RE: Meet My 10 Time Travelling Death Defying Dinner Guests
Very interesting list, I'm not quite sure if there's a timeline where we have an intersection of guests though. I have tons of historical figures in mind, and I've given this subject a lot of thought in the past. So much that I even wrote a short story involving different philosophers in a weird dining philosophers problem type of scenario.
Reading through your list though, it might be interesting to invite ... the top 10 worst dictators (gasp), is it not? I'm talking about Hitler, Stalin, Hussein, etc. right before the moment they snapped. It's a strange picture, I know, but hear me out. What if we get to talk to them, really talk things through, and prevent the atrocities they would commit from ever happening? You could save a lot of lives just by inviting people over for dinner!
Now I know this poses a lot of other questions like wouldn't someone else just take their place, or would the time travel be that spark that makes them snap and commit those atrocities. Since you have control of time travel, you could just maroon them in your out-of-the-timestream dinner and prevent them from ever returning to their own time.
I believe those dictators had a different morality from you and wouldn't be convinced by the arguments you found convincing, like saving lives and human rights. stalin said you had to break some eggs when making an omlet, but it'd be a hell of a party. And also have an upvote.
Yeah, @laconicflow, I get your point. Though, it begs the question whether their moral inclination is caused by their physiology (brain wired that way) or circumstance (upbringing, trauma). That's why I wanted to take them right before they snap to see if they could be convinced otherwise. It doesn't necessarily have to be by me. It could be the other dictators that sway them away (i.e. they realize the error of that path). It's a very interesting scenario for sure.
No, I get it; I'm down with that; if anything it would be fascinating to see if they were destined to be monsters or not.
As far as time paradoxes go, don't get me started! I think the only way time travel could be reconsiled in any way, is that each time you travel back in time and do something different, like take Hitler to dinner, you create a separate universe where Hitler might not go on to be such a douche.
However you haven't changed the past in your own timeline, in this scenario, the grandfather paradox doesn't exist, because you can kill whomever of your relatives you want, without ever affecting your own timeline.
Btw, trapping 10 dictators in a perpetual, temporal dinner party, sounds like one hell of a book/film script!
:-D
Cg
It really does, and your thoughts on timetravel are my own. I've been planning a long involved timetravel novel for a long time and kept getting stuck on the paradox of like if you go back in the past and save Lincoln, and I want him dead so I go back and kill you, but you go back before either of those things to intercept me from killing you, and then I go back before any of that. . . The solution is that a world could exist where Lincoln died in a different pair of shoes, but everything not affected by Lincolns choice of shoes is the same, therefore it could still be manipulated by people who knew the history of our own world.
Effecting things on your own timeline, is too troublesome; then you get a Back To The Future situation. Whereby Marty McFly decides to come back 10 minutes early to save Doc.
However he then sees a past version of himself go into the past, and then presumably do all the things he did, to then come back again 10 minutes early to save Doc and see a version of himself do the whole thing again.
So we have to think about causal loops as well as paradoxes! :-D
Cg
I like the Back To The Future reference. In that scenario, it still posits that everything that has happened still happened, as the time traveler would always wind up "resetting" what he did by going back to before he did everything. It feels a bit timey-wimey at first, but when you step back to look at it, it really simplifies things. Everything still happened, it's just that he went back to prevent everything so that for other it would feel it never came to pass. But, it always happened because he remembered it happening.
@cryptogee the Many Worlds Interpretation! That's actually what I subscribe to, though I didn't want to bring it up because it isn't the conventional view of time travel (yet). We'd also have to take into account their importance in history. Were they necessary evils? Is taking them out of the equation opening the gate to larger atrocities? It's a pretty difficult balance to weigh, but I guess the stakes are higher for people who have such great powers afforded to them :D