Stand up philosophy is not as dull an avocation as some might suppose. A few of the questions that I ponder for this space are actually interesting to people other than myself. If you have read the title and have never heard of the traveling assassin problem, that should come as no surprise to you since I just made it all up. The title should be interesting even if the tirade falls flat by the time that I type the last word.
You will often hear people talking about the idea of going back and taking out somebody like Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot or Fidel Castro to prevent the atrocities that history attaches to each of these names. It seems like a good idea. The actual debate concerns the moral implications of taking out history’s monsters when they were still innocent. After all, if you could prevent these evil men before they did these horrible things, then you will have eliminated your justification for killing each of these men. It is a tirade for another day that this may already have happened.
This got me into thinking and I came up with a story idea as a result. What if the whole world was on the verge of massive progress, on the same line as the leader of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party telling the German people that they are not the cause of all the world’s ills and might actually be the hope of the future. Then a group of people from an indeterminate world sabotage this great leap forward. How would we react to people acting in our time to prevent some catastrophe that they had lived through already and we still thought was a good idea? These people could come from another time or another planet and it would still be another world to us.
Somebody who is up to writing it could get a book out of this idea. It takes more than one idea to write even a short story so I will go on here. These people would be terrorists in our time. More than just being ignorant of reason these people will have come here to save us, we would be unwilling to believe what these people would tell us. Have you ever looked at a newspaper and considered this idea?
We are all time travelers moving from the past into the future. Even without moving backwards through time, some people see the future before it comes. You do not even have to be a prophet to do it. A clear understanding of the world around us allows you to see the downside of things that other people see as a no lose situation. Sometimes, a ‘no brainer’ is exactly that.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 12th, 2007 at 1:29 am and is filed under Mulligan Adventures. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.