Imagine it’s 100 years in the future, and the invention of time travel has just been perfected. Not just sending a clock into orbit, or the irritating ‘well actually, if we all went to sleep for a really long time, we would technically be time travelling’, but proper Doctor Who style time travel: the ability to arrive at whatever time we wish, whenever we wish. What would we do with it? There are numerous possibilities, yet without the actual existence of time travel, it’s impossible to know how well thought-out they are, how useful they’d be to us or even how ethical any of them truly are. But we can still try to explore a few.
This first one shouldn’t be too unexpected. What if we went back in time and killed Hitler as a baby? Any debate over how ethical it is to kill a child would be quickly shut down at the realization that you’d be saving millions of lives as a result; no Hitler means no Holocaust and no war, saving the lives of nearly all the people involved, plus we’d be saving Germany a whole lot of trouble. So far, so good? Of course, we would lose out on jet engines, radar, computers, and superglue – these inventions were at least accelerated due to the war – but that’s a small price to pay for the lives of 75 million people, right?
But considering how much WW2 modernised warfare this is perhaps less significant than it seems. Without the above inventions (possibly excluding superglue), modern warfare would be far more dangerous – there’d be far more casualties – and who even knows if history would have played out in the same way? The impact of WW2 practically dominated the mid-20th century, so what would have taken its place? While it could have simply been a peaceful era, there could just have been another huge event, someone just as bad – if not worse – than Hitler. And, while the unknown should not be feared, it’s certainly something to be wary of. Hitler was a product of his time, so the latter is not unlikely. If, in saving the lives of 75 million people you cause the deaths of 80 million could this really be considered ethical? Besides, Hitler lost in the end. Unleashing a violent fascist worse than Hitler is probably not the best thing to cause, albeit accidentally.
Now, here’s another good idea. Using our newfound time travel, why don’t we go back in time approximately 100 million years, gather some dinosaur DNA, and, in a badly thought-out experiment, attempt to clone them (yes, I did watch Jurassic Park)? But even so, the idea of exploring dinosaur DNA is too interesting a possibility to simply ignore. The study of dinosaurs has long been a very fascinating topic, with so many unknowns and much unfamiliarity that it warrants a large deal of investigation. Properly understanding them, their behaviours and their anatomy would play a key role in developing evolutionary theory and an understanding of the world at the time. Plus, it would also just be pretty cool to have a real photo of a velociraptor.
But as with my previous point, there are dangers. Dinosaur DNA could undoubtedly be exploited through genetic engineering, and, with our understanding of cloning perhaps more advanced than ever, would be a hugely dangerous combination that would be unlikely to have a happy ending. While I’m not implying that future warfare will be dominated by dinosaurs with guns, many dinosaurs were hugely dangerous nonetheless. Plus, having their exploitation as a possibility would not be ethical to anyone living at this time.
I could go on for a long time, listing the different uses of time travel, and how they could all go horribly wrong, and, through this, one thing is made clear: however it’s used, time travel has the potential to cause disaster. So, this suggests that time travel can’t be considered ethical – anything with this much power over, well… time, should probably be left untouched. But is time travel itself unethical in this situation? I mean, it’s only half of the invention. We are the ones changing history, gathering information and we are the ones who create a new future to use that information accordingly. So, surely, we are the unethical ones? Not specifically you or me, but humanity as a whole? In the end, we desire the ability to control the past, to create a perfect timeline in which there was never any struggle, never any unknowns, nothing that pushed us to be better, yet in doing so we create more problems and more opportunities for exploitation. To conclude, it is our usage of time travel that would cause it to be ‘unethical’ and it is our own nature that would cause it to be so dangerous, not the concept itself.
