I love time travel sci-fi, as well as alternate history novels. They pose very interesting questions. If you have not watched, I highly recommend Amazon's The Man In High Castle - about a world in which the Nazis won. Phillip K. Dick won a Hugo for an accurate depiction of life under Nazis after WWII (which is like the Nobel Prize for Sci Fi).
One of my favorite all-time stories was in a multipart Star Trek Voyager. The story is about two warring empires where a scientist in one figures out how to exist outside of time and to erase various key events. He does this by living on a space ship that resides outside of time. There he calculates complex trajectories of various events. As a consequence, he manages to restore his empire to glory, but at a heavy personal cost - the loss of the small rural planet where his beloved wife was born.
In the first episode, you see him trying to erase Voyager off the history. It is absolute hell for the crew. In the 2nd episode, two of the crew somehow make it over to the timeless ship, you see the events from their point of view. It's very interesting. The alien captain/scientist is not mad or callous. He is an enlightened and loving man who is misguided. Above all, he just wants to put things back to the way they were (and get his wife back), but he just can't. In the third episode, the Voyager crew initiates a successful mutiny and the Time Ship self destructs (as the crew in there were tired of living forever through so many timelines they no longer knew who they were and what they were fighting for). But the real twist came at the final scene. The scientist is having a beautiful afternoon with his lovely wife on his porch. It turns out that his ship was the obstacle into restoring the timeline to what it was. When it was destroyed, his goal came true.
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Ok - back to a more serious discussion of the issue in the article. I am of the opinion that the major arc of history cannot be changed. This opinion is based on many convergent and separately discovered trends around the globe throughout history. In science and engineering, they tell that an idea whose time has come cannot be stopped. Even something as simple as snowboarding was separately invented by many people right around the same time. It just happened that the patent system prevented them all claiming the same invention - in a different era, many people in many countries would have said they are the inventor.
I see no reason why social trends should be different - and in fact for the most parts they are not. The most recent case in point is the rise of right-wing populism in the Western World. So no, I don't think killing baby Hitler would have made a dramatic difference in the overall arc of history. |
