Quote:
Originally posted by Jaron
Sounds like we have a bunch of fatalists here. At least in a sense... in the "better the evil you know" crowd, and the "don't want to alter history" sense.
What if, as a hypothetical situation, someone had already done so? Say Billy the Kid should've been elected as president of the US, but someone shot him before he could get around to it? Or some other random unknown? Would it really be so bad? If it were so bad, would you know? Would you care? Would it matter?
A mild point of amusement for me... what if you killed all of Hitler's opponents? I mean, if you killed the other world leaders and key players of the time before they'd risen to power? Would Hitler still have become what he became?
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Ever play Command and Conquer: Red Alert? A similar situation arises, except that Hitler is killed (by Einstein of all people!
), and Stalin comes to power, interesting idea. There is also a book, which I haven't read, but is supposed to to be very good called "What if", which puts forwards "fictional histories" according to various "what-ifs".
Anyway, on a more serious not, I would claim that chaos theory comes into play. That altering the past in ANY way, no matter how tiny could end up having massive, and completely unpredictable consequences. Even consequences that would appear to be, completely ilogical.
I think its fair to say that the "non-linearity" (i.e. the "chaoticness") of the world is pretty large! So even trying to guess what the consequences of any specific event would be just as unaccurate as any attempt to predict the future from now.
EDIT: And I am definately not a fatalist. And I really don't think that anyone in this thread is. Quite the opposite in fact.