The butterfly effects would add up and and any zygote formed would not be the hitler-as-we-know anymore, since it would be a different combination of sperm and eggs.

Who needs guns when you got a time machine? Don’t like your highschool bully, just bump into their parents back in time. Or you know, “bump” ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) into their parents.

  • starman2112@sh.itjust.works
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    29 minutes ago

    The real criticism of this plan is that whether you assassinate Hitler or just prevent his birth, it doesn’t solve the societal problems that led to the world wars. Hitler wouldn’t have happened, but the Germans would still feel snubbed by the outcome of the Great War

  • philpo@feddit.org
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    4 hours ago

    Dude, don’t you think we tried that? The first time we got Schickelcutlerstalin for some reason who killed everyone with his out off-control biological weapons. Then for some fucking reason we got a fucking snake hitler!

    And now we are all out of time-travel juice and locked down in a reality where hitler lived AND an orange is also hitler. Well, I had a little bit left,but a giant testicle came along, kicked me in my testicles,shouted “you want fucking Mother Theresa torturing everyone to death” and disappeared.

    Now I am stuck here. Fuck.

  • Maple Engineer@lemmy.world
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    3 hours ago

    That’s not how time works. If you go back in time and kill Hitler Hitler already happened in your timeline so he’s going to happen again. You can’t change things that already happened in your past.

    • starman2112@sh.itjust.works
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      33 minutes ago

      Time is a one-way linear progression, you can’t go back in the first place. Any fictional story where time travel happens necessarily has its own rules, and every one is equally valid

    • iglou@programming.dev
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      2 hours ago

      It’s not like we actually know how time travel would work. Because, you know, it’s not currently a thing at all.

      • Maple Engineer@lemmy.world
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        1 hour ago

        I think that it’s fairly settled theory that if you perceived it it happened. If you went back to the past and caused it not to happen then it wouldn’t have happened and you wouldn’t have perceived it. Basically, you can’t change what already happened because whatever you did in the past had already happened when you perceived and therefore nothing that you did changed anything.

        • iglou@programming.dev
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          5 minutes ago

          Not at all. There is many ways to rationalize time, nothing is settled at all. The “settled theory” you talk about would create paradoxes, if time travel is ever made real. And paradoxes don’t work well with reality.

          There is actually a fairly common way to rationalize time that is the opposite of what you’re describing: Time is entirely a construct, there is no past, no future, only the present. Take away all of humanity’s memories and the past doesn’t exist at all.

          There’s also an understanding of time that says it only goes forward, making time travelling to the past impossible.

          • Maple Engineer@lemmy.world
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            3 minutes ago

            If you don’t like something that happened to you today and go back to 2000 to change something that change that you made in 2000 had already occurred in 2000 when the thing that you didn’t like happened in 2025. What happened in 2025 happened after the change you made in 2000.

  • rumba@lemmy.zip
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    6 hours ago

    Butterfly effect is as likely to make him more dangerous as it is to make him less

  • Siegfried@lemmy.world
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    10 hours ago

    We have our own hitlers living now. I think we should care about them first before thinking on time traveling

    • Lemming6969@lemmy.world
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      1 hour ago

      This is the correct answer in any single chain deterministic universe… It always happened just like that.

    • BeardedGingerWonder@feddit.uk
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      6 hours ago

      Oh man, this happened with my wife too, just bumped into her and next thing you know she’s pregnant. I can’t believe how fertile I am sometimes.

      • hungryphrog@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        10 hours ago

        Ehh, people are capable of doing pretty nasty shit regardless of sex or gender. But on the other hand, had Hitler not been a cis man, it’d have been a lot harder to get in a position of power that’d enable hitler to do what he did. So I see your point.

  • FriendOfDeSoto@startrek.website
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    21 hours ago

    Let’s say you’re right and you’ve prevented the birth of Adolf or altered him to send him to another life trajectory. Who is to say that there wouldn’t be another mad person, naturally a man, who would rise to power and commit similar if not even worse crimes. It’s not only the person that made the fuehrer possible, it’s also everything happening in the world, especially politics at the time. So you’ve bumped Adolf but you’ve created Anton who was similarly radicalized but he wasn’t a landscape painter, he was a physics major and he made Germany develop nuclear weapons much faster. So now you have to go back and disturb Anton’s conception. Which brings about fuehrer Armin and so forth. You might be stuck in a time loop you’ll never be able to stop because you can’t control all the variables.

    • bizarroland@fedia.io
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      21 hours ago

      For real, there was nothing particularly special about Hitler that made him the one and only being of his type.

      It was a confluence of multiple differing things, the emergence of new media technologies, and the ability to repeat a single message over and over again to as many people as needed to hear them without any equally as loud voices of dissent.

      Combine that with an incredible financial depression and the consequences of an ill thought war being foisted upon your country’s shoulders.

      Admittedly, it was his own personal biases against the Jewish people that caused the Holocaust, and the Aktion T4 was similarly born out of his hatred of people with mental disabilities.

      In any case, if you take a miserable nation, give them a lightning rod to direct all of the misery of their own lives at, and an eloquent or charismatic leader to tell them it is okay to vent their frustrations on the helpless people that surround them, then you too can create another Hitler.

    • Without the Holocaust, there’d have been no international horror over the atrocities of concentration camps, gas chambers, human experimentation, genocide. Anti-Jewish sentiment was rampant around the world.

      Progressives made a lot of progress off the back of WWII, and the anti-fascist sentiment in the US that survived until the greatest generation died and their grandchildren took over. It’s entirely possible that, without WWII, the fascism we see in the US today would have happened much earlier, and we’d have run our own concentration camps.

      Ironically, the people who probably would have benefited most from preventing “Hitler” would be the modern Palestinians, because without Hitler, Israel would not exist today, and it wouldn’t be carrying out a genocide.

    • Aurenkin@sh.itjust.works
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      20 hours ago

      Reminds me a bit of the setting for the Red Alert series of games. Although there they actually go back in time and kill Hitler so different from the scenario in this post but the possible alternate timelines are fun to think about.

  • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world
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    19 hours ago

    The butterfly effect refers to divergent chaotic systems. Chaos in math isn’t the layman’s chaos. It doesn’t mean wild. It only means there is no closed form mathematical solution. For example stepping on a butterfly can’t affect the weather such that the moon would crash into the Earth.

    Bumping into Hitler’s parents wouldn’t necessarily change anything. You have to do something drastic such that he was conceived days to weeks apart such that the sperm was completely different. Even a minor delay wouldn’t affect it because the sperm that fertilizes an egg isn’t random. There are selection hurdles in mobility that the sperm passes such that the most “fit” is likely the one that fertilizes the egg.

    • vrighter@discuss.tchncs.de
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      12 hours ago

      No it doesn’t mean that. It means that tiny changes in input result in big changes in the output.

      By your definition, a simple ellipse is chaotic. Which it clearly isn’t. Tiny changes in the axes result in tiny changes to its shape, and by extension its perimeter. Yet there is no closed form formula for the perimiter of an ellipse.

      This could also be verified using a simple dictionary, not even a math textbook.

      • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world
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        9 hours ago

        A tiny change could mean a big change but it doesn’t mean that change must be unlimited. For example a double pendulum is a classic chaotic system. There is no solution but that doesn’t mean the pendulum can move greater than the length of its segments. It’s still a bound system.

        https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory

        More importantly, in the real world, if you push a double pendulum, it won’t flail endlessly. It will eventually converge to the single state of rest.

        • vrighter@discuss.tchncs.de
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          7 hours ago

          what does any of that have to do with anything I said? By the way, that wikepedia page doesn’t contain the word “closed” anywhere in it. just saying

          • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world
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            3 hours ago

            A double pendulum is bound by definition! It is a fixed point, a line with a 2 axis joint, and another line. That’s the definition.

            Just because a system is chaotic doesn’t mean it can move in unlimited ways. A chaotic pendulum cannot move outside it’s predefined limits of its geometry despite being chaotic.

            The real world imposes far more constraints. A double pendulum starts out in a known state. It gets pushed. It moves chaotically for a minute, then returns to its original rest state.

            In the context of Hitler’s parents, you shove the dad, he moves chaotically for a second, then goes back to walking. No long term change has happened.

            • vrighter@discuss.tchncs.de
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              3 hours ago

              I completely agree with what this comment says. It’s still irrelevant though. Where did I say it has to be unbounded? You are countering an argument I did not make. Whether the result is divergent or not is irrelevant. The point is that “not having a closed form solution” is not the meaning of chaos, which was your original wrong statement.

    • LanguageIsCool@lemmy.world
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      18 hours ago

      Chaos means that a small change in initial conditions can lead to drastically different places in the long term, so I think OP was using the idea correctly. Though I agree that just bumping into the parents may not be enough to push the system into another trajectory.

      • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world
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        8 hours ago

        Chaos means that a small change in initial conditions can lead to drastically different places in the long term

        Yes, what I was trying to explain is that it could (no closed form) but doesn’t necessarily mean that is must. A chain with 2 segments is a double pendulum, the classic simple chaotic system. If you hold a piece of chain and give it a light tap, it will move chaotically for a few seconds and then come back to rest. The system will not have changed. Even with a hard push, the chain can’t move beyond the limit of the links.

        If you gave Hitler’s dad a push, he would stumble for a second (chaotically), then go back to walking (return to initial state). Nothing would change.

  • NaibofTabr@infosec.pub
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    18 hours ago

    B. F. Skinner would like a word

    For twenty-five hundred years people have been preoccupied with feelings and mental life, but only recently has any interest been shown in a more precise analysis of the role of the environment. Ignorance of that role led in the first place to mental fictions, and it has been perpetuated by the explanatory practices to which they gave rise.

  • .Donuts@lemmy.world
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    22 hours ago

    Don’t like your highschool bully, just bump into their parents back in time. Or you know, “bump” ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) into their parents

    Forcing your high school bully to call you daddy is one hell of a power move

  • originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com
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    22 hours ago

    on a side note…

    Important Note: In order to marry, Alois and Klara had to obtain a dispensation from the Church due to their close familial ties. This highlights the fact that they were indeed related and their marriage was considered unusual for the time.