Except if time travel were possible, and if it is possible to change the past, going to the past would be a reality-level roulette wheel. You travel back to an empty spot in the middle of Antarctica 100 years ago. You stay there for five minutes. Then you come home. Thanks to the butterfly effect, that tiny action would completely reshuffle the deck of history. Very few people currently alive would have ever been born. Just you being there would subtly alter weather patterns enough to completely change major weather events decades in the future, with all the knock on effects that would have.
This is the problem with trying to change the past. You can’t just make careful changes and slightly adjust the timeline. It’s completely rerolling history every single time you travel back.
There are very few situations where changing the past would this be worth it. You could use it for very short term changes. Prevent yourself from getting in that car accident. But whenever you start talking years, you’re just playing a game of chance you have zero control over. Traveling 100 years into the past means erasing anyone you have ever known or cared about. Maybe such a thing would be worth it to prevent civilization-ending catastrophes like a nuclear war. But otherwise there’s just no point. Changing history is not something you can have any say or control over. It’s purely random chance.
The Butterfly Effect is pure conjecture. There’s no way to know that just existing in a spot that you didn’t originally exist in would change anything noticeable. And since time travel has no concrete rules, as it hasn’t be achieved as far as we know, there’s no way to know how literally anything you did would affect things. My personal favorite model is where everything you do creates a separate timeline, eliminating the Grandfather Paradox.
Except if time travel were possible, and if it is possible to change the past, going to the past would be a reality-level roulette wheel. You travel back to an empty spot in the middle of Antarctica 100 years ago. You stay there for five minutes. Then you come home. Thanks to the butterfly effect, that tiny action would completely reshuffle the deck of history. Very few people currently alive would have ever been born. Just you being there would subtly alter weather patterns enough to completely change major weather events decades in the future, with all the knock on effects that would have.
This is the problem with trying to change the past. You can’t just make careful changes and slightly adjust the timeline. It’s completely rerolling history every single time you travel back.
There are very few situations where changing the past would this be worth it. You could use it for very short term changes. Prevent yourself from getting in that car accident. But whenever you start talking years, you’re just playing a game of chance you have zero control over. Traveling 100 years into the past means erasing anyone you have ever known or cared about. Maybe such a thing would be worth it to prevent civilization-ending catastrophes like a nuclear war. But otherwise there’s just no point. Changing history is not something you can have any say or control over. It’s purely random chance.
The Butterfly Effect is pure conjecture. There’s no way to know that just existing in a spot that you didn’t originally exist in would change anything noticeable. And since time travel has no concrete rules, as it hasn’t be achieved as far as we know, there’s no way to know how literally anything you did would affect things. My personal favorite model is where everything you do creates a separate timeline, eliminating the Grandfather Paradox.
“Time Police” is my favorite, cause it’s whimsical-ish. But infinite infinity is also a fun thought experiment
I wonder what the Department of Temporal Investigations thinks of Janeway. If Kirk’s a menace, what’s she??