CRS
Chandler, Arizona, United States

There's an old saying. If you don't want someone to join a crowd, you ask them, "If everyone were jumping off of a cliff, would you?" Well, I have. So my answer would be "Yes". True story.
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A Hypothetical Question About Time Travel

Wednesday, May 09, 2007

this entry brought to you by gnarls barkley, "gone daddy gone"


Let's say that you had a friend who came up to you one day and told you that he had something very important to talk to you about. He says that he has invented a time machine, and that the changes made in the time stream were absolute. Anything done in the past would change the present without creating a seperate time line. If you went into the future, this was an absolute future, with no way around this. He then tells you that he plans on going back in time and killing Adolf Hitler as a child so that World War II could never happen. Indeed, he has figured out that if he does such a thing World War II never comes about, and moreover, the Holocaust never happens. The countless millions of lives would never be lost, but also, America finds another way out of the Great Depression at roughly the same time they did in our time stream, and the baby boom generation is born from our country's thriving economy, not from the elation of a war that has just finished. You and everyone you know would still be born in exactly the same way they were in current times, with or without the war, so killing Hitler has nothing but positive reprecussions throughout time, except one thing: Your friend has discovered that somehow, the early death of Hitler will set off a chain of events that will lead to your mother getting a terrible disease three months after your next birthday. This is a flesh disease where anything that comes in contact with her skin will remove it, causing horrendous pain, not to mention the time spent healing the skin back. Your mother will not be able to come in contact with any other human being, not be able to wear traditional clothes, not be able to bathe in a traditional way-- and within 7 years, your mother will succumb to this horrifyingly painful disease, after having lived the entire time in nothing but relentless, excruciating pain. Knowing that your friend killing Hitler would allow millions of innocent lives to continue living and dying natural, normal deaths, but would cause your mother to live the most excruciating life imaginable until she dies, do you allow your friend to do it?
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with love from CRS @ 5:29 AM 

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