The End of Eternity

[airiefairie]

Here is a slightly more philosophical question. I know this is a primarily political community but please do bear with me if you like. What would happen if we could arbitrarily and without hindrances travel back and forth in time, to whichever "point" in time we wanted, and change past and future events in a way that would prevent the occurrence of

Comments

[policraticus]

The fault, dear airiefairie lies not in our stars, but in ourselves.

Utopias are bound to fail because they rely on fundamentally imperfect and dystopian building blocks, humans.

[luzribeiro]

Machines are so much better...

Vote Hal-3000!

[airiefairie]

You mean HAL 9000. =)

[luzribeiro]

Yes, him/her/it!

Surely...

[sophia_sadek]

... you must be aware that the letters for HAL were chosen because the are each a letter shy of IBM.

[404]

That must have been the non-murderous predecessors of the Hal-9000 series.

[luzribeiro]

Everything turns deadly, eventually.

[sandwichwarrior]

Aint that the truth.

[policraticus]

And what happened to HAL again?

[luzribeiro]

Some imperfect human defeated him, duh.

[policraticus]

The imperfect human was the one who programmed him. HAL failure started at the ground level. What Bowman was doing was fixing a malfunctioning machine.

"Daisy...

[sophia_sadek]

... Daisy, give me your answer, do."

The song was provided by Bell Labs from their electronic voice synthesizer. My sister obtained a copy of it on vinyl during a visit to the Labs.