LogFAQs > #887733064

OhhhJa posted...

Currant_Kaiser posted...

The concept of time travel is way too destructive. You'd have to be a complete moron to consider it. Even doing seemingly harmless things in the past could produce the butterfly effect and drastically change the future and prevent the time traveler from even being born in the first place. Never mind the fact that people would use it to go to famous events and meet famous people, thus guaranteeing that some massive changes occur.

Honestly, I think the butterfly effect idea is pretty unrealistic. One person has relatively little effect on the grand scheme of anything especially if they aren't trying to drastically change things

It's the cumulative effect, though.

Say I go back in time and erase some nobody from history. But in his future, he was going to get into an argument in a bar and piss someone off, who in turn was going to drive home mad and hit someone in his car. In turn, that person was going to die, sending their wife into a depression. And so on, and so on, because every human is interconnected in some way (no matter how slight), and because our present is very much the sum total of all past experiences.

That much is almost indisputable. The REAL question becomes just how strong that chain of causality really is, and how likely it is to end up at something major and significant. To wit, by killing that nobody in the past, the chain of events eventually leads to the man who was eventually going to invent the cure for some major disease never being born, and millions die. At its most extreme, even minor changes can lead to major consequences. On the other side of that spectrum, most interactions will be minor at best, and over time and distance will sort of "smooth out" (like ripples in a pond), until your changes no longer have significant effect (unless you do something incredibly major, like publicly shooting Lincoln in 1857 or giving plans for nuclear technology to Hitler in 1934).

You'd also have to worry about potential conflicts with the Grandfather Paradox - if your tampering interferes with history enough to prevent you from ever being born, meaning you could never have come back to make those changes in the first place, what happens? Does it create an alternate timeline? Do your changes persist, and the future is radically different, but you remain the same because of some sort of temporal inertia - becoming a person without a home time? Or do you basically just break the universe as all causality shreds and history unravels?


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