Why You Can’t Travel Back in Time and Kill Hitler (opens in new tab)

That's hilarious, but the justification they give for not killing Hitler is unfortunately pretty weak:

"no Hitler means no Third Reich, no World War II, no rocketry programs, no electronics, no computers, no time travel."

But still worth a read!

It does not necessarily, though it is possible.

1. If it is possible to go back in time to kill Hitler, it is possible to go back in time to defend Hitler. There may be a stalemate.

2. We may be living in a timeline that is the result of killing another evil person. Hitler may be an acceptable result of that.

3. We may be at the forefront of time, i.e., there may be no future ahead of us to have already invented the time machine. Similarly, time travel may branch time so create a Hitler-less timeline for copies of ourselves (i.e. no causality.)

> Doesn't it stand to reason that if it were ever possible to travel back in time and kill Hitler that this would've already happened?

No, because all the idealists who went back in time to kill Hitler (believe me, they were lined up around the block, and with no expectation of a safe return), according to multiple witnesses suddenly and inexplicably vanished just as they were pulling the trigger. Theorists say that outcome may have had something to do with the fact that their own existence depended in some perverse way on Hitler's uninterrupted existence.

All except Martin Bormann, who (I bet you didn't know this) went down into the bunker and killed Hitler and his girlfriend Eva Braun -- and even shot Hitler's dog Blondi -- then made up something about Hitler committing suicide, then disappeared without a trace. Of the top Nazis who survived to the end of the war, most eventually were located, but Bormann totally disappeared.

There's obvious speculation the Bormann was the time traveler we all imagined could have done it, and wished we could be. Too bad he didn't act sooner -- every month that Hitler lived caused the deaths of tens to hundreds of thousands.

Okay, I just made that up. Ordinarily I wouldn't have to say that, but there are so many crazy ideas uncritically embraced these days that I realize someone might take this seriously.

It may not be possible to have a stable timeline that involves time travel i.e. if time travel exists, someone always ends up travelling back and messing up the timeline so that time travel isn't discovered. If timelines which include time travel are inherently unstable then the timeline(assuming there's only) would stabilise when time travel isn't used at any point. This does leave the door open for time travel tourism though, where you just go back and observe but without changing history in any way. The method of time travel would actually have to prevent changing the past though otherwise the potential for abuse would lead you back to the unstable timeline issue.

Maybe it happened, sort of. I mean our timeline being the result of killing Megahitler and replacing him with the Hitler we know and find him totally evil only because we can't compare him to Megahitler.

What if by killing Hitler all future timelines ended a lot worse than this one? If it were ever possible to travel back in time, then we are living on the most optimal timeline according to some metric.

I wouldn't use the word 'ever'.

Time travel might be discovered so far into the future that time travelers simply don't care about changing things that happened in ancient history.

This so much. If time travel would ever become reality, wouldn't we already know?

I would have killed Muhammad instead.

That's true for everything, with the whole butterfly effect. Just opening the door to the time machine and walking outside is enough to change history completely. Imagine someone has sex in a different position or at a slightly different time. A different sperm reaches the egg, a different person is born. Not only will that affect all their descendants (which is pretty much the entire human race after a few centuries), but all the people they would have known or interacted with.

But consider this important point: While it stands to reason that WW2 was almost inevitable after the treaty of Versailles (US and Brit diplomats said as much at the time), the Holocaust was very much evitable.

Had the Communists won the battle for the disgruntled German of the 30s instead of being beaten out by the Nazis, there would not have been a Holocaust but probably still a war.

Evidence suggests Chuck Norris didn't manage to kill Hitler.