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May. 8th, 2009 14:46Jo Walton wrote a very good piece on time travellers in Montreal:
http://www.livejournal.com/users/papersky/150837.html#cutid1. The ones she talks about are helpful or at least harmless.
But if the past can be changed, some time travellers would be making deliberate alterations. And not all of these would be useful or harmless.
Example: Hitler first existed in the mind of a crackpot, then in his writings in which he claimed that the history everyone knew was a pack of conspiratorial lies.
In the untouched course of history, European politics could never have become insane enough for a Hitler (or even a Mussolini) to achieve power. But the pseudo-historian acquired followers. And after his death, time travel was discovered. It was possible to go back in time, and see that history hadn't followed nearly the course his followers knew it must have followed. Obviously (to them), The Conspiracy must have altered the past as a way of continuing the cover-up.
The pseudo-historian's followers realized what must be done. They went back through time, changing events to what they believed was the original state. In the process, they destroyed the history which led to them. (Don't mourn for them; thanks to chrono-inertia, they continued to live.)
This has happened "before". Taig of Silver Mountain believed, against all evidence, that Earth had once had a moon. His followers went back to a time before the origin of life; and they "restored" Earth's moon as Taig had described it. Result: when life evolved on Earth, it was very different from the life they were descended from.
http://www.livejournal.com/users/papersky/150837.html#cutid1. The ones she talks about are helpful or at least harmless.
But if the past can be changed, some time travellers would be making deliberate alterations. And not all of these would be useful or harmless.
Example: Hitler first existed in the mind of a crackpot, then in his writings in which he claimed that the history everyone knew was a pack of conspiratorial lies.
In the untouched course of history, European politics could never have become insane enough for a Hitler (or even a Mussolini) to achieve power. But the pseudo-historian acquired followers. And after his death, time travel was discovered. It was possible to go back in time, and see that history hadn't followed nearly the course his followers knew it must have followed. Obviously (to them), The Conspiracy must have altered the past as a way of continuing the cover-up.
The pseudo-historian's followers realized what must be done. They went back through time, changing events to what they believed was the original state. In the process, they destroyed the history which led to them. (Don't mourn for them; thanks to chrono-inertia, they continued to live.)
This has happened "before". Taig of Silver Mountain believed, against all evidence, that Earth had once had a moon. His followers went back to a time before the origin of life; and they "restored" Earth's moon as Taig had described it. Result: when life evolved on Earth, it was very different from the life they were descended from.