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

[abomvubuso]

The first Asimov thing i ever read was The Gravitational Death of the Universe or something like that. Well, it wasn't fiction but popular science, but it made me such a strong impression that it was prolly one of the reasons i got so enchanted by cosmology and astrophysics. He was way ahead of his time. And i'm seeing even today Hollywood is exploiting his ideas widely and making blockbusters like Minority Report, Adjustment Bureau, etc.

[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!

[the_rukh]

We are already spoiled brats who take "happiness" (lack of danger, lack of needs) for granted. Humans are geniuses at inventing new "worst problem evar"s. If we can't think of anything, we turn to television for it.

[airiefairie]

I think that is the point Asimov was trying to make: we are already living in that dystopia. It is inside us.

[underlankers]

That analysis of course assumes that "we" means First World liberal democracies. I don't think spoiled brats would even survive in the Hell that is the Congo right now, or in the poorer and more violent parts of the world. The whole problem with sci-fi has been that it assumes that the First World is the only future for the world, instead modern times has a few areas that are extremely technologically advanced and a tremendous majority of humankind where life remains nasty, squalid, brutal, and short. For them there's yet to be anything *but* dystopia.

[the_rukh]

Yes, that was the assumption. I actually thought about adding a whole lot more but had to go to work.

I was going to add that a population such as this is ripe for getting behind causes, both asinine (tea party) and noble.

Pastwatch

[russj]

Another novel which examines the use of time-travel to conduct interventions is "Pastwatch" by Orson Scott Card.

I wrote a review of this book some time ago here
http://russj.livejournal.com/16276.html

In that book, an intervention was planned to oppose the practice of slavery. In the process, it was found that slavery was tolerated as a lesser evil, resulting from a previous 'time-travel intervention' which opposed the evil of human sacrifice.

Although I have to say that Asimov's novel is a better read--one of the all time sci-fi greats.

In Asimov's book, the numerous interventions conducted by Eternity to eliminate risk, resulted in the stagnation of the human race, compared to other competing civilizations.

Re: Pastwatch

[mahnmut]

Interesting. I was just wondering what to read.

[luzribeiro]

This reminds me of a theory about UFOs. If we assume that UFOs are real, one possible explanation could be that they're not from another planet but from our distant future. And those creatures inside are us, but evolved after thousands of centuries. A sort of time travelers.

I'm just fantasizing! :)