I don’t have anyone I’d want to remove and I’m also not so naive to think it wouldn’t come with major unpredictable consequences.
Well, regardless of who you remove, you can’t change the original timeline. That original timeline will just keep trucking along as usual. What WILL happen is that a new timeline will branch off; one in which said person no longer exists. But you would never see it unless you travelled back in time and affected the change personally; meaning you’re now in that timeline; an active part of it, and thus never able to return to your original. If you travel forward again, you’re still in the new timeline. If you travel back, you create yet another new timeline; once in which the wave function collapsed to show that you travelled back in time.
It’s a wave function collapse. We live in a universe where that wave function collapsed to say said person existed. If we blink them out of existence, we’re essentially re-opening the box, which creates a new tangent. But that original collapse still exists. It happened; it’s immutable.
Re-rolling a dice doesn’t change the fact that it’s already been rolled before.
Weirdly enough, the best example of that is ironically the season three episode of Community called “Remedial Chaos Theory”
This power allows you to change the original timeline.
Name: Adrian Colebrook
Date of Birth: September 22, 1981
Reason: He knows what he did.Sure, yeah. How would you know it worked though?
without inadvertently making it so you were never born?
I dunno, getting rid of the My Pillow guy might be worth it anyway.
Well, imagine you’re trying to do the most good. Assuming you can’t take them all out at once because the power doesn’t work that way, maybe it does but how would you know? You would to see how many of these cancers you could knock off before you hit yourself by accident.
The only way to guarantee that you don’t cause a paradox is to not use the power at all.
This is what I thought as well.
If I picked Hitler (because that’s the mandatory first choice) I’d be preventing WW2, which my Grandpa fought in. That would definitely affect my existence in some way.
I feel like Trump’s influence between his birth and mine wouldn’t have a direct impact on my parents’ actions.
Then you find out you were conceived in a trump hotel.
Even if that were true, I doubt my parents would’ve chosen it because it was a trump hotel. If it were any other hotel, they probably would’ve still chosen it for the same reasons they originally did.
I don’t think you realize how little would have to change for you to not be born. There were millions of sperm cells churning in your daddy’s balls. Millions of alternate instruction sets to contribute to one half of a whole person. A two-minute delay, a sneeze, the thermostat being off by a single degree could have led to the birth of a completely different person.
Someone in the comments said if you kill somebody you also kill any children they might have. I’m going to second your motion.
Nah. I just think you would want to.
looks at user name
But why?
Just to confirm, i guess. Otherwise I could convince myself ending my life would make everyone else’s life better, today, and do it while feeling good about the decision.
According to my interpretation of chaos theory, virtually any change can cause you to not be born. Even if just considering the butterfly effect for weather: a few weeks or months after the change, the weather in the new timeline will completely diverge from the old timeline worldwide, and this will affect your parents’/ancestors’ behavior enough to change which genes get passed on, if they even still make a baby. And that’s only the weather, there’s a lot more chaos in the world.
The only exception is if the change happens just a short amount of time before you’re conceived, and far enough away. Then I can believe that it could work. But it would still affect your entire life, which might be subtly or totally different from your life in the original timeline.
All that out of the way, there are quite a few politicians and billionaires I’d like to nominate. Too many to list.
Prob the safest bet but I’m wondering if you can determine someone then kinda work your way back.
The mathematical definition of a chaotic system is that you can find two paths that will eventually diverge to be arbitrarily different. But eventually is a keyword. Two very similar paths can and will progress very similarly for a long time.
It’s impossible to know how long such a change will take to diverge. I guess my weeks/months estimate is baseless, I’ll grant you that. But some changes will have faster effects than others.
For example, if you remove a very famous person or someone from royalty, it will change the news cycle, which millions of people read all over the place. Each person who reads or would have read the news about it would have their life slightly altered, so this one change causes millions of differences over a large area. With so many changes, it’s likely that one of them will turn out more significant.
Just a reminder to people: if you remove anyone who has (or will have) children, from a certain moral perspective you’re responsible for them never existing, which could be considered akin to murder. Just take that into account in your considerations. Might make this a much thornier question, ethically, for some.
Some of us are fine with murder when it comes to the relative outcomes. If I can murder someone to save 100 lives (and there’s no doubt at all that it would), I wouldn’t even flinch before driving the knife into their skull.
In this hypothetical, we already know our targets body-count. So it’s easy to make the math work.
Personally, I’d remove Ronald Regan.
That’s just sophistry. You can’t kill people who never existed in the first place.
Murder is taking someone’s existing life without their consent.
This is just preventing further life existing in the first place. Basically same as abortion. The fetus could have grown up, had kids, grandkids,… It’s still just someone else making that decision.
Hell, perhaps I could even say it’s the same as using a condom. Same thing, someone could have been born, etc.Can’t murder someone who doesn’t exist.
It’s been discussed here much better than I could, but I concur with, you pretty much can’t.
The slightest change would cause ripple effects that would affect almost everything.
Everyone always gravitates to the big names… Hitler, Trump, Elmo… But even the most possible mundane person, such as an Inuit baby born to parents in the remotest part of the Arctic 200 years ago, would be enough to cause changes that could easily keep you from being born.
Trump’s impact is recent enough it probably wouldn’t make me unborn. There’s a good chance removing Hitler would change things though.
I mean removing someone who was born in between when your parents got together and when you were born would be fairlu safe. The odds that some random baby’s absence in those months/years that they’re together but not pregnant is not impossible, but pretty slim.
If you can pick any time and place pick a random person in bumfuck middle of no where in Mongolia 1 day before you were born or even when your parents sexed that led to you would be fine. Unless you live in Mongolia
I’ll punch that fish trying to get out of the water. That will teach him.
Oh i wish i wish i hadn’t sat on that fish…
https://youtu.be/nUt7Gdp4PdU?si=BoZOVvaOUfx7YtkE
No screw it I’m removing myself. Only way to be rid of this insanity
Oh shit before I was born ok I guess my father for the same reason.
All the butterfly theory and chaos theory and other such things aside, as messed up as it sounds, probably go back in time to the week before I’m born and find some newborn baby from the 3rd world country who won’t make it more than a few days and remove them. They weren’t gonna live long anyways. Again, messed up, but probably ensures I wouldn’t inadvertently make myself never born.
