And don’t forget: we don’t exist in future either, in any possible fictional scenario that could be imagined in the mind of a writer or film director.
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If I want to watch a movie about [field] during [historical period], I’ll watch a documentary. One of the dull ones used in lectures during the 1960s. Or a hygiene film, whatever. If I’m watching a story that has any human interest whatsoever, it isn’t simply about [field] during [historical period].
But white male “auteurs” should feel free to bend the truth in favor of white male protagonists for the sake of their art, I guess 
But… but… what if they really weren’t allowed to talk to each other 
It’s important that we preserve mistreatment of women for historical accuracy, but we make the white male protagonists larger-than-life superhero Mary Sues. Because that’s what interests our white male audience.
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Reminds me of an article I read in one a history magazine about time travel shows that are always about preserving the time line… well… why? Why do that? First, it’s fiction, no one is actually changing history, so why not make improvements in a fictional environment. Second, if we could time travel, we really wouldn’t know if changes would have good or bad outcomes in the “new” future, but things could be improved in the past. Why not do it, if you have the means?
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I’d shoot Hitler, but Hitler killed off the person who would kill my father in an alternate timeline, so therefore I wouldn’t exist to shoot Hitler.
Or something like that.
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I had a tutor who once voiced her opinion that “Who are you to decide that history should be changed back, affecting millions if not billions of lives by killing Hitler?”
Her colleagues’ response was that it just goes to show the importance of staying in Art college…
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Of course, the reality is that we have no idea if time travel is even possible, and if it were, what that would mean. If it’s a possibility, it’s already happened (you only need one time travelers convention…).
But the question is also about morality and making the world a better place, even the past. Orson Scott Card I think deals nicely with this question in Pastwatch (although I’m not in agreement with his core conclusion on what would make a better timeline necessarily, as his answer is basically Jesus).
Same question back at her, who gets to make the moral judgement that the murder of millions of people for no reason whatsoever is what should have happened?
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Wasn’t that one of the points made in City on the Edge of Forever? Dr. McCoy (while in the past) thought he was making an improvement by saving Edith Keeler’s life, but in so doing he destroyed the future for Kirk/Spock/Uhura the landing party et al.
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The answer is nobody.
Never step off the path, because one butterfly is important.
Then again, it also holds that nobody would know anything changed back here.
It really is best not to mess with Time at all.
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It’s happened over and over and over - we’re the final result of an extremely long exercise in temporal long division. The waveform collapsed into ourselves.
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Yeah, but we have no idea what might have been or could have been, right? Is there a “correct” history in a scenario where history can be changed? In a way, that’s what historians do, offer up new interpretations of the past based on new evidence or new understandings. How we understand women’s lives, for example, is much more nuanced and complicated now than it was 40 or 50 years ago. We know that women were never really “out” of the public sphere, were always in the labor market, were always shaping history as much as men. We used to not believe that… we imagined that most women were at home, studiously not making history. And as Laurel Ulrich has shown, the women who were imagined to be well-behaved made just as much history as their more rebellious counter parts.
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I’ve always found the scifi concept of the “fragile timeline” somewhat annoying. It makes for some interesting drama, but that’s not really what physics is like. There is tremendous resistance to permanent change. There are many examples where you have to pour extra energy (sometimes orders of magnitude more) to get a permanent change in the states of matter. Why would time be any different?
If there is such a thing as temporal hysteresis, that would be good news for time travelers - they wouldn’t be able to mess things up by stepping on an ant. But it’s also bad news if the intent was to make a positive change for the future. It means that the timeline is going to “heal” any damage made. You might kill Hitler, but that won’t prevent the rise of Nazism in Germany. You would have to fundamentally change the sociopolitical environment of Europe to really change the timeline. 
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World War one would have to be averted… so would the depression.
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Or maybe it really is as simple as someone going back and giving Adolf a hug and telling him his art is really good. 
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This coming from you. Uh huh. Pull the other one.
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Chaos is where the present determines the future, but the approximate present does not determine the approximate future. In other words, something that’s just a little bit off can change the future significantly. That doesn’t mean that it will, just that it theoretically can. If the future is chaotic, then it will converge to some set of fixed points based on the present state. If we’re on the divider between any two of those states, it wouldn’t take much to push change in one direction or another, but otherwise the future would converge to the point it would normally converge to.
And there are a lot of assumptions even in that.
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So maybe someone should shoot Gavrilo Principe instead of Hitler?
Maybe the people who write these things should study more history, so we know who it is we should shoot.
Spoiler
It is some dinosaur.
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(Sorry, I didn’t mean to derail the thread. Or even to nudge it off-course.)
It might be possible to make small changes over long periods of time to nudge it along. If it follows the pattern of other areas of physics, there might be a “preference” or tendency to follow a path of low energy or resistance to change. Something like water flowing downhill or electrical current following conductive pathways. And changing the timeline to favor a lower-energy state might also release tremendous temporal energy to make changes elsewhere.
For instance, if decreasing social chaos allows a timeline with a lower energy state, then making changes that avoid war would be more favorable than changes that increase conflict.
And now, in a diving catch attempt to bring my post back towards the topic(
) , what if one made small changes along multiple points along the timeline to bring more influence to marginalized people. Women, minorities, etc. Stabilizing society by reducing inequality would greatly reduce the fundamental driving factors of war.
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Basically the plot of this film…
Without the wibble-wobbly-timey-wimey stuff.
That assumes that the future that is something that is already there and set, that events are predetermined, and we have no agency. It assumes a particular path, which I’m not a fan of…
It’s assumptions all the way down!
The Austro-Hungarians wanted an excuse to invade the rest of the Balkans… Princip just gave it to them. If it hadn’t been him, the Black Hand was more than willing to provide another pretext. You have to completely transform imperial politics in the Balkans, and probably make sure that the Balkan Wars do not happen in the first place, which would necessitate not having the French, English, and Russians manipulating events there.
Oh, no, this is all on me!
Again, doesn’t that presume events that happened HAD to happen? It seems to me like this energy problem can flow with the same force in various directions?
Yes! Of course, this is always one of the first things that people who are interested in preserving the timeline point to and that people who have actual skin in the game would like to change.
But of course, it’s all academic, in the sense that we’re talking about popular culture representations of time travel, which is all we know is possible at this point in time. There really isn’t any reason why we can’t imagine alternate timelines in popular culture where such things are a reality. Isn’t that what popular culture is for, imagining something better?
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I just don’t want everybody thinking I’ll just keep fixing stuff
At some point we all have to be responsible NOW and fix it before it gets bad. There’s no do-overs.
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Now that I’ve finished watching “The Man In the High Castle”, and read this conversation, I realize I need to read the book so I can see what Dick’s solution was at the end. (My sense is that the TV series closed up the storyline early.)
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