And now a moment for the greater good
As part of The Internet's official Public Safety Awareness Campaign, I now present the following warning:
Ten things you should never touch while time traveling.1. Butterflies ( Read more... )
Ten things you should never touch while time traveling.1. Butterflies ( Read more... )
This one has to be the biggest cop-out of time travel stories. Yeah, yeah, millions of possibilities, chaos theory, there's no way to know how things will turn out, that's all true. But it can't be all that hard to come up with a result better than World War II and the fucking Holocaust. And you know what? Even if you do mess things up even worse than they "should" be, you've still got a goddamned time machine. Go give it another try, you lazy bum. Hell, lots of theories of time travel say you're not actually changing your own timeline, you're just adding yet another timeline to the infinite number already in existence. So you're not even screwing over your own world. Go nuts!
But seriously, folks, yes, "For God's sake don't make things worse than they already are!" is by no means bad advice for any situation, especially when one of the possibilities is "Worse than Hitler, if you can fucking believe that." But man does it get overplayed. Anyone out there who's thinking of writing a time travel story, take my word for it that the whole "We could go back and kill Hitler but don't know if we should" has already been done. A lot. And usually not well. Which is not a reason to think you could do it better, because you probably can't. Go after Stalin, for Christ's sake. He was an asshole, too, and at least it's a little more original.
Also, "You think Hitler's bad? You should've seen what happened before we meddled" is also not very original. Just for the record.
As far as the butterflies rule goes, I do of course agree with one specific exception. If you could duplicate Homer Simpson's feat of changing the world to the point that your family is rich and donuts fall from the sky, you're golden. The key is to stick around long enough to realize you're onto a good thing.
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