Time travellers: please don’t kill Adolf Hitler

http://www.theguardian.com/science/brain-flapping/2014/feb/21/time-travellers-kill-adolf-hitler

by ColinWright • 12 years ago

52 82 12 years ago

theguardian.com

Einstalbert• 12 years ago

If you insist.

harywilke• 12 years ago

Reminds me of this excellent short story on the kill Hitler time travel theme told through wiki edits.

http://www.tor.com/stories/2011/08/wikihistory

_puk• 12 years ago

Completely tangential, but given all the recent online privacy debates, and the likes of Steam sniffing dns caches etc I actually thought twice about visiting tor.com (having never stumbled across it before).

For reference it's a Macmillan Sci-fi / comic site, not the Tor project, but you all knew that right.

Great link btw.

Robin_Message• 12 years ago

There's a great short story in the style of a forum about not killing Hitler – http://www.tor.com/stories/2011/08/wikihistory

fmdud• 12 years ago

Reminds me of http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3116

mnw21cam• 12 years ago

Or even better: http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3266

mcv6• 12 years ago

I've long suspected that despite its many horrors, WW2 actually resulted in some very significant good: finally uniting an eternally warring Europe; civil rights, equality, and racism and discrimination being considered really evil; and it also marked the end of colonialism.

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.

yoha2• 12 years ago

The point is that WWII may still have happened without Hitler. However, it may have avoided some genocide. Of course, it's just speculation, we won't rewrite the past.

tempodox• 12 years ago

In the wake of WW I and II, Europe had to learn some painful lessons. Looking at the U.S. today, we can see where not having learned those lessons left this country. We will have to recreate the WW II catastrophe all over again, just so we also get the memo.

pavelludiq2• 12 years ago

History is weird that way. I recommend listening to Dan Carlin's Hardcore History series on the Mongols[1] where he talks about how historians often justify unspeakable horrors because in hindsight there are a lot of benefits to modern civilization. He balances it out by saying that the benefits don't look so good if you have to ask the people who actually have to pay the bill. Millions of Chinese, Muslims, Russians and Hungarians who actually had to pay for the benefits of Genghis Khans conquest would probably not see it as a good trade off to endure literally the end of the world.

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!

mcv6• 12 years ago

The Mongols are an example where I don't see nearly as much upside. I admit I don't know much about their impact on China, but pre-Mongol Russia (Novgorod and Kiev) were quite democratic and free. The Mongols moved the seat of power to Moscow and installed authoritatian regimes, and Russia has always remained very autocratic ever since.

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.

tga_d2• 12 years ago

Forget killing Hitler to stop WWII, kill Archduke Franz Ferdinand to stop WWI!

Oh, wait...

jmnicolas• 12 years ago

I liked the bit of humor at the end :

"Dean Burnett promises he is not a time-travelling Nazi. But then, he would say that, wouldn’t he?"

hessenwolf• 12 years ago

He did make eugenics unfashionable.

terhechte• 12 years ago

There would actually be no need to kill anybody in order to prevent WW1 and WW2 (at least as we know it) you'd simply need to tell a taxi driver to take a different path, and all would be well:

"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...

yoha2• 12 years ago

When you consider alternate past timelines, you have to choose some model: is space-time elastic so that a change will be automatically fixed gradually through time? is causation effective immediately, leading to possible paradoxes (killing your parents)? are you actually making a branch?

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!

levosmetalo2• 12 years ago

Small nitpick: please don't spread the misconception that Gavrilo Princip killing chief commander of occupying army who wanted to show off by visiting occupied territories somehow started the world war. It would have started anyways since the balance of powers was way off.

_ak2• 12 years ago

Bosnia Herzegovina wasn't "occupied" in any way and it belonging to Austria-Hungary was recognized by all European powers, including Serbia, and thus legal under then international law. A limited war against Serbia following the assassination was thus justified, but Austria hadn't considered the "chain" of allied countries assisting each other extending the conflict to basically all of Europe, plus the Germans used it as justification to finally implement 30, 40 year old plans to wage war on basically everyone else around them.

tl;dr it's complicated.

merloen• 12 years ago

That is by no means a fact. Nobody expected war in 1914, and most of the Great Powers did not want war. Franz Ferdinand was a force for moderation in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

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.

Sharlin• 12 years ago

Although a lone gunman single-handedly starting the bloodiest war in the history of humankind makes for a nice just-so story, in reality things are more complex. Europe was a ticking time bomb at the time; just like Hitler personally didn't cause the second world war, Gavrilo Princip hardly did the first one.

tga_d2• 12 years ago

While it smacks in the face of the joke I made elsewhere, altering the events of that day probably wouldn't have had that much effect on the over-arching tides of history. Pretty much everyone agrees that Europe was a proverbial powder keg at the time, and that all sides (at least in and around Europe) were itching for an excuse to go to war. This is a relatively popular subject to study in history, in fact.

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.

jsnell• 12 years ago

I don't think pretty much everyone agrees. I went on a WWI reading binge earlier this year, and of the 4 books on the war written in this millennium, none described a general European war as unavoidable. There had been major crises in the previous few years that didn't lead to one. And while the trend had been for increased polarization, there was good reason to believe that the tide was turning.

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.

walshemj2• 12 years ago

Bumping off Wilhelm I well before he became Kaiser might have diverted Germany on to a less confrontational path - would have reduced the prominence of antisemitism as well.

bazinga123• 12 years ago

if there were no hippies, we would never have Steve jobs; no ipod; no iphone; google would have come out with a nexus with a physical keyboard. we would never have apps etc etc.. oO

walshemj2• 12 years ago

I have an old rio mp3 player which predates the ipod by years

NAFV_P2• 12 years ago

I thought the Europeans had been at each other's throats for around three hundred years.

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.

mcv6• 12 years ago

I thought the Europeans had been at each other's throats for around three hundred years.

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.

deletes• 12 years ago

Please don't link cracked.com articles. They are written in a primitive and insulting style.

Here is wiki instead: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Archduke_Franz...

Shorel• 12 years ago

On the other hand, stopping Einstein from writing the letter to encourage the Atomic Bomb research would have really prevented all Atomic Weapons and the Cold War.

mseebach4• 12 years ago

It's interesting - as WWII is increasingly distant, the collective memory of it fades, and we begin to focus on the long term benefits from it that we enjoy (the peace dividend), and not the immediate horrors of the war.

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.

DanBC3• 12 years ago

We had drones before 911!

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.

mseebach4• 12 years ago

And we had rockets before WWII! (They were invented by the chinese around 1000 years ago)

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).

tinco• 12 years ago

I like to believe Americas misadventures with Drones give us lots of reason to be sceptical of these drones. If there was no threat from the east, these drones would still exist, but perhaps they would have no one to kill so would remain on the borders of obscurity like most of military technology.

Who'd be opposed to them then?

DanBC3• 12 years ago

I much prefer the murder of limited numbers innocent civilians with drones (which is usually a mistake) to the mass murder of innocent civilians by "Shock and Awe" tactics and cluster bombing. Making cluster-bomblets the same colour as air-dropped food-aid packs was a particularly cruel accident.

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?)

coldtea4• 12 years ago

Yes, what a blessing that was, getting the most disgusting and fascist kind of war technology at the hands of an unstable superpower (and perhaps everybody else too).

mseebach4• 12 years ago

I can't tell if you're being ironic and describing rockets that could reach London in the hands of Hitler, or just completely missing the point.

onion2k• 12 years ago

The "what if someone worse took his place!" reason is a misnomer - if you have the capability to go back and kill Hitler then you'd have the capability to go back and kill someone else as well.

watwut• 12 years ago

You would have to kill a lot of people. And you risk that some of them would turn out to be more effective then Hitler.

maxerickson4• 12 years ago

One awful theory would be that Hitler was a time traveler (the awful part being the assumption that he succeeded in making things less bad).

blueskin_4• 12 years ago

Exactly. If Hitler had been killed, there was the possibility someone competent took over. His mismanagement was certainly a contributing factor to Germany losing.

spc476• 12 years ago

One interesting theory I heard was the the US and Britain were trying to keep Hitler alive, because he was his own worst enemy. Had he been killed off during WWII, someone competent might have taken over and extended the war.

nolok• 12 years ago

It's not a theory since the official documents on it have been declassified nowadays, you can find the details on wikipedia, short version is they tried to get him killed but after a couple of years they realized he was not a very good military tactician yet still imposed his ideas/choices to the generals, so having him alive was beneficial to the allies.

Unsurprisingly this is roughly at this point that German's generals plots to kill him from inside started, although their reasons were more complicated.

spingsprong• 12 years ago

How about going back in time and changing Hitler's mind? I'm not sure what the best way to go about it would be, but it'd probably be worth a try before you kill somebody.

JonnieCache• 12 years ago

SMBC has dealt with this several times. Here's the most recent (and best) one: http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3266

tehwalrus2• 12 years ago

"Now that you’ve changed things, time travel wasn’t invented in your lifetime, so either you vanish and the whole thing is undone, or your time machine does."

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.

icebraining• 12 years ago

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.)

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,

tehwalrus2• 12 years ago

not at all. it just means you were always there in the past, and any action you took has already affected your own future.

maxerickson4• 12 years ago

Time travel is entirely outside of our theory of physics.

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)

deodorel2• 12 years ago

sorry to contradict you, but all the laws of physics are totally reversible, so in theory you could turn back physical time. The problem is that you need to do that for each atom, molecule from your body in order to reverse all the interactions. However it won't be time travel proper, except for the atoms/molecules in question.

blueskin_4• 12 years ago

Kill Hitler == no WW2 == no nuclear energy, no computers == no time travel == Hitler was never killed.

Time paradox.

conradfr• 12 years ago

* Time travel -> kill Hitler -> no WW2 -> no need to kill Hitler in the future --> Hitler not killed -> WW2 -> Time travel -> *

Time travel -> kill Hitler -> History changed -> previous time traveler doesn't exist in the future so he won't go -> ???

andyjohnson0• 12 years ago

Those technologies would still have been developed. It would just have taken longer.

yardie• 12 years ago

no nuclear energy, no computers

I guess guys like Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace just sat on their hands.

blueskin_4• 12 years ago

Fine, s/no/very delayed/

happy?

mcv6• 12 years ago

I guess guys like Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace just sat on their hands.

Well no, but they didn't succeed either. For a world where they did, read some steampunk literature.

_ak2• 12 years ago

Everybody kills Hitler on their first trip.

blindguardian• 12 years ago

Let's say somenone goes back in time and kills Hittler, does it really change our timeline events? Or it just creates an alternative timeline with alternative versions of us and nothing really changes here?

informatimago• 12 years ago

You're making the same mistake as those who talk about space travel usually make: you're considering the people who stay behind!

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!

magicroundabout• 12 years ago

I was waiting for a nod towards the Derek Parfit paradox: The idea that even if avoiding WWII would have made for a better course of history from an abstract utilitarian point of view -- a world with less suffering and more pleasure -- it would be ethically problematic because virtually none of the people who are actually alive today would exist in the alternate no-Hitler scenario. People who actually exist are more valuable than people who only potentially exist (it is difficult otherwise to explain the vast moral difference between a couple deciding not to have a child and having a child then painlessly killing her).

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.

yeukhon• 12 years ago

While I agree with the article, I think of time travel a bit differently these days.

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;

This construction makes sense. I copy myself and everyone in 1930. Because the original past we came from didn't have "us" in it. We didn't exist in 1930s. That is, adding an extra atom would mean a different 1930. This means whatever happens next, even if it were just removing that single atom again, doing so will affect everyone. How do you know that single atom didn't make the air module accelerate faster because that atom was hit so much more often?

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);

If 2014/02/21 7:35:01 - 7:35:02 are the two moments I want to preserve in the future, then we will have the following problem: the deepcopy of me is NOT compatible with the original me from 2014/02/21 7:35:01am AND 7:350:02AM. Because by the time I do a pointer modification, the deeopcopy of me from that new 1930 would have seen a real Hilter, killed a person for the first time. This is true for everyone else who lived through 1930s and 2014 in both the new and original world...

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.

RafiqM• 12 years ago

Life lessons from Command & Conquer: Red Alert.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_R6xCWcf_VU

MatthiasP• 12 years ago

I don't believe in single persons influence in history on a grand scale.

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.

Time travellers: please don’t kill Adolf Hitler

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