Time travellers: please don’t kill Adolf Hitler
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
"But Franz was not yet done putting his life in insane danger. Against the advice of pretty much everyone, he insisted on going to the hospital to visit the people who were injured by the grenade. The driver, unfortunately, had no idea where the fuck he was going. They ended up crisscrossing hilariously through the streets of Sarajevo, until they just randomly happened to pass a cafe where, you guessed it, Gavrilo Princip was enjoying a post-failed-assassination sandwich.
After the obligatory pause of dumbfounded luck, Princip grabbed his pistol and turned the tide of history."
http://www.cracked.com/article_17298_6-random-coincidences-t...
Well, if we consider the last choice (which, I think, is the more convenient for speculating), you would still have a World War because this event was more of a pretext since there were already a lot of political tension. Moreover, the alliances which made the war global were already in place and would lead to WW1 even with another trigger.
That say, you can also consider the Butterfly Effect meaning that changing the trigger could finally change a lot of things after some time. Maybe Hitler (or his substitute) would have listened to his adviser, or he would have declared war with USSR, or Manhattan Project would have failed, and so on.
tl;dr: if we are to rewrite history, let us do it all the way!
tl;dr it's complicated.
How could it not consider such a, ahem, small detail?
As you already said, one Bosnian Serb (which btw declared himself as Yugoslavian, like many members of his Mlada Bosna (Young Bosnia) organization) kills one tyrant, then AH and Germany attack half of the Europe, and Serbia and Gavrilo Princip are guilt of WW1? Makes no sense to me.
A lot of domino stones had to fall for WWI to happen. By the way, I can recommend "The War that Ended Peace", excellent book about the causes of WWI.
That's not the impression one gets from the popular literature (thriller romances, etc.) of the preceding years. For instance, it is obvious that the English were expecting a naval clash with Germany sooner or later.
What was unexpected was the prolonged slaughter of trench warfare. The previous war of 1870 had been a relatively quick affair ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_World_War_I
While there is some argument to be made that the specific timing of the event made subsequent happenings occur in the manner they did, I think most people would say that what happened was going to happen anyway. Or at least, this is what I recall from high school history class and my own limited research into the subject.
Still though, it's fun to speculate - a sufficient delay in the causes of revolution in Russia could have correspondingly delayed the backlash against communism, Germany could very well have been the first country to undergo such a revolution, the style of communism then being more akin to classical Marxism than Lenin's, perhaps lessening Germany's role as an industrial powerhouse and colonial ruler, mitigating the competitive tensions in Europe on that front but increasing them on an economic one, or who knows what. Really it's all just counterfactual conjecture, but like I said, it's fun.
France was a month away from getting a pacifist government that was looking to patch things up with Germany (and would've had one by the time of crisis, except for by a freak occurence in the form of the Caillaux affair). Russia was losing their shot on Constantinople at the end of that summer, when the Turkish Dreadnaughts would've been delivered. In Austria-Hungary Franz Ferdinand was the main driver for peace, and the main warmonger (Conrad )was about to be sacked. England was likely to detach itself from Russia when the next round of treaty negotiations over Persia came up. Germans were convinced that a war against Russia would be unwinnable in a couple of years.
So there's some reason to believe that the time window for a general European war was fairly short, and it was only by bad luck that something sufficiently serious happened in that window.
In Jared Diamond's book Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, he argues that the technological innovations of Europe during the enlightenment were partially due to intense competition and wars. He compared it to China, which by 1350 was highly advanced, but had a more homogeneous political structure, suggesting less competition.
Three hundred? More like two thousand. In the late middle ages a war could last 30, 80 or 114 years. There was always some sort of armed conflict somewhere in Europe. The peace we've seen post-WW2 is pretty unique.
Yeah, bang on.
> The peace we've seen post-WW2 is pretty unique.
I had a look at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_conflicts_in_Europe#1st...
It looks like it never stopped. I counted 101 conflicts since 1900 up to the present day, I'm currently counting for the previous centuries.
19th - 51 18th - 42 17th - 41 16th - 59 15th - 59
... I've lost count.
Here is wiki instead: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Archduke_Franz...
This article written 80 years from now? Time travellers: please don't kill Osama bin Laden, the war on terror gave us drones and tons of great security technology.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_unmanned_aerial_veh...
> The earliest recorded use of an unmanned aerial vehicle for warfighting occurred on August 22, 1849, when the Austrians attacked the Italian city of Venice with unmanned balloons loaded with explosives.
> After World War I, three Standard E-1s were converted as drones.[6] The Larynx was an early cruise missile in the form of a small monoplane aircraft that could be launched from a warship and flown under autopilot; it was tested between 1927 and 1929 by the Royal Navy. The early successes of pilotless aircraft led to the development of radio controlled pilotless target aircraft in Britain and the US in the 1930s. In 1931, the British developed the Fairey "Queen" radio-controlled target from the Fairey IIIF floatplane, building a small batch of three, and in 1935 followed up this experiment by producing larger numbers of another RC target, the "DH.82B Queen Bee", derived from the De Havilland Tiger Moth biplane trainer. Through some convoluted path, the name of "Queen Bee" is said to have led to the use of the term "drone" for pilotless aircraft, particularly when they are radio-controlled.[7] However during this period the U.S. Navy, continuing work that reached back to 1917, was also experimenting with radio controlled aircraft. In 1936 the head of this research group used the term "drone" to describe radio controlled aerial targets.[8]
etc. So current drones are just a refinement of earlier technology. If we hadn't gone to war in Afghanistan we had Iraq to use this new technology. If we hadn't gone to war in Iraq or Afghanistan we would have used drones over NK, perhaps to drop media players loaded with sitcoms and soap operas and music.
The big leap in technology still happened during, and mostly because of, the requirements of war.
It's obviously too early to decide if drones is going to be the quintessential example of peace dividend technology to come out of the war on terror, but it's disingenuous to suggest there isn't going to be one (or several).
Who'd be opposed to them then?
With bombing someone is making the choice to kill civilians. At least with drones they're trying (perhaps not hard enough) to avoid killing civilians.
The book "Bomber Command" (Max Hastings) talks a little bit about the changing policy in WWII from "Do not kill civilians" to "Let's carry out horrific firebombing of German cities". (Also the death rate of bomber crews was shockingly low.)
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Bomber-Command-Pan-Military-Classics...
(Wait what? Is that a referral link? I don't think I have any kind of referral stuff set up with amazon?)
Sure, as long as it's your side/country/flag that's doing the killing.
And it's not about preventing baddies, it's about the consequences of building a totalitarian superpower with access to that to fuck and exploit everybody else with.
Nothing to be thankful for.
And the fact that "ok, at least they kill fewer people" is not that conforting either. At least a full blown war has casualties from both sides, and pilots are not a boundless resource.
The peace dividend is about peaceful, civilian uses of technology developed in wartime: Rockets build to 'punish' random, civilian Londoners -> Civilian space program. Holocaust -> conclusive acceptance of the evils of racism. Drones built to track and kill baddies (and whoever happens to look like or stand near them from a few thousand feet) -> Amazon drone delivery, TacoCopter, Search & Rescue, ???.
What many people fail to realize is that despite two of the most horrific wars in history, the 20th century was actually the most peaceful century ever. WW2 was a very painful step, but I think its consequences were ultimately an important step forward for mankind.
He also talks about how sometime in the future, when the pain isn't as fresh as it is now, some historian will write a book about all the benefits of Hitlers regime, like they do for Caesar or Alexander(All butchers of similar caliber). But thats pretty much impossible currently because you need the historical distance from such hard topics.
[1] http://www.dancarlin.com/disp.php/hharchive It's caller "Wrath of the Khans" and is essentially an audio book, find a couple of free evenings and listen to it if you can handle hours and hours of horror. There are also a bunch of old episodes(only recent episodes are free) on WW2 that are definitely worth the money. The most recent series is on WW1, it's still unfinished, and in fact after many hours it's barely one month into the war, you need an entire mini-audio book to set up the context for an audio book on WW1, thats insane. Fans of history will become addicted to this podcast. BE WARNED!
But even without that, of course we shouldn't go about causing terrible evil hoping some good will come of it. The Holocaust and everything Hitler did will always be terrible. It was the response to this evil, and the memory of it, that hopefully keeps driving us towards good for a long time to come. These are the lessons of history that we need to learn: that it's everybody's duty to ensure that this kind of evil can never happen again.
In summary, humans did horrible things to each other, and we survived and endured, so now with the danger out of the way we can play these games, I don't wish to continue though. I've probably stepped on a few land mines with this comment already. The whole thread is a mine field. I wish everybody pleasant evenings with history books/podcasts.
For reference it's a Macmillan Sci-fi / comic site, not the Tor project, but you all knew that right.
Great link btw.
Unsurprisingly this is roughly at this point that German's generals plots to kill him from inside started, although their reasons were more complicated.
Oh, wait...
Can we please stop telling people that time travel will/can cause the object in your hand to change in front of your eyes?
Objects in spacetime follow the path defined by the laws of physics. If you brought an object from your timeline[1] it (and indeed you) will not change to suit the new reality you're in. It will just be an object, like you, stranded from another place, even if the return journey closes because of one of your actions.
The first housecat in Australia just hangs out and eats everything, it doesn't start acting like a koala. (traveling in space and time are the same thing, even though one is more restrictive in which way you can go.)
EDIT: There is another alternative, which is that there is only one causal universe, and it is impossible to change things that happened in the past (e.g. every time you try to kill Hitler you fail, and maybe make him tighten up his security making it impossible for a local-time assassin to do their job, all of which was reported in local documents that you already knew about, or similar.)
[1] or universe, if you believe in multiple possible worlds.
Clearly if changing the past is impossible, then traveling to the past it's completely impossible, since your simple presence in a place is a change. It makes no sense that the laws of physics would prevent you from killing Hitler but not from changing the position of the air molecules around you,
If you want to insist on rules, you have to say that we can't do it, not argue about how it would work.
(I mean, it is entirely possible that the universe is a-causal in the presence of certain types of events that we do not yet understand)
Because to me it looks like you were itching to contradict me.
(I'll totally own the fact that I might have made an imprecise overstatement or whatever, I'm lazy and this is just a message board, the context is clearly enough popping in and out of time, not magic level reversibility)
(I'm being cranky here, I didn't get worked up over any of this or anything)
Gavrilo Princip was just one of many 'terrorists' that were supported by Serbia and Russia to extend their influence into Bosnia. The situation was about to explode there, no matter what.
Adolf Hitler was just one of millions of nationalsocialists and the popularity of the Nazis was based on the treaty of Versailles and the huge social injustices in 1930s Germany, not on his rhetoric skills. While he was the reason for many strategic errors on the Eastern Front he was also the person who gave the Blitzkrieg doctrine vs France the decisive support, while many of the German generals opposed it. Germany could have never won the war against the soviets, because the soviets would have always been able to relocate their production and political centers further and further to the east.
The geopolitical situation at the beginning of the 20th century was this: Germany and allies were big enough to threaten the rest of Europe, but not strong enough to dominate them. So there was a long and painful process of subduing Germany and this process is now known as WW1 and WW2.
PS.: If an actual historian finds flaws in my reasoning here i would be very thankful if they take the time to point them out.
Unfortunately, this seems to justify everything since (especially if coupled with chaos theory) we can prospectively say of the future that the set of people won't be the same at time X -- say, a hundred years hence -- if we don't go to war with Iran.
N.B. That this only form of justification can only work if you are not planning to annihilate everyone on the planet.
"Dean Burnett promises he is not a time-travelling Nazi. But then, he would say that, wouldn’t he?"
Time paradox.
Or
Time travel -> kill Hitler -> History changed -> previous time traveler doesn't exist in the future so he won't go -> ???
I guess guys like Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace just sat on their hands.
happy?
Well no, but they didn't succeed either. For a world where they did, read some steampunk literature.
This is irrelevant. The gains obtained from travel benefit the traveler, not those who stay behind.
If you want to go into the galaxy, just put up a nuclear reactor in space, and with the energy obtained, produce a permanent thrust, as small as it may be (given the mass of your space ship including a whole nuclear reactor, and a self contained biotope).
When you kee a permanent thrust, you reach relativistic speed soon enough, so that a travel to the closests stars (or the planets detected around them), can be done in a reasonable time, FOR THE TRAVELLER!
With an acceleration of about 1g, you can get to the closest star (4 light years) in about one year.
Of course, for those who stay behind, time goes faster, and it'll be ten years (plus four years for the light to get back) for them to learn that you've reached your destination. But who cares about those losers who stayed behind?
Well, it's the same here. Who cares about those losers who didn't travel back in time. Let's have them keep their lousy timeline! At least, the TIME TRAVELLER gets to change his own future!
The old idea I have/had looks like this:
- we are just one of the many (very likely infinite) possibility in this universe
- I believe time travel is a possibility, from a philosophical point of view. I believe in moving forward, not backward.
Put it this way: If I didn't write this comment, your previous five seconds would be reading something else. That's a different history of you and definitely a different history of you and everyone else, even if they are not on HN (you and me are part of each other's experience, even if we are completely strangers, just think about the number of likes on a Youtube video, we could have clicked that button on the same video without knowing the existence of each other).
Think about a street performer. The performance was great, quite inspirational. Everyone who passed by or stood there to watch the performance have a different thought. A guy who just lost his job was going to commit sucicde but the music and the performance cheered him up. A high school kid who just got out of school thought the show added joy to his day. A mother with a young child thought the show was an interesting entrainment and she uploaded a video of the performance on FB later that night and many of her friends echoed her afterward.
One event can make big impact on everyone. If you didn't dye your hair so often your chance of getting blood cancer would be much lower and your family wouldn't have to see you die a few years younger. The outcome would be very different.
If we go back to the past, we will create a new past. From a programmer's mouth, we will create a new object, totally distinct, occupy a different chunk of memory. If "possibility" is a computer with unlimited RAM, that's the model we will use.
old_1930 = historyTable(1930_version_1234);
old_current = historyTable(0xlolcat);
new_1930_everyone = deepcopy(new_1930_everyone + old_current.me;
new_1930 = new World(now_everyone);
// new_1930.next = old_1930.next;
Note my construction doesn't say much about deleting. If the original "past" object still exists in this unlimited RAM machine, can I delete it? Can I just detach such node from the other linked list and delete from memory?
If only we performed a deepcopy on old_current.me. But remember, we will remain to have a disconnection with reality. We will keep remembering about friends we used to have but no longer exists because when we do a deepcopy we only copy the pointer to the other events in our memory. We can't locate friend Alice and friend Bob in the new past object anymore.
But if we don't do a deepcopy, we will not be able to delete ourselves. That is, we can't delete the original world. People who lived in the old_1930 would continue to experience the old_1931, old_1932, etc.
B U T, we can't just attach nodes this way.
new_1930_everyone = deepcopy(new_1930_everyone + old_current.me;
new_1930 = new World(now_everyone);
Me != me. Therefore, we cannot go back and simply change pointer and expect to see good things. I might even carry a dust particle from 1930 into 2014.
Anyhow, what I am proposing doesn't really make sense. There are holes and I am too tired to continue. This is what happen when I couldn't sleep for the last 36 hours.