On dissipating the future impact of malicious psychopaths, a story premise

[jollyreaper2112]

Imagine we have invented a chronoscope that allows us to see the future. Imagine that we are able to learn who will be the next Adolph Hitler, the next Ted Bundy, the next Dubya Bush.

Would it have been ethical to shoot Hitler in the head at age 16 for pre-crimes against humanity? What if consensus says no? What, then, to do with him? The best path would have been to call up the dean of the art school that wouldn't let him in and convince them to reconsider. Just imagine how beautiful those paintings would be, each one representing tens of thousands who who would no longer have to die. Of course, removing Hitler just clears the way for some other charismatic type to take the opportunity. Perhaps his outlet would be music school or perhaps a comfy and lucrative VP slot in a bank that carries no real responsibilities. There's talk of the banality of evil. It's not just that but the context of power. My girlfriend has relatives who are minor nobles back in Africa. They live here in the States in a modest house but they have thrones in the living room and want to be seated at the high table at any event they go to, be addressed by titles, and treated with a deference and respect they have not earned. It struck me how laughable they are here in the States. They have no power over me. Put them back home and with the power the family had fifty years ago, surrounded by young men with machetes and guns, they would be terrifying. Charlie Manson in jail is just a crazy old man. Charlie Manson on the outside with followers who would do whatever he ordered them to, that's terrifying. And really, what's the difference between your crazy right-wing uncle who says all liberals should be shot and the dictator who actually has the liberals shot? A death squad, that's all. Sure, there's a combination of ruthlessness and opportunity that puts a dictator in the position to have a death squad in the first place but I think that's less of a gap than we might imagine.

I look at today's inexplicably successful, the Justin Biebers, the JJ Abrams, the Lil' Wayneses and imagine that such a device might already exist, that there are teams of dedicated humanitarians seeking to find our most dangerous future psychopaths outlets so that their dark furies might be spent yelling at people in reality shows rather than signing death warrants in future totalitarian states. I think it's a fun guessing game to imagine the monsters we're preventing these people from becoming by remaking them into celebrities. Would Simon Cowell be a murderer, a dictator, a great swindler? What greater evil was Rush Limbaugh steered away from so that being a poisonous radio host is a fair alternative?

[hunter]

1. Almost every time you take Hitler out...

...World War II ends in a nuclear inferno.

Even the one where Hitler becomes a moderately successful and innocuous painter in the style of Thomas Kinkade and emigrates to the U.S.A. where his art is more appreciated than it is in Europe.

Star Trek has a lot of time themes, starting with Harlan Ellison's "The City on the Edge of Forever."

The one that describes the horror of temporal warfare is Star Trek Voyager "Year of Hell."

These two episodes are written from the perspective of Gottfried Leibniz; that we live in the "the best of all possible worlds" and time travel can only mucks things up and makes things much worse than they already are.

My own perspective is that time has no arrow. There are possible pasts just as there are possible futures, and it's all projections of an everlasting present, not a place that actually exists. Time travel is impossible, "chronoscopes" are impossible,

"Looking" into the past or into the future (which we all do) changes the picture, not always in ways we like, sometimes resulting in misadventures we cannot recover from.

[jollyreaper2112]

2. heh

113 views, one reply. Guess if I wanted some traction I should have started another DU pigfight thread. "Here's everything wrong with women and why you should just accept men are right." Troll Hard 2: Troll Harder lol

This is a tongue in cheek example with the chronoscope. The problem with speculation about altering history is that it's all a thought experiment. There's no way to really prove any of this. The only question is whether you have a more compelling argument than your fellow. This is real angels dancing on pins stuff.

I've seen cosmologists talk about everlasting presents and variable futures and pasts but they've never convinced me. Time does have a direction.

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

The arrow of time, or time's arrow, is a concept developed in 1927 by the British astronomer Arthur Eddington involving the "one-way direction" or "asymmetry" of time. This direction, which can be determined, according to Eddington, by studying the organization of atoms, molecules and bodies, might be drawn upon a four-dimensional relativistic map of the world ("a solid block of paper&quot .[1]

Physical processes at the microscopic level are believed to be either entirely or mostly time-symmetric: if the direction of time were to reverse, the theoretical statements that describe them would remain true. Yet at the macroscopic level it often appears that this is not the case: there is an obvious direction (or flow) of time.

Some people are more dismissive.

"Try to touch the past. Try to deal with the past. It's not real. It's just a dream."
—Ted Bundy