::Warning:: Woo ahead. And a spoiler of sorts in the first pargraph.

Probably one of the best Episodes of Star Trek, at least from a story view, was "City on the Edge of Forever". There is a portal that pulls McCoy back to Earth circa mid 1930's. He prevents a woman from getting killed in a traffic accident and this allows Germany to win WWII. Kirk goes back to a point slightly before McCoy, and knowig what must happen to preserve the timeline, allows the woman to be killed by stopping McCoy from saving her.


Since then, the preservation of the timeline has popped up... a lot would be an understatement... in Trek. They go back in time more often than I go to the store. Now flash over to The Dead Zone. I saw the movie, but have never seen the series. The premise looks the same though. A man gets hurt in an accident and goes into a coma for several years. When he comes out, he learns that he has opened up a part of the brain that generally goes unused. This dead zone in the brain allows him to see the future of a person when he touches them. In the move, he shook hands with an up and comming politician and saw that the man would become President, and start a nuclear (or nu-cue-lar if it's said by Jack Bauer) war. He asks his friend and Dr if he met Hitler in 1930, and knew what he would do 10 years later, what he would do. The Dr. replied with something like, "Being a doctor, and dedicated to easing suffering and protecting life, I'd have no choice but to kill the (forum rules violaion and Blake Edwards' movie)".

My question here is: How is this different? If a person can see the future with 100% accuracy, and is in a position to change it, wouldn't that be considered altering the time line the same as if a person who remembers it as history goes back in time and changes it?

I'm mainly looking for opinions. It's for a story idea, and right now, I'm leaning toward yes, it would be an ethical violation to alter a future event.

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I'm not evil.
An evil person would do the things I think up.

If time travel is possible, there's no fixed future to preserve, it's not a timeline so much as a tangled web.

If it's not possible, no problem.

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"The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head" Terry Pratchett

You don't even need time travel, though. If the precognitive person performs acts based on their vision of the future, they are either capable of altering that future, in which case it's a really complex mess to get involved in, or they can't, in which case it's all ineviatable.

Fiction, however, teaches us that if we use our knowledge of the future to try to prevent it, those are precisely the actions that will cause it nine times out of ten. (obviously I won't give examples, as they would be gigantic spoilers for the films and novels concerned).

Actually, I'm pretty sure that in the book, the doctor said he wouldn't do it because it wouldn't do any good, but my copy's in the living room and there's someone asleep on my couch. The doctor's reasoning (it might've been someone else's somewhere else; I haven't read The Dead Zone in a while, I don't much watch the TV show, and I've never seen the movie) was that killing Hitler in and of itself would not necessarily solve anything, given the political and socioeconomic situation of the time.

Which I think is a decent point. There are so many factors leading up to any one event that we tend to just kind of pick one as being it cause; see Archduke Franz Ferdinand and WWI.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

<<My question here is: How is this different? If a person can see the future with 100% accuracy, and is in a position to change it, wouldn't that be considered altering the time line the same as if a person who remembers it as history goes back in time and changes it?>>

Not really, IMO. A person who sees the future and is in a position to change it is only in the realm of potential, not actuality. The person who goes back in time to actually change past events, is working in actuality and not potential. In short, the "prophet" sees but does not necessarily do, while the time traveler sees *and* does. Of course, there is the thorny question of whether the prophet is even capable of altering the future; if he sees it, hasn't it already come to pass?

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"Call me old-fashioned, but I think fire is magic. And it scares me a lot."

--The State

My twofold theory of the time continuum is this:

1. Attempts to change the past must result in future history substantially identical to the original history.

Example: I desire to go back in time and kill Hitler, for obvious reasons. However, this desire arises only because Hitler was not, in fact, killed. Therefore, I conclude that all attempts to kill Hitler have only conspired to keep him alive and set him on the course charted by history.

2. But that's all moot anyway, as "time" isn't really a "dimension" or a "continuum" so much as it is an idea, a tool for measuring state changes.

Thus, "going back in time" isn't like "going down a road". Rather, it's more like "resetting the state of everything in the universe to some earlier configuration, at which point everything will be as it was n seconds ago, and you can then try to alter the sequence of state changes yet to come".

Since the ability to change the state of every quantum in the universe (and to know with exactitude all the earlier states of all the quantum) strikes me as a truly godlike power, beyond even the most advanced non-deity civilizations ever conceived in fiction, I conclude that time travel is not, in fact, possible.

Precognition requires information to travel back in time, thus prequires timetravel.

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And the "driving on the freeway on a scooter" analogy still holds true because the pilots are sitting in 7 to 30 ton aircraft o' doom and you are running around them in your very own Meatbody, Mark I. Beep, beep.
Trying to make sense of computers, The Error Log.

It depends on your ethics (they are a dime a dozen). Killing Hitler before he commits a crime would be a crime itself. But, other forms of changing history may be ethical if they favor free will, such as persuading hitler to follow another course of action.

Seeing the future probably has fewer ethical issues since there is not really a paradox in that frame of reference. A future changer is a participant instead of an interloper.

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"What you think you thought you saw you did not see." Agent J, MiB - Manhatten Bureau

Just buying a couple of his paintings to stop him from hating everything might do the trick.

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And the "driving on the freeway on a scooter" analogy still holds true because the pilots are sitting in 7 to 30 ton aircraft o' doom and you are running around them in your very own Meatbody, Mark I. Beep, beep.
Trying to make sense of computers, The Error Log.

Interesing idea. Guess the difference is that the time traveller knows how history turns out. The precognitive person now matter how much the believe in their powers can still never be 100% confident that what they see will come to pass.

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Time cube is evil.

A precognitive person may not have a paradox but they might may have a conundrum because, like inferno suggested, they will never know if their power is true. This is because their actions may actually prevent the event that would have occured without their interaction. But then you need to wonder about what type of interaction the precognition had with the person and what interaction the person had with the event. Maybe the Uncertainty Principle or Chaos Theory makes the act of knowing the future enough to preclude it. It may be that the more truly precognitive a person is the less accurate they actually are.

There may be a few equally woo hypothesis that are somewhat more plausible. Instead of sensing the future directly, it may be mere clairvoyance of intentions of other humans (like telepathy). Clairvoyance of this kind would not work with inanimate objects, like asteroid impacts.

Another possibility is that the precognitive person is actually pre-remembering ("premembering") actual events that person will later experience. If you've ever read Heinlein's "Lifeline" you might get an idea of the concept, if not the actual mechanism. In my limited experience with prima facie precognition anecdotes, the more credible claims seem to have a pre-visual element. This means that people see or sense something that they will later actually see or sense in the first person instead of seeing it from a 2nd or 3rd person point of view. Tele-precognition, seeing things in the future far away, sometimes even take the form of a TV visual, thus, explaining some of the pseudo 3rd person (so-called god-like) perspectives. Of course this is all hypothetical and unproven.

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"What you think you thought you saw you did not see." Agent J, MiB - Manhatten Bureau

My theory is that you can go back in time and kill your parents before you were born because the universe doesn't really care what stupid primates do to each other.

I think Gillianren has it right....

people think that making one change affects history, try reading "The Science of Discworld III - Darwins Watch" it deals with this very eloquently and with lots oftop quality science to boot!

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There we were in the park when suddenly some old lady says I stole her purse..... I chucked the professor at her but she kept coming..... So I had to hit her with this purse I found.
-- Bender

Oh, I won't doubt that Gilliamren is right about the book. I've never read it, and may have been changed for the movie. I recall the Drs line very clearly.

Thanks for the replies all. I've got an idea for a story that deals with precognition that I really like, but I can't think of anything to do with it.

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I'm not evil.
An evil person would do the things I think up.

Um, "Gillianren," please. And if they changed it, that's yet another example of how Stephen King is often badly translated onto the screen, because the doctor had a valid point which is then obscured because it involves thinking.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Sorry... I'd like to claim that one was a typo but a lot of times when I type, I get letters mixed in completely at random. B and P get confused a lot and there is no way to blame that on fat fingers. I do try to be more careful when using a specific name. My apologies.

I had never read a King Book or even story until very recently, mainly because I had seen a lot of the movies and most of them were really bad. It left me with no desire to read them. The GF was a huge fan (until the last Dark Tower book) and got me to read a few of the short stories, most of which I really liked.

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I'm not evil.
An evil person would do the things I think up.

Well, the movies do tend to suck, yes. That's why you should read the books instead. (Now, I admit I do know people who don't like Stephen King's books, but even they acknowledge that the books are way better than almost all the movies.) I mean, for heaven's sake, the man sued to get his name taken off The Lawnmower Man because it had literally nothing to do with his original (six-page) story.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

The idea of precognition and any moral responsibility attached to it is fascinating one.
One simple scenario could be as follows;

Person A starts getting visions of the future. She finds out that they are accurate by comparing the visions to the subsequent events. As an experiment she attempts to change the course of future events, and finds that this is possible.
Let’s say that she finds that she is 100% accurate in her precognition in every case except those in which she acts to change the course of events.

This places a heavy moral responsibility on Person A’s shoulders, as she can act to avert any bad event which she has precognition of. This is something like the responsibility everybody has to try to diminish the possibility of danger in everyday life. Two factors complicate this responsibility; one it that Person A might try to avert a bad event and fail, and feel guilt for this failure; another factor is the possibility that the precognition might be false despite her previous experiences.

Now how would the precognition work from a physical point of view? If real information is passing from the future to the past, that would explain the accuracy of the precognition. But it wouldn’t explain the fact that Person A has the ability to change events such that they differ from the information sent back from the future.

If the information sent back was originally accurate, that means that the ‘timeline’ has been changed by Person A’s actions; the original timeline (in which the events predicted did occur) has branched off and now exists only as a source of the original message. This could either be part of a myriad branching ‘multiple worlds’ or ‘Many Worlds’ scenario, where every action with more than one possible outcome creates a new timeline; or it could possibly be that the original branch simply ceases to exist except for the forlorn messages that were sent back in the first place. Messages from a future which never happened.

An alternative possibility is that the precognition was predictive, rather than sent as a message back in time. A massively powerful computer might predict all the events in the physical world with such accuracy that it can give an account of future events beforehand. This computer could transmit the results of its prognostications to Person A as visions. In this case there is no reversal of time, or of causality, and there is no paradox if Person A acts on this knowledge to change future events.
But such a computer could not possibly exist, events in the physical world are too complex, and are governed at least partly by the Uncertainty Principle which precludes such prediction.
Or could it? The most powerful processing device known to humanity is the human brain; this appears to operate at least partly on a quantum level. Perhaps the task of accurate prediction is not entirely beyond the human brain in some (as yet unguessed) fashion.
Just a handwavy argument to explain something that probably could never happen.

So with a predictive vision of the future, dredged up by whatever means from the depths of the human mind, Person A would have freedom to change the future without fear of changing or destroying timelines, although the weight of responsibility would still be there.

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Orion's Arm . The Starlark . Voices: Future Tense- Novella Contest Issue! . OA Flickr set

You know, I never watched the show Early Edition, but I can't help wondering if it ever dealt with this particular moral issue.

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SeanF

"Ask to understand, but don't challenge unless you have the knowledge."--NEOWatcher

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