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what would you do if you could go back into the past ?


Purple Heart

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Well, killing Hitler would change way too much. And what if the result is even more bad? That would be way too risky.

When you kill him too early, you would be just a murder (well, for me you would be a murder anyway, because a life is a life.)

Without WW2 we wouldnt have seen how horrible nukes are. What if in the alternate history the USA and Russia launched all of them, because they are pissing each other off? Now we are ALL dead... good idea that with killing Hitler :awesome: 

 

I would just travel back to the year were I was 18... with a bunch of national lotterynumbers and EuroMillion numbers... then, back in 2015, my life would be better in EVERY way. Its unimportant what happenes then, everything would be an upgrade. Also, with just giving my younger self lotterynumbers Im harming nobody, so there is nothing bad with it. I mean, what should happen that can be bad, except that good guy Nep-ko is buying Sony...? Or maybe Zalando when in my 30s, because alternate history Nep-ko would be transgender.

*is thinking a moment*

There is nothing that can fuck up our existence.

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There's no way you can anticipate what would happen if you changed something in the past.

 

Lotery numbers? This would drastically change who you are. Plus you (or your relatives) could become a target for crimes to extort money of you. You could be dead today if you had millions back then or you could be lonely because the money prevented you from finding true love.

 

Kill Hitler before WW2 can happen? Sure he deserves it, but who knows what would change... Without WW2 a lot of technological developments would have been delayed, or not happen at all. Countries could be completely different from what they are today or not even exist at all. There's no way of knowing if the outcome would be better than we have today, it could just as easily be a lot worse.

 

A lot of bad things (maybe even every bad thing) in history has also caused a lot of good things (in the greater scheme of things).

Edited by Ric
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One thing I definitely WOULDN'T do is, as so many other people said they would do, is kill Hitler.  Think about it for a minute.  If you were to kill him before he could rise to power, you might potentially save tens of millions of lives, and the Second World War might - repeat, MIGHT - never even come to pass.  That has to be a good thing, right?  Well, yes....... and no.

 

Let's say you bumped Hitler off.  Mission accomplished, you might think - time to go home.  When you get back to your present, how do you know that the world you're returning to will be the same one you left behind?  You might think that the world is bound to be a better place, since he wasn't around to propagate the darkest, most devastating conflict in our history.  But what if another dictator figure stepped up in his absence and began their own war?  What if Japan initiated an attack greater than their assault on Pearl Harbor?  What if Joseph Stalin, who already had millions of deaths attributed to his regime even before WWII actually began, had launched a Soviet invasion of Europe?  What if the Cold War had escalated into a full-blown conflict?  Who's to say how any of those, or other similar, scenarios might have played out, and how they would have affected the future?

 

Even if we assume that WWII never took place as a result of Hitler's death, don't forget that the war claimed more than 60 million lives, which was roughly 3% of the world's then-population of 2.3 billion people.  If they had all carried on living, would we have had enough space and food to accommodate all those millions of people for many more decades, in addition to the billions of people who survived the war and who were born after it?

 

No, it's easy to think that you might be doing the entire planet a favour by taking one life to save 60,000,000 more, but there's just no way to know for sure what you'd be doing to the timestream.  You may even be forced to go back in time again to STOP yourself from killing him.  I'll lighten the mood somewhat by referencing the Back To The Future movies, in which Michael J Fox's character travels through time and makes a few little changes that he doesn't think will do any harm.  When he returns to his present, he realizes that he's totally screwed up his life as well as the lives of his family, so he has to travel through time again to try and undo his mistakes.  The same basic principle still applies - you shouldn't change anything in the past, because you just don't know how it will affect your future.

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I would pull practical jokes on every historical figure. I would be the Doctor Who version of the Joker! 

 

For those saying 'Kill Hitler'. Haven't you played Red Alert?

 

But we got President J.K. Simmons and Soviet Tim Curry, as well as the girls, so I guess it wasn't too bad.

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I wouldn't want to change the future too much, so I'd just do something small... like win the lottery. :devil:

 

I would pull practical jokes on every historical figure. I would be the Doctor Who version of the Joker! 

But we got President J.K. Simmons and Soviet Tim Curry, as well as the girls, so I guess it wasn't too bad.

Edited by Masamune_316
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