this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2024
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The best ones are thoughts that many people can relate to and they find something funny or interesting in regular stuff.
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This was my mostly comical thought. You know how people always say they'd go back and off Hitler? But somehow it never happened so either time travel doesn't exist, or they just always fail. We're just getting to see that in real time.
(That said, this fucker definitely changed the future so it's probably not that.)
In my view, it would be naive to assume that killing Hitler before he became Chancellor would guarantee the prevention of the atrocities that followed, and it might even pose the risk of something worse happening. Events don't occur in a vacuum. It's similar to how dropping nukes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were horrific events in themselves, but who's to say those events aren't the reason nukes have never been used in warfare since? Preventing those bombings might have saved the people in those cities, but it also might have significantly lowered the bar for using nukes, increasing the chance of a true nuclear holocaust during the Cold War, for example.
So maybe time travel is possible, and someone did try to change history by killing Hitler, but then realized the outcome was even worse. Now, they needed an additional assassin to deal with the first one.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki may have prevented the future that the video game series Fallout predicts, as that never happened in their past.