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.
I think that it’s fairly settled accepted 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.
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.
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.
If you left your phone in 1929 then you had already done it in the past today. Nothing changed.
I feel like just accepting that as the answer is a philosophically lazy answer that simply doesn’t pass the logic test because I didn’t have a time machine. Now I do. Things change. And even if it doesn’t change for us, it changes the course of time for them. Can you imagine the leap in tech if a modern flagship phone was found in the 70s? You wouldn’t be able to go so far back that they’re incapable of interpreting the tech, like what would a hunter/gatherer glean from a phone? Nothing. But in the 40s? Certainly we could have learned a lot from it by then.
You can’t just wave off something that’s pure speculation as if you know anything about it. This is as close to some weird time theology I can think of. Like the “gods plan” of time.
Many worlds theory gives us an alternative - in one world I left my phone in 1929 and that shaped that world tremendously.
But that didn’t happen in my world and it can’t, because my world is the world where no one left their phone in 1929.
