what if you put him in the cupboard instead

Wikihistory: "Everybody kills Hitler on their first trip".

You know what's a fantastic read on time travel?



/totally not kidding, I love that book.

The problem with killing Hitler is that there could be many parallel universes, a la Jet Li's The One, and so you could end up creating Super-Hitler in other universes. Like, one that's so charismatic that he could lead the German people not just into WWII, but convince them to slaughter millions of Jews. So, not only do we have to worry about paradoxes here, we have to worry about the effects of other time travelers in other universes.

I'll just shoot Hitler out the window.

NO

the whole grandfather paradox always seemed like a non issue to me.

Suppose I travel back in time and shoot my grandfather. it doesn't matter that i'm never born (in what would be precieved at that point as the future) as a result. His/the new timeline progresses, with me in it as it would have just minus his influences (and add in mine) in what he would have precied as his future.

also i wouldn't instantly fade out of time because having been born i am alive and moving backwards in the timeline doesn't change that fact. i don't instantly become -60 years old. I just continue on as everyone else native to that timeline.

it isn't that hard.

No

/parallel universes
//infinite and undending
///yes, I believe this
////and no, I haven't been taking drugs

Stupid, primitives. Hitler was the best answer. Yes you view Hitler as a bad man, we here in the 25th century know him for the hero he really was. See we did not kill Adolf HItler, but just traveled back in time and replaced him.

You think it was an accident that he was acting like a farking looney? That he took a sleeping pill on D-Day and could not be woken up to order the tanks to repeal the invasion of Normandy? That the Germans never did manage to get a working bomb, flying wing, or VX gas? You seriously think that making the US a superpower was not the desired out come?

Silly primitives.

Ambitwistor: Wikihistory: "Everybody kills Hitler on their first trip".

Came here to post this, glad to see you beat me to it.

tom baker's scarf: the whole grandfather paradox always seemed like a non issue to me.

That's because, apparently without realizing it, you're proposing the alternate-timeline theory.

Don't worry guys, I already went back in time an took over Russia and used it to kill hitler. Wore a big fake moustache so no one would recognize me in a history book. Problem solved.

One of the few things that I think that "The Time Machine" movie got right was the paradox similar to this about Guy Pearce's girlfriend. The whole purpose that he made the time machine for was to go back and prevent his girlfriend from getting killed, but when he saved her from one method of death she died from another. If he would have succeeded, his whole purpose for creating the time machine would never have existed so he never would have been able to save her.

So if going back in time to stop Hitler was your purpose of creating the time machine, you'd never be able to stop him. That doesn't mean that his death couldn't have been caused indirectly by your interference with the timeline. Again, with stopping Hitler not being the purpose of your journey back in time, if you accidentally chopped down a tree that blocked a road and Hitler's motorcade got ambushed, the events would break your previous history...but the events of WWII and everything afterwards would still play out in a slightly skewed way than from what we are familiar with. Someone else would have taken over and continued Hitler's work, or if you went farther back and stopped him as a child or young adult, someone else would have emerged as who we know as "Hitler" and most everything would have played out as it did before, except the names would be different and the dates may be slightly off.

Anyway, my 2 cents on time travel paradoxes... the past is fixed, it might be able to be observed some day but never changed. Otherwise why hasn't anyone gone back and stopped Judas from throwing JC under the bus...who cares about Hitler at that point?

So you walk into an elevator and in the elevator is Saddam Hussein, Hitler and Brad Childress. You only have 2 bullets.

Who do you shoot?

/_{Brad. Twice.}
//*insert any reviled famous person into spot #3 and the joke works*

So killing Hitler would stop the German's from bombing Pearl Harbor?

Seriously, lay off the drugs man.

Time will tell...sooner or later, time will tell...

"I can cross 'stab Hitler to death' off my list of cool crap I thought I'd never get to do."

Congratulations to everyone here who's explaining how something works that doesn't exist. Next up: unicorn farts and their impact on the mars rover!

why does yesterday give a sh*t it existed? why would yesterday be stored anywhere for us to go back to? only our minds dwell on the past...nature doesn't give a sh*t that Hitler was a really bad guy.

I see it as us walking down a sidewalk and as we move through time what is now behind us falls away and disappears forever.
You only get once chance, don't f*ck it up.
Time travel theoretical masturbation is cool, but seriously.



/flat-earther in 1,000 years

RoyFokker'sGhost: But, let's say you go back in time and go all Rambo on the Reichstag after Hitler's elected, effectively cutting off the head of the Nazi party. Good job. Now Stalin has absolutely no enemy army to counter him on his own push into Western Europe. Remember that while Time magazine was praising Hitler's turnaround of Germany from the Great Depression and the excessive reparations from WW1, Stalin and Communist Russia were the real enemy. And Stalin wasn't especially fond of Jews, either.

So you've played Red Alert too.

hervatski: Congratulations to everyone here who's explaining how something works that doesn't exist. Next up: unicorn farts and their impact on the mars rover!

Don't be ridiculous, unicorns live on Venus, not Mars.

LesserEvil: One day we will travel through time, but it will come with one caveat: Time will split at the point the traveler returns to the past, creating a new, separate, timeline.

...so kill Hitler, it won't affect your "present" - but as a sort of "pro-active historian" you could jump ahead in THAT timeline and observe the consequences of that action on history, then (to borrow the term from the TV show) "slide" back to your own timeline to report your findings.

Q.E.D.

This also explains thirty years of X-men stories.

cob2f: [images.wikia.com image 400x300]

"I can cross 'stab Hitler to death' off my list of cool crap I thought I'd never get to do."

From the moment he said that, I've wanted to read Brock Samson's List of Cool Crap the Thinks He'd Never Get to Do

palelizard: hervatski: Congratulations to everyone here who's explaining how something works that doesn't exist. Next up: unicorn farts and their impact on the mars rover!

Don't be ridiculous, unicorns live on Venus, not Mars.

They only summer on Venus!

I'm an observer-effect kind of guy, also known as "you already changed the past." The moment we ran out of time to kill Hitler via time travel in any meaningful way is the moment he started giving the orders for which we would justify his death, because those orders were given. If he died before this point (for example, because you went back in time and killed him) then someone took his place, gave the orders, and faked Hitler's identity such that everyone -yourself included- thought that Hitler was the one who did it. This might have even happened several times, before the time travelers gave up.

Or you could do like the xkcd guy, and go kill him in his bunker around the time of his actual death. But as xkcd says, that would be pointless.