A look at Terminator morality and future actions

[FaxModem1]

In the Terminator series, both movies and television, the entire purpose of time travel is to prevent some event that will forever change history against you. In T1, T2, and T3, Skynet does what it can to end John Connor so it can win the war against humanity. Humanity as well. tries to change things. Sarah Connor does what she can to prevent Skynet from ever existing. Now, she almost does this via killing Miles Dyson, as well as previously committing acts of terrorism against Cyberdyne computer factories. The Sarah Connor Chronicles also examines this choice, and shows that these inventive scientific men that create these things are not evil, and the moral grays of eliminating them for the future. Terminator: Genysis continues this thread, with the birth of Skynet, and it being a relatively innocent being while created, and that's I'll say about that without giving spoilers.

So, here's the question, if you had what was considered definite proof that someone in the future would be responsible for great atrocities in the future, whether through direct or indirect action, how moral would it be to commit such action against that person to prevent them from existing or before they do such a thing?

Put another way, if you had the chance to safely kill Hitler, Stalin or some other villain in history before they do the act and are still an innocent, would you? When does it become right, when does it become wrong? For those who say it is right, what if that individual person wasn't available via your means, and you would have to adopt more drastic means, taking out a parent of theirs before conception.

Yes, this is moral relativism, but since it is a theme of the Terminator series, I feel that is a question that should be addressed. What are your thoughts?

[B5B7]

Whatever actions we do in normal life affect the future, but not the past. So, actions that change a possible future to another future are morally neutral.
But changing the past - eg. the popular "kill Hitler" - changes not just the future, but the time between then and now. This means that billions of people now living would never exist. Your parents may have a child superficially the same as you, but it will be the product of a different egg and sperm, just like a sibling is.
Extend this into hundreds or thousands of years of future time, and it becomes trillions "genocided".

This may seem melodramatic, as one can say well there could still be a me - Joe Bloggs, just slightly different, so nothing to worry about. Of course non-existent people never have any worries or other concerns. One may make a case for less radical minor changes eg changing your personal past, but even this could butterfly into major changes.

Now, as regards Terminator, who knows what the original timeline is? I have read a Terminator trilogy in which several of the timelines co-existed until the heroes managed to end all timelines except one.
Which brings a distinction between the Hitler scenario and the Terminator one. With the latter, where it is a choice between humanity's extermination and preventing that, it seems pretty moral to ensure that at least some form of human civilization exists as distinct from no humans at all.
So, I would make a caveat on my original thesis - IF changing the past eg killing Hitler made the difference between the non-existence and continuing existence of humanity, then it would have a moral basis.

[Starglider]

Whatever actions we do in normal life affect the future, but not the past. So, actions that change a possible future to another future are morally neutral.
But changing the past - eg. the popular "kill Hitler" - changes not just the future, but the time between then and now. This means that billions of people now living would never exist. Your parents may have a child superficially the same as you, but it will be the product of a different egg and sperm, just like a sibling is.
Extend this into hundreds or thousands of years of future time, and it becomes trillions "genocided".

This is a fundamental ethical problem with a certain kind of time travel, although I don't think it's reasonable to extend it past the departure time, because at that point any normal action you take in the present has the same influence on what future people exist. The ethical problem with 'non-parallel-universe but paradoxes possible via timeline overwriting' time travel is ontologically provable, because the people you erased up to the point where you left are still in the causal past of the resulting timeline, so they definitely did previously and no longer exist in the most important sense (causality). Cosmology where time travel is possible but strictly paradox free doesn't pose an ethical issue because what happened always happened and no one is ever 'erased'.

On top of that, there is the fact that making it through the Cold War without having a strategic nuclear exchange was by no means a certainty; changing anything of historical note before the late 20th century has a nontrivial chance of causing a gigadeath global nuclear war via butterfly effects.

[Tribble]

I follow the theory that the Terminator series has parallel time lines, and time travel simply just creates a new timeline while leaving the original intact. If that were the case your personal timeline would remain the same as you'd only be altering the new one you created.

That being said you'd still have to be very careful. Jumping in and doing something like killing Hitler could just as easily make the parallel time line worse because you don't know what would happen. Maybe things would be better... or maybe it could ultimately lead to an even greater war where far more people die. Imo time travel should be a last resort where your timeline is fubar so you might as well try and create a better one.

[AniThyng]

I follow the theory that the Terminator series has parallel time lines, and time travel simply just creates a new timeline while leaving the original intact. If that were the case your personal timeline would remain the same as you'd only be altering the new one you created.

That being said you'd still have to be very careful. Jumping in and doing something like killing Hitler could just as easily make the parallel time line worse because you don't know what would happen. Maybe things would be better... or maybe it could ultimately lead to an even greater war where far more people die. Imo time travel should be a last resort where your timeline is fubar so you might as well try and create a better one.

That does seem to make it rather pointless, as you haven't actually fixed anything for your world, you've just created a new world with its own (possibly better, possibly worse, possibly the same) problems.

[Starglider]

That being said you'd still have to be very careful. Jumping in and doing something like killing Hitler could just as easily make the parallel time line worse because you don't know what would happen. Maybe things would be better... or maybe it could ultimately lead to an even greater war where far more people die. Imo time travel should be a last resort where your timeline is fubar so you might as well try and create a better one.

On the contrary, in this case the bar for creating a new timeline is fairly low; on average, would the inhabitants rather that they had not existed at all? Things have to be very bad for humans to answer 'no' to that question. Besides in this case there are probably already near-infinite naturally created parallel universes, as it is unlikely that a technological device could effectively duplicate the whole universe but natural procceses could not.

[biostem]

There are a huge number of possible ways to look at things, (taking the "kill Hitler" scenario as an example):

1. Someone else rises up to take his place, and history chugs along very close to the original timeline.

2. Someone takes his place, but they are wildly different - perhaps this person is even more extreme than the original, or perhaps they are very similar, only differing in some key ways, (like maybe not trying to invade Russia, or deploying jet aircraft right away).

3. Let's say someone went back in time and killed Hitler as a little kid - maybe WWII never happens, but as a result, we don't get the technological boom that resulted from the war. How many years "behind" would we then be? Heck, how many people were prevented from having offspring, or were in fact born as a result of, the war?

Those are just a tiny selection of ways that the timeline could have changed.


On a side note - anyone notice how they specifically mentioned that only living tissue can time-travel in Genisys, but never addressed how the T-1000 could do so? I was also thinking - what would happen if Skynet set it so the last time coordinates weren't saved in the time machine, after something was sent back - the resistance would be screwed! Also, since we know multiple people can be sent at once, I wonder just how many terminators you could cram into 1 trip.

[The Romulan Republic]

The only explanation is that the T-1000 can so accurately mimic living tissue that it comes to the same thing.

[Elheru Aran]

The only explanation is that the T-1000 can so accurately mimic living tissue that it comes to the same thing.

I vaguely recall it being mentioned somewhere on this board in a Terminator thread that one theory was that the T-1000 had been encased in a thin shell of skin for its original time-travel, which got burned off in the tanker-truck crash that it comes walking out of all shiny. Could be wrong, though.

[biostem]

The only explanation is that the T-1000 can so accurately mimic living tissue that it comes to the same thing.

I vaguely recall it being mentioned somewhere on this board in a Terminator thread that one theory was that the T-1000 had been encased in a thin shell of skin for its original time-travel, which got burned off in the tanker-truck crash that it comes walking out of all shiny. Could be wrong, though.

I mean, if that was all it would take, (and hate to sound gross), but then "Pops" could have killed a cat or something, to cover his arm, then time travel before all the cells died.

[PREDATOR490]

If someone is going to commit a bad deed and you have the power to safely stop it - Is it moral to stop them doing it ? - I think so.

Of course the premise is that they WILL do something. I.E Future tense
Changing the 'past' - Ultimately I think the only way it can really be argued as being moral is if more damage will be done by not doing it and the only way you can possibly know that is if you are essentially a god. A being with all knowledge should logically be able to know all possible outcomes and thus make a moral decision about what is the 'best way' to do something.
Unfortunately, the issue with that is this being would be stuck in a catch 22 morality issue - Do nothing, get blamed for being a bad guy who watches bad things happen with the power to stop it
Do something, get despised of playing 'God' or rallied against because people get upset at the idea of not having control of their own lives.

In no scenario does the ability to change time or create alternate realities become anything less than Pandora's Box.

[Irbis]

3. Let's say someone went back in time and killed Hitler as a little kid - maybe WWII never happens, but as a result, we don't get the technological boom that resulted from the war. How many years "behind" would we then be? Heck, how many people were prevented from having offspring, or were in fact born as a result of, the war?

Never mind technological boom - if Nazism wasn't discredited, similar movements could have taken power in more and more countries (perhaps as a reaction to communism and anti-colonial movements) would join ideological block perfectly willing to exterminate opposition, gays, and whoever is considered subhuman at the time.

Even in real life, you had half of NATO countries being fascist dictatures (mostly in south Europe), right wing thug networks being armed in Gladio plan, and entire South America being neo-Nazi in all but name. Imagine world divided between two extremely hostile blocks with executions and terrorism sponsored by other side being so common it makes 1984 look like peaceful utopia, with nuclear exchange looming in background whole time.

[Cykeisme]

I think I can safely say that people who are indirectly never conceived due to changes in the lives of their ancestors aren't something you should have any moral qualms about.

You are no more "killing" them by going back in time, than you already are a mass murder here, now, in reality.. just by walking around talking to people, touching random objects, etc.

I mean, the worst thing you could possibly do is ring random doorbells in the middle of the night.. if you do it enough, you'd probably prevent quite a few conceptions from happening (or at least changed the particular successful sperm involved), but you're hardly a murderer.

[Starglider]

You are no more "killing" them by going back in time, than you already are a mass murder here, now, in reality.. just by walking around talking to people, touching random objects, etc.

Would you personally be fine with me using my secret time machine to go back and make sure you are never conceived?

[Cykeisme]

You are no more "killing" them by going back in time, than you already are a mass murder here, now, in reality.. just by walking around talking to people, touching random objects, etc.

Would you personally be fine with me using my secret time machine to go back and make sure you are never conceived?

I reckon I'm about as fine with it as other people who would only be conceived due to your time traveling trip would be with the idea of you NOT making the trip..

[Starglider]

I reckon I'm about as fine with it as other people who would only be conceived due to your time traveling trip would be with the idea of you NOT making the trip..

And there we go. 'Would be' is hypothetical, 'I am' is concrete, concrete reality has moral value, hypotheticals do not (although they help us reason about concrete things).

If I don't make the trip, there is no timeline in which they (the alternate persons) exist to have an opinion. However am making the boldly anti-solopist assumption that you do in fact exist. The important point is that you still exist in the historical sense even if the observable timeline (post modification) does not include you, because you are in the causal history of the time traveller (e.g. I remember you existing) and hence the rest of the universe (I wouldn't have made the trip back to erase you, if you hadn't originally existed). This is why, in a mutable single timeline model of time travel, erasing things is equivalent to destroying them, or rather to overwriting data in a computer memory with new data (the single timeline now contains different patterns). Anything else is logically inconsistent. This is often conceptualised as multidimensional 'hypertime' where the first time dimension is the one that we appear to travel through, while modifying the timeline causes movement in the second time dimension. Which is to say, we have relaxed the 'only the present exists' criteria on the first time dimension and replaced it with 'only the current timeline exists', which is the same criteria applied to the first time dimension. In this case saying 'causing someone to never have existed is fine because there is no observable trace of them' is equivalent to saying 'murdering you in a way that totally destroys your body and all records of you'. i.e. completely wrong, because you certainly did exist and there are still indirect causal consequences of that in the subsequent state of the universe.

As I said, this is just one ontological model of time travel. Generalising to more hypertime dimensions is possible and tends to reduce to traversible many-worlds although there are many families and variations of time-travel models. Going the other way, if we disallow paradoxes completely no one can be erased because what happens was always going to happen. Although in this case there are still various (conceptual) possibilities for what non-observable, possibly iterative process might produce the final consistent observable timeline.

[Starglider]

P.S. This is a funny case where intuitive human perception of the issue should actually be helping my argument. Usually human intuitive philosophy is hilariously wrong and worse than useless as a starting point for physical and cognitive science; it causes no end of trouble for quantum physics, AI (Chinese room argument etc), neuroscience (people on this board insisting Cartesian dualism must be true 'because I can't imagine how chemistry could create consciousness') and sci-fi (muderous teleporters). However in this case it's more or less correct;a typical human when asked if being erased from existence is equivalent to death would just blurt out yes, because 'I exist' and 'I no longer exist = death' and 'my death = awful' are basic human intuitive ideas.

I think for sci-fi fans who diverge from that may be overwhelmed by an emotional bias towards 'time travel would be cool and I would want to do it if it was possible', which is fine, but then also 'I want my time travelling heroes to cause bad things to never have happened rather than creating a new timeline in which they didn't happen' and 'I don't want all the heroes in time travel stories to be mass murderers', which are just ontologically incompatible (for any large-scale change). Narratively there is a way around this, at least for moderate changes; you can posit some kind of butterfly-effect-suppressing corrective force that causes details to turn out the same and the same people to exist as much as possible (e.g. Back to the Future seems to work this way). But that is pretty much outright magic, not something you could put in a hard sci-fi story.

[Adam Reynolds]

I think for sci-fi fans who diverge from that may be overwhelmed by an emotional bias towards 'time travel would be cool and I would want to do it if it was possible', which is fine, but then also 'I want my time travelling heroes to cause bad things to never have happened rather than creating a new timeline in which they didn't happen' and 'I don't want all the heroes in time travel stories to be mass murderers', which are just ontologically incompatible (for any large-scale change). Narratively there is a way around this, at least for moderate changes; you can posit some kind of butterfly-effect-suppressing corrective force that causes details to turn out the same and the same people to exist as much as possible (e.g. Back to the Future seems to work this way). But that is pretty much outright magic, not something you could put in a hard sci-fi story.

This is why I have personally never really liked time travel in stories. With enough creativity, it isn't even necessary to tell most story concepts. There are essentially two key ideas that make time travel interesting, that involving questions of inevitability and that involving a character serving as a fish out of water.

The Edith Keeler dilemma from Star Trek TOS is a good example, in which Kirk famously had to let Edith Keeler die so that America would enter WW2 and stop the Nazis from developing the atomic bomb first. Person of Interest features similar scenarios using the predictive power of an AI, in one case it even suggests that they kill a man to stop a rival AI from coming online. And Castle(Nathan Fillion TV series) also featured something of an inverse in which a single death was supposed to be the lynchpin that would lead to WWIII, though in this case it was commented that it was less certain. The Agent Scully style detective makes the comment that they simply saved a girl, and that was all that mattered.

As for Terminator, essentially the same story was told in the Star Wars EU as Darth Maul: Shadow Hunter, with Darth Maul in the role of the Terminator and gender flipped Reese and Sarah(with the Reese as a young Jedi with virtually no experience and the Sarah as a scoundrel who accidentally discovered the secret of the invasion of Naboo). The key to the story is that it portrays an out of context villain that the heroes aren't really prepared to deal with and are rather helpless against. Such a story could even be told in a realistic setting, with something akin to an antagonistic Jason Bourne against relatively realistic heroes that are much less capable. The Winter Soldier in the titular Captain America film was also somewhat similar to this.

More generally, non-linear storytelling accomplishes much the same thing. Something like True Detective, which features stories both in the past and in the present allows similar questions about past actions and future consequences. How I Met Your Mother similarly goes into issues of inevitability and destiny while telling the story entirely in flashback and with heavy use of nonlinear narrative.

The rather interesting narrative roleplaying game Microscope is designed around this concept. It is intended to allow a group of people to collaboratively create an epic history. The non-linear nature of the storytelling is key to its sucess as a group activity as it prevents the ability to "nuke Atlantis." It allows other players to focus on a different era and thus overcome that change without ignoring or changing it outright. It specifically makes the point that adding time travel defeats the point by making the non-linear narrative linear again. Though the yet to be released supplement apparently includes rules for time travel or at least alternative histories. Who knows how that works.