Time Travel Questions

[Pacy McNeil]

Time Travel Questions

So something in Back to the Future two always bothered me. When Doc Brown is explaining alternative timelines, he says that there’s a line, and a decision splits that line into two, creating an alternative timeline. So one persons decisions always splits the world into two, one where you said yes to a decision and one where you said no. But then which timeline is prime? Which timeline isn’t? There must be an infinite possibility of timelines somewhere. Is it like Fringe the TV program where there is only two timelines, the world of ‘yes’ and the world of ‘no’. If so which one do i belong too? Is one better than the other?

Another thing bothered me about time travel. How comes people always say if you meet yourself, there will be some kind of paradox and the world will end? If you were always open to the idea of time travel, wouldn’t you be a little shocked but accepting of the fact of meeting yourself from a different time?

The last thing that bothers me about time travel is the butterfly effect. Changing one thing in the past can seriously alter the future. Sure, but if it came to the choice of killing one person to save millions, wouldn’t you do it? I would, if it could stop a desolate future by killing a few people in the past, then so be it, because it they are the ones who did it, then why shouldn’t they suffer before they do what they do.

That is all for now, my brain just hurts trying to write this, and trying to explain it in an easier way for your peon brains to even comprehend

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Comment below (if you dare)

[sky]

I like the butterfly effect debate so I thought i'd comment
Yes, I dare

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That one thing you change could change more than you ever imagined it would. Sure, killing someone to save millions would change things for the better, but what if that people you killed actually raised arguments that became an important part of society? What if they were a socio or psychopath that we learned from? That we could prevent some kind of future illness or understand a current mental illness?

What if, because millions died, other millions all over the world, scattered individually, stopped to talk to someone about that event or stopped to see it on a tv in a shop? Waited that one or two crucial moments behind at home or work to finish watching the news and because of those few minutes created by distraction of the initial event, many others were saved from a shoot out or a car crash or accidental death or life changing injury of some sorts?
What if it was that very incident that some student used in a report or for their thesis? That by using that incident they infact became one of the most important people in the world or someone who had a major influence in the world, but without it they would have just been an ordinary shop worker?

Millions may have been saved, but the individual lives of people could have been drastically changed all because of a missing moment. And in turn, all those individual lives could add up to just as many deaths all because it didn't happen, because you changed things. Saving millions might make the world less advanced or might mean the life and death of many others.

Whether you believe those who caused the crime should or should not suffer, it's those who were somehow, if even in the smallest way, effected or influenced by the crime committed that will suffer and that could spiral a whole other travesty of events. If you did intervene, it could be you who was the cause of killing millions of innocents.

[Pacy McNeil]

PW

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I totally agree with you on the point, think about all the people who wouldnt be together today because the Holocaust didnt happen, and think about t all the Jewish comedians who wouldnt be around because of the Holocaust not happening, but then again, I'd like to try and spin it, think about the people who will have survived, whose to say that they wouldnt have been great people themselves?

Whose to say that by Hitler being killed that two people who never met would have met and they became/made someone great? By killing one person you may have killed millions, but you would also have saved AND created millions of new people, all of which have a chance for greatness