It feels kinda wrong how quickly some people say they wouldn’t kill hitler if they were sent back in time and given the opportunity.
I’m using that scenario because it seems like a common example, but I’m curious about how materialist theory would approach this.
Barring the sci-fi theories around time travel and whether a new timeline is created, where I believe it’s fair game to change the past (since it’s a new timeline) would it be morally right to improve the world if flung into a version of the past?
My thought is that it would be a moral obligation to help with things and not just be a witness to atrocity.
Edit: I think my question was more - Is it wrong to do nothing if flung into the past when you know what is likely to happen, or is it more wrong to try to prevent or change it?
I ask because it’s almost a given in media and general discussion that you don’t mess with things on the chance you make things worse by interfering. That argument feels flawed and lib- brained and I don’t think I would be okay with a bad thing happening in front of me just because that’s how it happened in my history book. Like the idea of standing by and doing nothing in the face of suffering feels wrong especially with something as nebulous as ‘affecting the timeline’
Help a small village stop a Viking raid using your nanotechnology augments, then track down your old mafia boss who humiliated you for years and is also back in time in order to exploit the probability weirdness that comes with dimentional travel, re discover your boxing skills in order to finally beat the man you threw that fight to so many years ago that started your life down the spiral it had been going through the last few years and rediscover your self worth. Make some new friends with the local Himbo, traveling grifter, and the weird old lady in the woods. Potentially unleash lower dimentional God like beings into your own dimention with your technology after deciding to live the rest of your life interegrated into this new (old) world. Call that a good day 😊
that’s the problem with time travel in fiction, once it’s possible, it’ll never stop. But in the fictional story, it does stop, despite there being nothing to stop time travel from being invented again in the future by the endless number of inventors standing atop an ever-growing number of technological shoulders?
The book I’m pulling from, “The Frugal Wizard’s Guide to Medieval England”, doesn’t actually have any time travel, it’s dimentional travel, which has its own quirks that are explored in fun ways. It’s a good book if you like Brandon Sanderson’s particular brand of slop (mmmmm Sanderson slop 😋).
I feel like this does happen in fiction a bunch, various “time war” stories in comics and stuff