• Rhynoplaz@lemmy.world
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      16 days ago

      This is what I thought as well.

      If I picked Hitler (because that’s the mandatory first choice) I’d be preventing WW2, which my Grandpa fought in. That would definitely affect my existence in some way.

      I feel like Trump’s influence between his birth and mine wouldn’t have a direct impact on my parents’ actions.

        • kn33@lemmy.world
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          16 days ago

          Even if that were true, I doubt my parents would’ve chosen it because it was a trump hotel. If it were any other hotel, they probably would’ve still chosen it for the same reasons they originally did.

          • scops@reddthat.com
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            16 days ago

            I don’t think you realize how little would have to change for you to not be born. There were millions of sperm cells churning in your daddy’s balls. Millions of alternate instruction sets to contribute to one half of a whole person. A two-minute delay, a sneeze, the thermostat being off by a single degree could have led to the birth of a completely different person.

    • PoopSpiderman@lemmy.world
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      16 days ago

      Someone in the comments said if you kill somebody you also kill any children they might have. I’m going to second your motion.

  • mkhopper@lemmy.world
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    16 days ago

    It’s been discussed here much better than I could, but I concur with, you pretty much can’t.

    The slightest change would cause ripple effects that would affect almost everything.

    Everyone always gravitates to the big names… Hitler, Trump, Elmo… But even the most possible mundane person, such as an Inuit baby born to parents in the remotest part of the Arctic 200 years ago, would be enough to cause changes that could easily keep you from being born.

    • emeralddawn45@discuss.tchncs.de
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      16 days ago

      I mean removing someone who was born in between when your parents got together and when you were born would be fairlu safe. The odds that some random baby’s absence in those months/years that they’re together but not pregnant is not impossible, but pretty slim.

      • cmbabul@lemmy.world
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        16 days ago

        If you can pick any time and place pick a random person in bumfuck middle of no where in Mongolia 1 day before you were born or even when your parents sexed that led to you would be fine. Unless you live in Mongolia

    • WolfLink@sh.itjust.works
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      16 days ago

      Trump’s impact is recent enough it probably wouldn’t make me unborn. There’s a good chance removing Hitler would change things though.

  • LostXOR@fedia.io
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    16 days ago

    Do I have to ensure I’m still born? If not, I choose the last common ancestor of modern humans. We’ve screwed things up enough that I think the world would clearly be better off without us.

  • solrize@lemmy.world
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    16 days ago

    without inadvertently making it so you were never born?

    I dunno, getting rid of the My Pillow guy might be worth it anyway.

    • Clinicallydepressedpoochie@lemmy.worldOP
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      16 days ago

      Well, imagine you’re trying to do the most good. Assuming you can’t take them all out at once because the power doesn’t work that way, maybe it does but how would you know? You would to see how many of these cancers you could knock off before you hit yourself by accident.

  • NeatNit@discuss.tchncs.de
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    16 days ago

    According to my interpretation of chaos theory, virtually any change can cause you to not be born. Even if just considering the butterfly effect for weather: a few weeks or months after the change, the weather in the new timeline will completely diverge from the old timeline worldwide, and this will affect your parents’/ancestors’ behavior enough to change which genes get passed on, if they even still make a baby. And that’s only the weather, there’s a lot more chaos in the world.

    The only exception is if the change happens just a short amount of time before you’re conceived, and far enough away. Then I can believe that it could work. But it would still affect your entire life, which might be subtly or totally different from your life in the original timeline.

    All that out of the way, there are quite a few politicians and billionaires I’d like to nominate. Too many to list.

    • WolfLink@sh.itjust.works
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      16 days ago

      The mathematical definition of a chaotic system is that you can find two paths that will eventually diverge to be arbitrarily different. But eventually is a keyword. Two very similar paths can and will progress very similarly for a long time.

      • NeatNit@discuss.tchncs.de
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        16 days ago

        It’s impossible to know how long such a change will take to diverge. I guess my weeks/months estimate is baseless, I’ll grant you that. But some changes will have faster effects than others.

        For example, if you remove a very famous person or someone from royalty, it will change the news cycle, which millions of people read all over the place. Each person who reads or would have read the news about it would have their life slightly altered, so this one change causes millions of differences over a large area. With so many changes, it’s likely that one of them will turn out more significant.

  • j4k3@lemmy.world
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    16 days ago

    I remove a bee that stung one of the young parents of the man that disabled me altering the parent’s biology and life just enough to alter which sperm is successful or cycle they are in effectively removing him from the timeline of a miserable life as a political refugee while having the cognitive capacity of a third grader. I stop his long line of destruction from living in a place where driving is required to survive, and there is no viable alternative for those that lack sufficient capability to perform the task. It is impossible for most of us to comprehend what a first generation driver is really like when we were born into driving culture. Some people were not, and their logic can lack a fundamental grounding that we take for granted.

  • Ech@lemm.ee
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    16 days ago

    I wouldn’t. But if I absolutely had to, I’d try to find the shittiest person I could, born as close to when I was as possible, and as far away from me as they could be.

  • Dizzy Devil Ducky@lemm.ee
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    16 days ago

    All the butterfly theory and chaos theory and other such things aside, as messed up as it sounds, probably go back in time to the week before I’m born and find some newborn baby from the 3rd world country who won’t make it more than a few days and remove them. They weren’t gonna live long anyways. Again, messed up, but probably ensures I wouldn’t inadvertently make myself never born.