Monday, September 16, 2013

The Ethics of Time Travel

In 2009 Stephen Hawking threw a party, but didn’t reveal the date, time, or place to anyone until after it already occurred. It was a simple time travel experiment; if people of the future with functioning time machines came across the invitation they could prove to our present society that time travel is eventually possible by going back and showing up to the party. Unfortunately, no one showed up.

If someone had, though, they would have maybe hung out only to chat a bit with the great physicist before going back home (after all, the invitation was only for a short party). Assuming Hawking convinced us that he really was visited by someone from the future, the only predictable effect the visitor’s appearance would have would be demonstrating that we will someday achieve the ability to travel back in time. Because we’re already trying to figure out today how to make time travel possible, a brief conversation at the party wouldn’t really change the course of history. Maybe her consumption there of a few cupcakes would mean a few more cupcake wrappers in a landfill than there otherwise would be, but the world would continue pretty much as it normally would.

But not all trips into the past would leave such a small footprint. When and where a traveller shows up, how long he stays and what he does all contribute to how much he’ll change the course of history. If someone goes back in time to the side of some lonely country road, flags down a car, and asks the driver for five bucks to pay for a meal, the driver may leave without enough money to fill up his car and arrive on time to meet his date at a restaurant. Because he misses her and doesn’t get another opportunity to see her again, he can’t go on to marry her and start a line of descendants that ultimately produces the person who plays a key role in preventing a nuclear armageddon.1 Borrowing that five bucks could mean covering the world in mushroom clouds.

That seems like a pretty extreme example, but tiny happenings have had huge impacts on the course of history. When Corporal Barton W. Mitchell picked up a random envelope of cigars on a campground that had been recently abandoned by Confederate soldiers in 1862, its contents gave the Union intelligence that helped it win the bloody, but crucial Battle of Antietam. That victory was huge for the Union and even gave President Lincoln the confidence to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. Today’s only super power could conceivably be two different countries had Mitchell paid a little less attention to where he was walking.

So it’s not hard to imagine that going back in time, even very briefly, could inadvertently change the course of history in a major way. If going back in time can cause so many potentially awful changes, could going back at all be morally permissible? If someone went back to assassinate Hitler as he was gearing up for World War II, he may succeed, but could inadvertently provoke, say, a psychotic Nazi colleague to take up the mantle and initiate a war just as devastating. Even good intentions could lead to bad outcomes.

But say someone does have the ability to go back and kill Hitler as he’s gearing up for war and does so, and averts World War II entirely. And say the guy going back somehow knows for certain beforehand that he’ll pull it off well enough to avoid igniting a conflict just as bad or worse. Does that assurance make it permissible? While some different people will inevitably die because of the new circumstances (maybe someone who would originally have been fed in the military was instead a civilian who died of hunger), the person’s trip back saved the lives of millions and millions of people.But because of the trip, millions, if not billions, of people to live since wouldn’t have been born. There would be others in their places, and the time traveller would go back to find many, if not most, of his friends and family to be very changed or different people entirely. People who had good fortune and happiness in the normal course of history could instead have poor lives in a new history — he may save millions, but he hurt some of those who were to originally be just fine.

I think the ethical permissibility of the travelling example from the last paragraph could come down to individual opinion and values. Would changing the natural course of history, even to prevent an enormous amount of suffering and thus completely transforming what constitutes the present, be okay?

But going back and changing history like that effectively kills off the possibility of what would have been. If Hitler had been killed early on, what we think of as the 1940s to the present would only be considered one random story within alternate history fiction. To put it another way, imagine that Hitler was originally going to be killed early on, but some psychopath from the future went back in time and saved him. The natural course of history, then, does not include a World War II or a Holocaust and all its lingering effects, but one of relative peace. That course to us today, however, is moot because we never experienced that would-have-been peace. So if what could have been peace stopped being a possibility because of the traveller and the alternate history of a World War II became the real and only course of events, does it matter to those of us in the relative past if someone goes back in time to change something? Would it matter more if we today knew who the meddler from the future is and what exactly she’d done?

I think the risk of screwing something up and making things worse than they otherwise would have been is enough to make travelling back to the past at least a bit unethical. Perhaps if we have good intentions and could be absolutely sure that everything will go well it would be okay since no one could know what life could have been like otherwise. But then again if someone from the future appears in the past then it seems to me like it would be a foregone conclusion that he’d have to go since the trip’s already happened — his appearance compels the trip and he may not have a say.

At the very least, time travel’s something that should probably be heavily regulated should we ever figure it out.

1 The person who would go back to borrow the five dollars could be killed by that nuclear war she caused before getting the chance to go back in time in the first place. So this doesn’t get too messy or convoluted, I’ll ignore time travelling paradoxes and the like in this article to simplify things.

This article was originally published at Medium.com with the subtitle "Would it be morally permissible to meddle with the past?"

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