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

[stewstewstewdio]

Let's look at it from the other side. How would this unimpeded prosperity reflect on mankind as a society? Wouldn't our desire to constantly seek for new ways of dealing with difficult circumstances fade out and become rudimentary? Wouldn't we become spoiled brats and begin to take eternal happiness for granted? And the total lack of evil? Wouldn't we quit looking for further development, wouldn't we close into ourselves, and stop dreaming, because we've decided that we have achieved everything that could be achieved; wouldn't we stop looking up to the stars and asking ourselves with genuine curiosity, "but what is out there, beyond"?

Welcome to the reality of the American vision of itself.

[airiefairie]

I'm afraid this sort of mentality is not specifically tied to any one nationality. It is probably universal, more emphasised in one place than another but still prevalent almost anywhere.

[jonathankorman]

John Holbo has a long blog post about the tendency for exactly this in a review of a book by conservative David Frum:Surely Frum is at most guilty of insufficiently vigorous advocacy of prosperity. He can’t be expressly advocating the lack thereof. Oddly, there are various strong hints that he is. Example:Contemporary conservatives still value that old American character. William Bennett in his lectures reads admiringly from an account of the Donner party written by a survivor that tells the story in spare, stoic style. He puts the letter down and asks incredulously, “Where did those people go?” But if you believe that early Americans possessed a fortitude that present-day Americans lack, and if you think the loss is an important one, then you have to think hard about why that fortitude disappeared. Merely exhorting Americans to show more fortitude is going to have about as much effect on them as a lecture from the student council president on school spirit. Reorganizing the method by which they select and finance their schools won’t

[underlankers]

Frank Herbert did this in God-Emperor of Dune, an all-powerful tyrant establishes millennia of peace and prosperity but does so by making Hitler and Stalin look like anarchists. This being Dune it can only end badly and does.

[htpcl]

There's some truth to this. Take my society for example. It's been in a permanent state of crisis for decades. It has toughened people, though made them more cynical. But they have no illusions. The world is a tough place and they know it. And they've devised all sorts of ways of dealing with difficulties, some of them might even appear shocking to you.

Even today there's a centuries old tradition, and even in urban places, that people would pack jars of winter supplies (mostly marinated vegetables) for the winter. Even after the invasion of trade centers and malls where fresh food is being sold in large quantities at relatively low prices. But people still pack those jars of "Turshia":

[luzribeiro]

Yummmm, pickled peppers and cauliflower!

[htpcl]

You'll eat your fingers!

[htpcl]

Imagine a couple of old ladies making a bonfire between your block and the next one, and baking some peppers that they'll later store in the cellar for the winter.

[underlankers]

The result would be a tremendous disaster because nobody would be able to agree on the idea of utopia and in the end produce multiple distinct deinotopias. To change history would be a very risky business, it would only take the absence of one horseshoe nail to prevent one great horror but then the course of history could easily lead to others.

[underlankers]

Or in the poetic form:

For want of a nail a shoe was lost.
For want of the shoe a horse was lost.
For want of a horse a messenger was lost.
For want of a messenger a battle lost.
For want of a battle an army slain, for want of an army death does reign.
And all for want of a horseshoe nail.

[htpcl]

The butterfly effect.

[underlankers]

Yup. Some might incline to this trope: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SetRightWhatOnceWentWrong but all I see with that is: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ButterflyOfDoom as there's virtually no way to alter history from a point we'd recognize that would minimize the horrors of the last century. The degree and form the horrors take can change, not the horrors themselves.

[notmrgarrison]

"And what if we could calculate precisely which possible scenario and which combination of circumstances is the most favourable, and then make it happen flawlessly without a glitch? Wouldn't that bring universal prosperity to all humankind"

I see no reason why the best possible scenario would necessarily lead to universal prosperity. By going back in time, you got rid of all the diseases and prevented all earthquakes, floods, droughts, car accidents, child abusers, ...

[mahnmut]

Didn't they deliberately curb any attempts for space progress? I don't remember the book very well but if memory serves, the moment someone made a discovery that would stimulate space flights, they instantly came back and erased it. Eventually it turned out mankind never left Earth and its vicinity. And in the meantime many alien civilizations thrived across the stars and occupied all the nice corners of the universe and we were condemned to solitary existence on our island, under the threat of dying out a natural death as a species.

But then the people from the far-far-future appeared and.... oh wait. Enough with the spoilers!

Short-version conclusion: expand or linger and die out. That's how most empires are being born. But the way they're born also hides the very reason for their eventual demise.

[airiefairie]

Yes, they thought that space flight is a waste of time and people should not waste their resource and should stay focused on life on Earth. Some parallels to modern times can be found...