Ethics and Time Travel
Feb. 25th, 2015 06:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
wingedbeastIf you find yourself in the past, it is your obligation to change the past.
Almost every movie, book, comic book, short story, and fiction that discusses time travel into the past has gotten this basic element of time-travel ethics wrong. The vast majority have taken efforts to "preserve the time line".
Let's say that you appear in a wilderness in the past. The first thing you've done is displace air. The second thing you've done is step on something, anything, possibly frightening off some birds that would have, instead, remained where they were. The lines of causality that you have just impacted are already immense and you haven't even been in the past for more than few seconds yet.
There only two possibilities at that point.
The first possibility is that you cannot change the past. In that possibility, your appearance from the future has always been an element of the past and always will be and there is simply nothing that can be done about that. Whatever you do, you already have done. You have no need to worry about changing the past, you cannot do so.
The other possibility is that you already have changed the past. Simply stepping into the past has displaced air, moved solid matter, disturbed microbial lifeforms. You have no need to worry about preserving the past, because you cannot do so.
Next, the excuse comes that we don't know the full consequences of our actions. We don't know the long term effects of most of the things that we do. If, finding yourself in the past, you don't save a life because that life *might* be the next Hitler, then the same is true if you're dealing with the present. Either now or in the past, you have to act with the reasonably expected consequences within the reasonably knowable scope thereof.
This only changes if you have information that gives you a reasonable expectation of the longer term consequences of that change. See the original Star Trek episode "City on the Edge of Forever" in which Spock and Kirk, finding themselves in the past, learn the change that destroys the future.
Without that specific knowledge, having found yourself in the past, what was once the present has become the future. That means you know no more about that future than you do about any other.
If you're stuck in the past, your moral obligation is the same as when you're stuck in the present, do the best that you can and hope for the best. So, go ahead, introduce the scientific method, civil rights, and trade unions to Ancient Greece. You don't know what will happen long term. But, what you do know is that, short term, you might make some lives better.
Almost every movie, book, comic book, short story, and fiction that discusses time travel into the past has gotten this basic element of time-travel ethics wrong. The vast majority have taken efforts to "preserve the time line".
Let's say that you appear in a wilderness in the past. The first thing you've done is displace air. The second thing you've done is step on something, anything, possibly frightening off some birds that would have, instead, remained where they were. The lines of causality that you have just impacted are already immense and you haven't even been in the past for more than few seconds yet.
There only two possibilities at that point.
The first possibility is that you cannot change the past. In that possibility, your appearance from the future has always been an element of the past and always will be and there is simply nothing that can be done about that. Whatever you do, you already have done. You have no need to worry about changing the past, you cannot do so.
The other possibility is that you already have changed the past. Simply stepping into the past has displaced air, moved solid matter, disturbed microbial lifeforms. You have no need to worry about preserving the past, because you cannot do so.
Next, the excuse comes that we don't know the full consequences of our actions. We don't know the long term effects of most of the things that we do. If, finding yourself in the past, you don't save a life because that life *might* be the next Hitler, then the same is true if you're dealing with the present. Either now or in the past, you have to act with the reasonably expected consequences within the reasonably knowable scope thereof.
This only changes if you have information that gives you a reasonable expectation of the longer term consequences of that change. See the original Star Trek episode "City on the Edge of Forever" in which Spock and Kirk, finding themselves in the past, learn the change that destroys the future.
Without that specific knowledge, having found yourself in the past, what was once the present has become the future. That means you know no more about that future than you do about any other.
If you're stuck in the past, your moral obligation is the same as when you're stuck in the present, do the best that you can and hope for the best. So, go ahead, introduce the scientific method, civil rights, and trade unions to Ancient Greece. You don't know what will happen long term. But, what you do know is that, short term, you might make some lives better.
no subject
Date: 2015-02-26 06:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-02-26 06:55 am (UTC)I am a Pratchett fan. But, I haven't read that one in a while. Might be time for a reread.
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Date: 2015-02-27 02:11 am (UTC)Dark (for Discworld) as it is, it's one of my favorites.
no subject
Date: 2015-02-27 03:14 am (UTC)