Would You Kill Baby Hitler? Thread

How could you blame a baby for something that it hasn't even done?

...or you could prevent his "struggle" by positive intervention. People are easily influenced, especially younger children.

Uhm, no offense, but this is a rather weird poll...

I'm going to address the issue directly: Hitler did what he did, and it was horrible, but are we sure killing him would have prevented WWII and the Holocaust from happening? Had not been for the post-WWI situation in Germany, Hitler would have hardly gained enough power to make the worst tragedies of human history possible. In poor words, I believe someone would have played his role in his place, and may - I say may - have been even worse than him.

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Inferno: Alliance Standalone - Inferno SCP - Neo Terra Victorious

Or we can just let history play out regardless of the outcome. Most things in the cosmos are beyond our understanding. It's as simple as that.

...And unforeseeable is our very future, right now. Foresight is not a negative criteria to abstain from doing anything- but memory is.

Having the unique possibility to change the past, and after considering the shithole the world has become since WW2.... i'd HONESTLY, GLADLY risk it.
Otherwise, we'd just have to settle with... this.

But, if you ask me, I'D TRY TO PREVENT WW1 INSTEAD OF BOTHERING IN KILLING THIS FUCKER.

Unfortuantely, that's quite true ... alot of the higher level mechanical engineering concepts were basically formulated during the 1940s

Also, although im not in favor of killing hitler as a baby, I wouldn't think twice about changing the past.

Think about it like this. Would you let bad decisions and situations develop right now if you knew it would turn out bad? You have the capability to change the outcome, but you don't know if it will be better or worse. I would think that if original outcome was "pretty bad" it probably wouldn't be a bad idea to "roll the dice" for a different outcome. If you were to rate the scenarios with a normal distribution, odds are at greater than 50% that you will get a better scenario.

It's the same concept except in the past, you know Hitler is going to rise to power and start WWII, the question is how can you make the current (but actually you're in the past) situation better? Simply by changing events you probably have changed it for the better.

Of course you may not exist because you changed the past, but it seems like such a small thing to weigh against the lives of millions of people who died (and probably 10x that who never existed)

^
Implying WWII was fun

Too many poor assumptions in that article.

I know what it is (I've wasted many hours there before), but the article itself is less about presenting the plot devices and more writing them as if they'd be 100% true (saying that locating him would be the ultimate needle in a haystack when his life is pretty well documented, or saying outright that there would be a temporal paradox when the temporal paradox article it links to says otherwise). It spends several paragraphs trying hard to set the stage how killing Hitler would be a grave mistake, and then has to ironically close by admitting "there's no telling if a world without WWII would have turned out better or worse than the world we live in today". It's just not a good article. 

And there is no need to know for what has happened has already happened. Those Jews are dead, many of them are still buried beneath the snow mounds, and Hitler is apparently dead, but his legacy lives on through Nazism. What we now need to do truly is kill all of the Neo-Nazis. That is, if we don't want another holocaust on our hands.

That would F-up the timeline.

Um, what if it wasnt past, but present?  You would have no idea what the baby would do...
And if it is past, how do you get there?

More than that, the question or ideaology of altering past / future / present may all be moot.
If some of what quantum theorists posit is true the universe has alternate states and time lines that manifest _all_ possibilities.

So...
There is already a version of our universe with our earth and many of our selves where:
Hitler never existed, died early, or simply became a pacifist artist.
There was no WWII (Weimar republic got a better deal?  Avoided hyper inflation)...some 11 million (or more) people did not die.
Maybe the atom wasnt split in the 40s.  So no nuclear power either.
That alternates Europe (the parts hit hard in the war) must be incredible with all the old architecture still left.
But then maybe someone like Kadafi comes along and starts WWII...and its worse.  11 million instead is 3 billion.
Except there is an alternate where he doesnt.  An alternate to all the alternates where humanity coexists peacefully.

But the point is all these possibilities could have happened.
You dont need to go back in time and kill baby Hitler - you just need to go sideways in time to an alternate where he died young, or never existed... a world
that had no WWII.  Might want to make your device a two way gadget - you might not like the alternate world.

How about this: what if quantum theory and the bibles creation myth are both _correct_!
Then there is an alternate time line where Adam and Eve never got thrown out of Eden.  They live there to this day
in peace and tranquility, never changing immortals.  Hrm.  that might get a tad boring.

Simply no. And that mainly for two reasons:

1. War lies in the humans nature. If there wouldn't have been no Hitler, we'd most likely fought WW2 a couple years later with nukes.
2. If I would be forced to change the past, I would rather do my best to ensure his morality does NOT get broken.