequence of time travel, which the further back you go, the more unpredictable the impact from it would be... So let's say you arrive 500 years ago, immediately head out to a remote spot to end it, and along the way you bump into one random guy. That random guy is fooling around with his wife a week later and his mind wonders back to that odd person he bumped into, thus prolonging the passion. His wife still gets pregnant the same night, only the egg merges with a different sperm from the same father. The obvious case of randomization is switching the sex of the future child, but let's say it was a boy and is still a boy, but is more or less hansom than in the previous iteration... That one change spirals out, not just in one family tree, but in the impacts of everyone they interact with slightly differently. The population of at least one region will get randomized, and likewise other people as well considering our interconnected world.So I don't think suicide to avoid the butterfly effect would be a good idea in that scenario.
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--> @RagnarOk, first of all, how was the first example that popped into your mind a guy getting fired up while banging his wife cause of some random kid he met in the streets? And that made him bang her harder? Is he gay and a pedo? That aside, that's where the emphasis on discreetly comes in, if it is absolutely impossible to commit suicide discreetly, I suppose I could just blend in as a mute if it's too far back or I can't change the language, or just blend into the background.
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--> @WaterPhoenixAs per your profile, you're 90 years old, which probably makes you memorable. Heck, just wearing different fashion from other people might make you memorable. Also I referenced prolonging things, for which thinking of random non-appealing stuff is useful... The point is that even a single second shift in such a minor event, leads to a randomized population in the future.Let's say you don't even bump into someone. Some animals eat your corpse, and a couple that otherwise would not have made it through a harsh winter now do... It takes longer, but slight changes to the animal population will cross paths with people, thus affecting the human populations.
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--> @RagnarOk, then what would you suggest is the course of action that affects the future the least.
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--> @WaterPhoenixAccept that you'll inevitably change stuff, and try to live the best life you can.
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--> @WaterPhoenixFrom a scientific point of view, and without taking any science fiction as gospel, what is a "timeline"?
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--> @WaterPhoenixIf you kill yourself, you've never time traveled to the past in the first place. As you killed yourself before.So, you once you kill yourself you get erased from existence. So, your parents will never give birth to you. This could cause more tragedies.As for me, I would try to find a way to get back
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--> @WaterPhoenixThe version of time travel I believe is most likely is the self-consistent version. In other words, you can't alter the past because anything you do after traveling to the past has already happened. In other words, an attempt to kill Hitler as a child would always fail, because we already know that Hitler was not killed as a child. In this scenario, killing your past self would be impossible, and killing the version of yourself that was "teleported to the past" would not be necessary to prevent paradox or changing the past.
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--> @K_MichaelThat doesn't seem very likely, if I were to kill hitler as a child, what I know doesn't matter. The events that came from hitler would cease to exist, so us remembering hitler as a fascist dictator would not happen.
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If you kill yourself, you will be teleported back to the time in which you were born, or you teleported to the past. You will be stuck in a never ending loop, because it is destiny, that you will teleport to the past.
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--> @BearManYou'll never reach the truth!
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--> @WaterPhoenixThere is only one timeline. Time travel doesn't actually change the past, because the very first time through, is the only time. Even if you travel through time with the intention of killing Hitler, you have already failed.
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--> @K_MichaelOne theory, I guess.
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--> @WaterPhoenixIt's the one that makes the most sense to me.
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--> @K_MichaelMakes more sense to posit that time travel to the past (and therefore also travel at faster than the speed of causality) is impossible, which given what we know about entropy and causality seems the most likely. Any reason to suppose that this is not the case?