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Comment by awjr | Hacker News Reader

Isn't the issue here that they are describing the methods through which they are trying to determine time travel. In effect, telling anyone in the future exactly what not to do.

Let's also assume that somebody had a reason to travel into the past, say to kill Hitler. Our timeline would record that an Austrian artist was murdered in the 1920s. We would not consider this historically significant.

I think time travel is inherently very difficult to detect. Even if a time traveller 'dropped' tech. This tech would be recoverable by popping back in time and recovering it.

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"...say to kill Hitler."

Everybody kills Hitler on their first trip. http://www.abyssapexzine.com/wikihistory/

Why just Hitler? Stalin and Mao were arguably equally as bad:

http://necrometrics.com/tyrants.htm

And there are monsters like Leopold II of Belgium (possible victims in the range 2-15 million) who hardly anyone remembers:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_II_of_Belgium#Exploitat...

Actually, as hardly anyone remembers Leopold II maybe he is the ideal target.... :-|

[NB I eventually remembered that I'm against the death penalty - so what I am actually in favor of is apprehending the relevant individuals and bringing them back to face trial by the appropriate authorities. Although I admit there would be a distinct temptation to do a Cheradenine Zakalwe with Vasili Blokhin:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasili_Blokhin

Where was the Grey Area when we needed it!]

Actually, the H man and those guys don't make the cut. The ones deserving of time-travel assassination have already been dealt with. Hence we don't know of them.

Exactly. If we are going to hypothesize about time travelers then we have to accept that any significant reason to time travel has already happened. Futhermore it has happened more times than we are aware of to create our specific timeline.

Maybe Hitler was a time traveler himself.

I am wondering, that things like killing someone historically significant won't be done unless there is extinction level threat from that individual.

Other wise the people in the future would decide to just let it play.

http://mark.laabs.net/alternate-theory-for-obamas-nobel-priz...

Killing Stalin without killing Hitler might not be the best idea, considering the vital role Russia played in the defeat of the nazis. And maybe Leopold II gets overlooked by time travelers exactly because they also don't remember him.

(Good of you to mention Leopold II, though. Also note Henry Morton Stanley's role in that despicable piece of genocide.)

There is a view that General Winter managed very well by himself.

Would it not be a much better idea to kill Columbus, and prevent the 'discovery' of the Americas, thereby saving the population of nearly two whole continents? Can't be much more efficient with your time travel than that I reckon.

edit: Just read the interesting link you posted to 20th centuries bloodiest tyrants. I wonder why Johnson and Nixon are not in the third list, bloody tyrants who killed over 400.000 innocent civilians in the Vietnam war using horrible chemical warfare.

Columbus was a particularly unsavoury individual whose instinct was to sell the Taino natives he encountered as slaves, but it is difficult to imagine a scenario where the inevitable large scale contact between the Old and the New Worlds would not have resulted in calamitous declines in the native population of the Americas who had no resistance to smallpox and other Old World pathogens, no matter the nature of the intial contact. Even without Columbus, it would have been a matter of time before the Europeans found out about the Americas.

Have you read "Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus" by Orson Scott Card? It get's a little weirdly preachy, but the idea that Columbus really is the fulcrum about which the fate of the Americas tips, and that if you could go back and get him to think of the locals as actual people and not savages, things could work out pretty good.

If you don't mind changing history, it might be better just to go back in time and give the natives small pox vaccine. Contact was inevitable.

Hell if you are going to do that there are probably countless other things you can do to improve history.

If done even slightly wrong this would be easily detected.

Because of Columbus I and most of Latin Americans are born, most of us are a mix of European and Native Americans. If all of that population was really killed, there would be just white people in the spanish and portuguese territories.

Ignoring the rest of your comment… how would this kill you all?

My point was that the population was not exterminated in this side of America, the proof is us (Latin Americans), for example Mexico with 90% of its population being "mestizo" (european/native american) with variations of 70%/30% 50%/50% 30%/70%

7000 personally executed over 28 consecutive nights, through a shot in the base of the skull while wearing a leather apron, gloves and hood, 300 a night for 10 hours each night, one every 3 minutes?

That's some character...

It takes a certain kind of monster to order the execution of 7000 officer prisoners of war. It takes another kind to carry it out personally with a collection of pistols brought in especially for the job.

I can recommend (if that is the correct term) the book "Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar" for a chilling description of the leadership of the Soviet Union from the early 30s until Stalin's death:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Stalin-The-Court-Red-Tsar/dp/0753817...

There's also an excellent 2-part CSPAN "Book Notes" with the author:

http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/Tsa

Agreed! It is next to impossible to understand soviet Russia without knowing what is covered in that book. It completely changed my view of the whole Bolshevik experiment, especially Stalin's role. What had been a mystery to me became much clearer.

I can't wrap my head around this. I'm not even sure he went insane because of the unhumanity of such an act or because he was out of the system.

Wouldn't it be highly probable that the untimely death of any of those men would cause almost everyone born after the war to cease existing?

"Why just Hitler? Stalin and Mao were arguably equally as bad:"

Read the story. This is covered. Quite well, IMHO.

You need to find someone who would have been worse than any of these folks but was killed when very young.

Jesus Christ! After reading that wiki on Leopoldo I am personally signed up to be the traveller to go back and murder that SOB with impunity!

It's historically more romantic to kill Hitler than any other dictator.

See also [0] for explanation why no one ever succeeded.

[0] - http://www.viruscomix.com/page382.html

Thanks for that link, i haven't laughed this hard in ages

Well, then starting to read at http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HitlersTimeTravel... may be dangerous to your health.

It's beautiful for how it captures the essence of all message board fights.

thank you. I was thinking about this fantastic story the other day and I was wondering if I'll ever find it again. Bookmarked.

And have you thought about how many potential hitlers were pruned in the WW2 ... every one that died in the conflict could be much worse than him. So maybe Hitler was a historical fuse. A maniac just 20 years later could have destroyed humanity. Dead serious here, assume that nuclear weapons were available from day1.

So maybe there was time travel manipulation to ensure WWII so that humanity could survive.

Perhaps the WW2 in our timeline is the least worst outcome.... :-|

e.g. What if the Normandy landings had failed? The Nazis would still have been defeated by the Soviets but the whole of Europe north of the Alps could have been occupied by the Soviets, perhaps making a far worse later nuclear conflict much more likely.

I think Stephen Fry wrote an alternative history book based on that premise.

Now you're just messing with my mind.

Sounds like a plausible sci-fi story!

> Let's also assume that somebody had a reason to travel into the past, say to kill Hitler. Our timeline would record that an Austrian artist was murdered in the 1920s.

This would prevent World War 2 and the associated advances in technology, possibly including those leading to the time travel being possible in the first place.

You could also imagine the converse, where someone from the future brings back all scientific knowledge, thus reducing the time it takes scientists of the past to invent time travel, which in turn leads to that person bringing back all scientific knowledge sooner, perpetuating onwards until massive amounts of knowledge are acquired in small amounts of time. Such is the nature of the grandfather paradox.

Given that people cannot learn infinitely fast and progress needs time to happen, there will be a point of equilibrium.

you are assuming time travelers change history, but it's different if you subscribe to the idea that you can't change past because in fact you did not change the past.

Then you can detect people saying stuff about the future, or possibly attempting to kill hitler while failing miserably.

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