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Asked by anon-187746 to Stewart, Miriam, Marton, Laura, Kathryn, David on 8 Nov 2018.
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Stewart Martin-Haugh answered on 8 Nov 2018:
Ooh, time travel! Don’t take the answer too seriously. Let’s assume I make a mistake in the past (accidentally kill the first person to use fire or something) and humans die out as a race.
More people have lived in the past than are currently alive: 107 billion people have lived and died, and 7 billion people are currently alive. So if I change something in the past that means 107 + 7=114 billion people have never lived.
If I accidentally kill everyone in the present, 7 billion people die. This is therefore 114/7 = ~16 times better than killing everyone who has lived so far.
Maybe you’ve spotted the problem. I’m ignoring all the people who might live in the future. How many of those people die? Well, the rate of population growth is slowing
https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth
but that might change if we start colonising other planets.Conclusion: it’s worse to accidentally kill everyone in the past, but best to avoid it altogether.
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Miriam Hogg answered on 9 Nov 2018: last edited 9 Nov 2018 11:19 am
I think that’s a hard one to answer.
As Stewart said in his answer you could do something in the past which radically changes the present. But we only know of those changes because we live in the present.
If I did something now, I wouldn’t know how it has affected the future because it hasn’t happened yet!
If you think about it in that way every action you do will affect the future, but we don’t know if that affect is bad or good. But if you go into the past and change something you will know if it was bad or good because you can check by coming back to the present and seeing what that change did. It’s hard to get your head around! So I guess both are dangerous, but we can only check how bad for things we change in the past
Very good question!
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