originally posted by: IseeyourBS
a reply to: AnAbsoluteCreation
Are you serious? No such thing.
Don't you think if time travel was real someone with some brains and technology would come back and attempt to change our history for the better or
for the worse.
The human body can not travel through time. Time travel is a hoax.
And who says that hasn't already happened?
Think of it like this - how hard would it be to change a major course in history? Could you send one person back and prevent a war? Wars tend to be
the culmination of a lot of factors, some of which might take centuries to build up.
Here's a thought for you. It's about a man called Herman Von Strumpet. He took control of the fledgling Nazi party from Hitler in the 30's and
eventually became the Fuhrer. He was evil, ruthless, driven, charismatic, incredibly intelligent, and a tactician that made Alexander the Great seem
like an amateur. Under his control, Germany swept through Europe, Russia, and Africa like a wildfire, unstoppable, eventually taking India, China, and
South America as well. Everyone who failed to meet his strict Aryan ideals was executed on the spot. Four fifths of the world's population was wiped
out.
A single man, a time traveller, was sent back to ensure that Herman Von Strumpet was killed in 1920. The Nazis still rose, but under Hitler. War still
broke out, people still died, but without Von Strumpet's guidance, Germany was stoppable.
Why not stop the war completely? First of all, how would a single person or a small team completely resolve all the social and economic issues that
brought about the war? Even if they could, how could they guarantee that the alternative timeline wasn't even worse? They could make an assessment
and calculate the potential outcome from a single death, but how to calculate the knock-on effects of radically altering the social and economic
landscape of an entire continent? Also, without that war, the research team that laid the groundwork for time travel would not have been funded, so
they had no way of knowing whether the technology would have been invented in their original time.
It reminds me of a quandary faced by Tom Baker's Doctor - he could destroy the Daleks before they rose to power, but without the threat of the
Daleks, thousands of different species would never have united in alliance and would still be waging war against each other. Would the universe
actually be a better place without the Daleks?
Regardless, you would have no way of knowing if the time line was ever altered, because you would never know any different. Just like you've never
heard of Herman Von Strumpet, because history books have no reason to note the death of an unknown man due to a freak accident with an apple strudel
and a length of hosepipe.
If time travel was possible, the only safe way to do it would be as a discrete observer, nothing else.
For the record, while I am loathe to discount any technology being possible, I would be incredibly surprised if time travel of the kind discussed here
was ever developed. That's as close to "it's impossible and it will never happen" as I like to get