You've been given the power to remove anyone, who was alive before you were born, from the timeline. How do you use this power without inadvertently making it so you were never born?
You've been given the power to remove anyone, who was alive before you were born, from the timeline. How do you use this power without inadvertently making it so you were never born?
tRump
This is what I thought as well.
If I picked Hitler (because that's the mandatory first choice) I'd be preventing WW2, which my Grandpa fought in. That would definitely affect my existence in some way.
I feel like Trump's influence between his birth and mine wouldn't have a direct impact on my parents' actions.
Someone in the comments said if you kill somebody you also kill any children they might have. I’m going to second your motion.
It's been discussed here much better than I could, but I concur with, you pretty much can't.
The slightest change would cause ripple effects that would affect almost everything.
Everyone always gravitates to the big names... Hitler, Trump, Elmo.. But even the most possible mundane person, such as an Inuit baby born to parents in the remotest part of the Arctic 200 years ago, would be enough to cause changes that could easily keep you from being born.
Time travellers don't go after Elmo, for a reason
Trump’s impact is recent enough it probably wouldn’t make me unborn. There’s a good chance removing Hitler would change things though.
I mean removing someone who was born in between when your parents got together and when you were born would be fairlu safe. The odds that some random baby's absence in those months/years that they're together but not pregnant is not impossible, but pretty slim.
If you can pick any time and place pick a random person in bumfuck middle of no where in Mongolia 1 day before you were born or even when your parents sexed that led to you would be fine. Unless you live in Mongolia
I remove Charles Sawell. Terrible President.
Do I have to ensure I'm still born? If not, I choose the last common ancestor of modern humans. We've screwed things up enough that I think the world would clearly be better off without us.
Sure, yeah. How would you know it worked though?
I wouldn't, but I would know if it didn't work and that's pretty much the same thing.
without inadvertently making it so you were never born?
I dunno, getting rid of the My Pillow guy might be worth it anyway.
Well, imagine you're trying to do the most good. Assuming you can't take them all out at once because the power doesn't work that way, maybe it does but how would you know? You would to see how many of these cancers you could knock off before you hit yourself by accident.
My birthgiver than, I'm doing it intentionally
I'll punch that fish trying to get out of the water. That will teach him.
Oh i wish i wish i hadn't sat on that fish...
https://youtu.be/nUt7Gdp4PdU?si=BoZOVvaOUfx7YtkE
I wouldn't. But if I absolutely had to, I'd try to find the shittiest person I could, born as close to when I was as possible, and as far away from me as they could be.
According to my interpretation of chaos theory, virtually any change can cause you to not be born. Even if just considering the butterfly effect for weather: a few weeks or months after the change, the weather in the new timeline will completely diverge from the old timeline worldwide, and this will affect your parents'/ancestors' behavior enough to change which genes get passed on, if they even still make a baby. And that's only the weather, there's a lot more chaos in the world.
The only exception is if the change happens just a short amount of time before you're conceived, and far enough away. Then I can believe that it could work. But it would still affect your entire life, which might be subtly or totally different from your life in the original timeline.
All that out of the way, there are quite a few politicians and billionaires I'd like to nominate. Too many to list.
The mathematical definition of a chaotic system is that you can find two paths that will eventually diverge to be arbitrarily different. But eventually is a keyword. Two very similar paths can and will progress very similarly for a long time.
It's impossible to know how long such a change will take to diverge. I guess my weeks/months estimate is baseless, I'll grant you that. But some changes will have faster effects than others.
For example, if you remove a very famous person or someone from royalty, it will change the news cycle, which millions of people read all over the place. Each person who reads or would have read the news about it would have their life slightly altered, so this one change causes millions of differences over a large area. With so many changes, it's likely that one of them will turn out more significant.
Prob the safest bet but I'm wondering if you can determine someone then kinda work your way back.
I remove a bee that stung one of the young parents of the man that disabled me altering the parent's biology and life just enough to alter which sperm is successful or cycle they are in effectively removing him from the timeline of a miserable life as a political refugee while having the cognitive capacity of a third grader. I stop his long line of destruction from living in a place where driving is required to survive, and there is no viable alternative for those that lack sufficient capability to perform the task. It is impossible for most of us to comprehend what a first generation driver is really like when we were born into driving culture. Some people were not, and their logic can lack a fundamental grounding that we take for granted.
Define "from before I was born".
Does that mean, "born before I was" or "died before I was born"?
The only way to guarantee that you don't cause a paradox is to not use the power at all.
There's a nine-month window that should be pretty safe.
Nope, you need to use the power to fix the timeline!
Do I have to remove their entire life or can I pick a point in time in their life where they are alive, but the next moment suddenly go poof and vanish into thin air?
All the butterfly theory and chaos theory and other such things aside, as messed up as it sounds, probably go back in time to the week before I'm born and find some newborn baby from the 3rd world country who won't make it more than a few days and remove them. They weren't gonna live long anyways. Again, messed up, but probably ensures I wouldn't inadvertently make myself never born.
Name: Adrian Colebrook
Date of Birth: September 22, 1981
Reason: He knows what he did.I don't have anyone I'd want to remove and I'm also not so naive to think it wouldn't come with major unpredictable consequences.
I would take out that time-travelling trophy hunter who stepped off the path and squished a butterfly.
Well, regardless of who you remove, you can't change the original timeline. That original timeline will just keep trucking along as usual. What WILL happen is that a new timeline will branch off; one in which said person no longer exists. But you would never see it unless you travelled back in time and affected the change personally; meaning you're now in that timeline; an active part of it, and thus never able to return to your original. If you travel forward again, you're still in the new timeline. If you travel back, you create yet another new timeline; once in which the wave function collapsed to show that you travelled back in time.
It's a wave function collapse. We live in a universe where that wave function collapsed to say said person existed. If we blink them out of existence, we're essentially re-opening the box, which creates a new tangent. But that original collapse still exists. It happened; it's immutable.
Re-rolling a dice doesn't change the fact that it's already been rolled before.
Weirdly enough, the best example of that is ironically the season three episode of Community called "Remedial Chaos Theory"
This power allows you to change the original timeline.
Jesus. Oh wait, he wasn't real. BRB
I mean you could probably still remove him from the timeline, as in remove any mention of him so that he actually doesn't exist in any context.
No screw it I'm removing myself. Only way to be rid of this insanity
Oh shit before I was born ok I guess my father for the same reason.
Just a reminder to people: if you remove anyone who has (or will have) children, from a certain moral perspective you're responsible for them never existing, which could be considered akin to murder. Just take that into account in your considerations. Might make this a much thornier question, ethically, for some.
Murder is taking someone's existing life without their consent.
This is just preventing further life existing in the first place. Basically same as abortion. The fetus could have grown up, had kids, grandkids,... It's still just someone else making that decision.
Hell, perhaps I could even say it's the same as using a condom. Same thing, someone could have been born, etc.Can't murder someone who doesn't exist.
Some of us are fine with murder when it comes to the relative outcomes. If I can murder someone to save 100 lives (and there's no doubt at all that it would), I wouldn't even flinch before driving the knife into their skull.
In this hypothetical, we already know our targets body-count. So it's easy to make the math work.
Personally, I'd remove Ronald Regan.
That's just sophistry. You can't kill people who never existed in the first place.