Morality of Chronological Tampering

[The Romulan Republic]

Why? You're doing the same thing, just with more access to information. Why is your past recollection of what happened in your own history privileged over all the other possible futures that were excluded by an event that happened in the past? Why is the history that resulted from, say, Hitler not making it into art school privileged over the history resulting from his making it?

Well, from our perspective, our history actually happened, because we experienced it. The other possibilities are just that- hypothetical possibilities.

But maybe that's just a human perspective, or rather, the perspective of a being that experiences time linearly. Someone like the Doctor, or still more the Prophets from DS9, who exists outside of or perceives all of time, might see it differently, as I previously acknowledged.

They're more or less logically required. There are two kinds of self-consistent time travel stories: ones that use multiverse theory, and ones that (when the smoke clears) have everything occupying a closed timelike curve.

Everything else leads to paradox.

Agreed.

On that note, I consider original Terminator a more-or-less model example of how to write a time travel plot. Its also one of the reasons I consider it superior as a film to Terminator II, despite the latter's higher production values and larger scope.

[Simon_Jester]

Why? You're doing the same thing, just with more access to information. Why is your past recollection of what happened in your own history privileged over all the other possible futures that were excluded by an event that happened in the past? Why is the history that resulted from, say, Hitler not making it into art school privileged over the history resulting from his making it?

Well, from our perspective, our history actually happened, because we experienced it. The other possibilities are just that- hypothetical possibilities.

Why does my memory of a certain sequence of events privilege that sequence of events over other possible sequences?

I feel like the only good grounds on which to criticize a time traveler are the same utilitarian grounds we'd use to criticize an ordinary person acting 'in the present.' Were the consequences of your action positive, or negative? Did you make things better, or worse? The bare fact that you have acted isn't blameworthy in itself, assuming you had good reason to expect a net-positive outcome.

Now, our standards for what constitutes "good enough" for a time traveler might be higher, because they have more information about future outcomes and should be expected to exercise better judgment. Certainly a reckless time traveler who acted as though ignorant of important historical facts would be FAR more blameworthy than a reckless contemporary who genuinely was ignorant of those facts.

But that's a separate concern.

[The Romulan Republic]

Why? You're doing the same thing, just with more access to information. Why is your past recollection of what happened in your own history privileged over all the other possible futures that were excluded by an event that happened in the past? Why is the history that resulted from, say, Hitler not making it into art school privileged over the history resulting from his making it?

Well, from our perspective, our history actually happened, because we experienced it. The other possibilities are just that- hypothetical possibilities.

Why does my memory of a certain sequence of events privilege that sequence of events over other possible sequences?

Because our sequence of events actually happened, we know it actually happened because we experienced it, and the others are merely hypothetical possibilities (unless you are following the multiverse theory, I suppose).

But this is coming from the point of view of someone in the present deciding weather or not to go back to change history. Once you've gone back, well, the world you knew has already been changed simply by that act, so you might as well try to change things for the better.

I feel like the only good grounds on which to criticize a time traveler are the same utilitarian grounds we'd use to criticize an ordinary person acting 'in the present.' Were the consequences of your action positive, or negative? Did you make things better, or worse? The bare fact that you have acted isn't blameworthy in itself, assuming you had good reason to expect a net-positive outcome.

Is simply utilitarianism the only valid measure? If you make things better for a billion people by erasing the existences of a hundred million, is that moral? In short- do people matter merely as statistics/groups, or as individuals?

I mean, your argument isn't totally invalid, but I think their are other ways of looking at the issue that are worth consideration.

Now, our standards for what constitutes "good enough" for a time traveler might be higher, because they have more information about future outcomes and should be expected to exercise better judgment. Certainly a reckless time traveler who acted as though ignorant of important historical facts would be FAR more blameworthy than a reckless contemporary who genuinely was ignorant of those facts.

But that's a separate concern.

Agreed.

[Simon_Jester]

Is simply utilitarianism the only valid measure? If you make things better for a billion people by erasing the existences of a hundred million, is that moral? In short- do people matter merely as statistics/groups, or as individuals?

There are two questions.

One, "how much better?"

Two, "does this violate any rule we put in place for a good reason?"

A good utilitarian system includes the idea of rules you don't break even when it seems like a very good idea, because experience shows that well-intentioned people who think that Act X is a good idea are nearly always wrong, and bad consequences result from their actions consistently, even when they're sure.

Basically, I think you want to argue for a standing rule against 'corrective time travel' in an attempt to improve the past. If not an absolute prohibition, at least a very restrictive set of conditions that hold even when you're pretty sure it's a good idea.

[The Romulan Republic]

Yeah. Pretty much.

[Q99]

Is simply utilitarianism the only valid measure? If you make things better for a billion people by erasing the existences of a hundred million, is that moral? In short- do people matter merely as statistics/groups, or as individuals?

There are two questions.

One, "how much better?"

Two, "does this violate any rule we put in place for a good reason?"

A good utilitarian system includes the idea of rules you don't break even when it seems like a very good idea, because experience shows that well-intentioned people who think that Act X is a good idea are nearly always wrong, and bad consequences result from their actions consistently, even when they're sure.

Basically, I think you want to argue for a standing rule against 'corrective time travel' in an attempt to improve the past. If not an absolute prohibition, at least a very restrictive set of conditions that hold even when you're pretty sure it's a good idea.

It is always worth remembering that the means are part of the ends in any 'ends justify the means' calculation.

And I'm in favor of 'allowed, but incredibly stringent conditions if possible.' The potential for good is so massive, but it is always good to make lots of double-checking and careful consideration fairly mandatory before a major intervention even if time travel isn't involved.

[FedRebel]

Greetings all,

I'm on my phone so this will be brief, I'll expand later as necessary.

In brief: Is it moral to travel through time and attempt to alter the course of history?

Let's posit the following scenario. You are randomly picked up and flung anywhere between 1017 B.C.E. and 1967 C.E., anywhere in the world. You are given a general knowledge of your place and time; apart from that, you are on your own, other than knowing you may be returned to September 2017 C.E. after... say twenty years\. But the caveat is, if you change the timeline, you have to live with the consequences, however farfetched they may be.

It's more a matter of practicality, since return to the present is automatic and guaranteed, any alterations would place you in a completely alien environment.

If I go back to say the Roman era and showcase the industrial and logistic potential of the steam engines in use at the time, I'd revert to a drastically different 2017 where I and a sizable chunk of my family tree never existed. I'd be a non-person and it's doubtful that any form of interest bearing trust would survive 2,000 years of events

killing Hitler is a classic, thing is WW2 was inevitable. we just changed the players by taking The Greater German Reich out of the equation. On reversion, I'd be in a world where I was never born (50/50 shot on my parents) and the political climate is semi-recognizable...but drastically different.

Late 1950's, I could make sure JFK isn't elected. Nixon in 1960 would continue Ike's plans, no Bay of pigs, no Cuban Missile crisis, no bans on supersonic aircraft over land, and ARADCOM/NIKE would completely shield the US from missile attack. I could arrange for an interest bearing trust and stocks that'd pay handsomely on my reversion, low probability that'd be compromised. 50/50 shot that I exist, but time-frame is close enough that I could arrange for that.

Further back I go, best to not muck things up..as I will automatically be deposited in a radically different 2017

As long as I am deposited after WW2, I can potentially make arrangements so that I can acclimate to a changed 2017

It's not so much morality, just that say taking Hitler out means...

A: The Great Anglo-American War
B: The Soviet-Euro War + Japanese-American War
C: The Colony/Mandate Wars

....not exactly fun times, and the fallout of either of those possibilities would create a sharply different 2017.

[Elheru Aran]

...Anglo-American War? I can see a Soviet-Euro or Japanese-American war easily enough but I'm really not sure I see a shooting conflict between the UK and US in lieu of WWII.

Anyway. Decent answer. However, the question arises: knowing what happens in your prime timeline, are you justified in deliberately attempting to insinuate yourself into other people's lives in order to alter what they do? Because that's basically stalking. Otherwise, you're going to have to enter whatever system is intrinsic to whatever you're trying to change, and attempting to change it from within, rather than using your privileged knowledge to go directly to Mr. X and tell him 'do this/don't do this'.

So, are you really going to be able to alter something as significant as a Federal election in the US, having only twenty years to learn the system, enter it, and effect your change, if you are not going to interfere directly by getting to know certain people and changing their mindsets over time? And this close to your lifetime, are you really justified in 'arranging' your existence?

[Simon_Jester]

Anyway. Decent answer. However, the question arises: knowing what happens in your prime timeline, are you justified in deliberately attempting to insinuate yourself into other people's lives in order to alter what they do? Because that's basically stalking.

What?

How the hell is it "stalking" to, say, write someone a letter saying "yeah, don't do this thing you were planning to do, it'll end badly?" Stalking involves persistent patterns of unwelcome following, and of harassment. Not just the bare act of attempting to communicate with people ad make suggestions.

Now it seems like you're just making up random nasty accusations to make against time travelers.

[Elheru Aran]

Anyway. Decent answer. However, the question arises: knowing what happens in your prime timeline, are you justified in deliberately attempting to insinuate yourself into other people's lives in order to alter what they do? Because that's basically stalking.

What?

How the hell is it "stalking" to, say, write someone a letter saying "yeah, don't do this thing you were planning to do, it'll end badly?" Stalking involves persistent patterns of unwelcome following, and of harassment. Not just the bare act of attempting to communicate with people ad make suggestions.

Now it seems like you're just making up random nasty accusations to make against time travelers.

'Stalking' is perhaps the wrong word, but allow me to elaborate.

I don't mean writing a letter. It's too easy for someone, getting a letter out of thin air (or the post, rather) that says "don't do this thing because... reasons" or worse "because I'm from the future and I know what you end up doing but you shouldn't", to simply ignore that kind of thing and carry on as usual. If you organized some sort of mass letter writing campaign, then maybe, but I don't think that (to draw a random example) Martin Luther King Jr would have quit doing what he was doing simply because he got a barrage of mail. Certainly public figures of the sort who could change the course of history by simply changing a few decisions would probably have been used to getting each and every public opinion whatsoever thrown at them, and no shortage of craziness would have been in there. They're going to pay more attention to "I'm gonna get together with my good ole boys and string you up a tree" than "I'm from the future, I know you shouldn't do this".

It seems logical to me that if you want to (quickly) directly affect those people to alter their mindsets or even to the point of changing historically significant decisions, you have to intervene on a personal level rather than indirectly, unless you are capable of identifying specific decision chains that led them to make the historic choices they did. And if you want to short-circuit the usual getting-to-know-a-famous-person process, you have to be able to step into their lives at some point, knowing things about them that most people might not, because a random dude just stepping up to LBJ in 1962 and saying "hey you might be President soon, you might want to do something about that Viet Nam mess" is going to get ignored or possibly arrested. A random person LBJ meets at a party who's a friend of a friend that knows him well enough to catch his interest and maybe get his phone number is another matter.

Granted if you're willing to play a long game, that's another matter. Say you emerge in England in the mid 1600s, establish yourself in the local town as an inventor, raise enough money that you can get yourself elected to the House of Commons, you might be able to influence-peddle your way to talking King Charles II into not enabling the British East India Company as much as he did. That's the same as anybody else at that same time. That requires a certain degree of planning and patience, but if you have a vague goal and you don't really know what to do and who to talk to, you have to work your way up the pecking order.

Studying a specific person in order to have specific influence with them, though, is on a different level to me IMO, especially if you have knowledge from your original timeline's history about what that person does. If I ended up in the 1930s and wanted to get the US into WWII earlier in order to end it more quickly, I won't be waiting around for Pearl Harbor to happen, I'd be trying to get cozy real fast with guys like Henry Stimson, Douglas MacArthur, George Marshall, John Nance Garner, the current leaders of Congress and so forth. How? Damn if I know and I've spent enough time writing this post that I don't need to keep screwing with it, but you get the idea of what I'm saying, I hope.

[Simon_Jester]

'Stalking' is perhaps the wrong word, but allow me to elaborate.

I don't mean writing a letter. It's too easy for someone, getting a letter out of thin air (or the post, rather) that says "don't do this thing because... reasons" or worse "because I'm from the future and I know what you end up doing but you shouldn't", to simply ignore that kind of thing and carry on as usual. If you organized some sort of mass letter writing campaign, then maybe, but I don't think that (to draw a random example) Martin Luther King Jr would have quit doing what he was doing simply because he got a barrage of mail. Certainly public figures of the sort who could change the course of history by simply changing a few decisions would probably have been used to getting each and every public opinion whatsoever thrown at them, and no shortage of craziness would have been in there. They're going to pay more attention to "I'm gonna get together with my good ole boys and string you up a tree" than "I'm from the future, I know you shouldn't do this".

It seems logical to me that if you want to (quickly) directly affect those people to alter their mindsets or even to the point of changing historically significant decisions, you have to intervene on a personal level rather than indirectly, unless you are capable of identifying specific decision chains that led them to make the historic choices they did. And if you want to short-circuit the usual getting-to-know-a-famous-person process, you have to be able to step into their lives at some point, knowing things about them that most people might not, because a random dude just stepping up to LBJ in 1962 and saying "hey you might be President soon, you might want to do something about that Viet Nam mess" is going to get ignored or possibly arrested. A random person LBJ meets at a party who's a friend of a friend that knows him well enough to catch his interest and maybe get his phone number is another matter.

Granted if you're willing to play a long game, that's another matter. Say you emerge in England in the mid 1600s, establish yourself in the local town as an inventor, raise enough money that you can get yourself elected to the House of Commons, you might be able to influence-peddle your way to talking King Charles II into not enabling the British East India Company as much as he did. That's the same as anybody else at that same time. That requires a certain degree of planning and patience, but if you have a vague goal and you don't really know what to do and who to talk to, you have to work your way up the pecking order.

Studying a specific person in order to have specific influence with them, though, is on a different level to me IMO, especially if you have knowledge from your original timeline's history about what that person does. If I ended up in the 1930s and wanted to get the US into WWII earlier in order to end it more quickly, I won't be waiting around for Pearl Harbor to happen, I'd be trying to get cozy real fast with guys like Henry Stimson, Douglas MacArthur, George Marshall, John Nance Garner, the current leaders of Congress and so forth. How? Damn if I know and I've spent enough time writing this post that I don't need to keep screwing with it, but you get the idea of what I'm saying, I hope.

Okay, but I'm not seeing this as a serious ethics problem. You're doing it for a reason, you're not actually harassing or harming them or intruding on their personal privacy. You're trying to cultivate influence, yes, but any powerful person throughout history has been used to that.

[Panzersharkcat]

If it's a whole separate timeline, I'm jumping through a time portal dressed as Batman (for lols) and punching Gavrilo Princip in the face just before he can shoot Franz Ferdinand. Am I allowed to bring things back? Because I'm also bringing back a tablet with a history ebook and other history textbooks as way to prove that I'm not bullshitting about bad things happening if the war goes on. They can accuse me of having a bunch of fake books written up but it's a little hard to dismiss clearly futuristic technology.

[Simon_Jester]

The big problem with futuristic technology as proof of bona fides is the ease with which it can be stolen- not necessarily by random criminals, but by, say, the secret police of the Austro-Hungarian Empire...

[Crossroads Inc.]

ANY Discussion of time travel largely hinges on "Whose rules are we using?"

In terms of "Is it Ethical?"
Single Time Line = Change means History as we know it is gone forever, and millions of people cease to exist due to changes. This could constitute murder to a degree, sure new people are born, but you have erased others from existence.
Multiverse = Each change splits the universe. One with the "original" time line, where everyone keeps going, and one with the new time line. In this version, you could say that in the "New" time line you are NOT 'killing' anyone as those people would not have existed initially.

In terms of "Paradox"
Single Time Line = Here you would have to worry about it. Changes to history effect YOUR history. If you do something in the past, that would prevent you from then doing that thing, Paradox.
Multiverse = Paradox becomes irrelevant. The question of "Shooting your own grandfather" becomes a non issue as "You" would then exist in a new Timeline in which "You" did not exist originally. So no paradox.

In terms of "HOW to change time"
As others have stated, unless some one is given certain resources or powers. There is not much one that can be done aside from the age old "Prevent certain persons Assassination" or “Cause certain persons Assassination” and even then, History may not change the way you WANT it to without additional “Help” to push it in a certain direction.

[Starglider]

Multiverse and single self-consistent timeline (CTL) are not the only possible models for time travel. It is possible to imagine a time machine as resetting the state of the entire universe except the time traveller to a previous state, or equivalently a multiverse model where there is only one coherent universe with a nontrivial probability amplitude and time travel transfers that amplitude from the departing branch to the arrival branch (or various equivalent metatime models). There is no paradox because the causal history of the new timeline still follows logically from the old one (via a join of bulk of universe from an older point plus time travelled artifacts from a later point), it's just that no evidence remains of the old one other than the time traveller. This is the case where the ethical problem of terminating everyone and replacing them a different population occurs. Due to the effectively random way that human gene recombination works, even the most trivial changes and indeed possibly no change at all will quite rapidly lead to divergence as genetically different people are born from the original timeline (unless a rather implausible 'temporal interia' concept is introduced to brake changes). This model of time travel was used in the webcomic Schlock Mercenary.

[Simon_Jester]

We don't actually know whether the instance of time travel in Schlock Mercenary resulted in "termination and replacement" of the timeline that various individuals started from. We do know that the viewpoint of the comic shifted to the "new" timeline. But we have no way of knowing what happened in the old one off camera (except that presumably the Milky Way got eaten by the giant Evil Spatial Whozit).

...

There are also some logically problematic issues with the "terminate and replace" approach to timelines, though. For one, it doesn't respect conservation laws even in a model that stands "outside time." The time traveler and their equipment represent matter and energy that came from a place that literally no longer exists. In principle you could create a universe with infinite energy by time-warping supplies into your past, then having your 'next self' time-warp supplies into their past, and iterating.

Secondly, if you don't specifically adopt an "amplitude transfer" version of multiverse theory, it means embracing the idea that an effect can exist when the cause retroactively never existed, not even in a place you can't access.

Thirdly, if you do adopt "amplitude transfer multiverse theory" as your model, you have to explain how you can shift amplitude around between branches of the many-worlds version of quantum mechanics, which strikes me as problematic though you could maybe finesse that.