Kill Hitler
by Jeff
Image text: Revised directive: It is forbidden for you to interfere with human history until you've at least taken a class on it.
In this comic, which I believe Randall created just to put in "BRB, Killing Hitler", Black Hat creates a one use time machine. Cueball selects the most common suggestion for Time Machine usage "Killing Hitler". Black Hat finally relents and goes to kill Hitler, however, he goes to the year 1945, when Hitler is already in his bunker. Hitler has already committed his atrocities and the war was already turning against him. Later in 1945, he reportedly died by suicide in that very same bunker. The joke in here being that he didn't save any lives or prevent the Holocaust or a global war by killing him in 1945 because he went back in time too late. He needed to go earlier, before his rise to power.
June 1st, 2012
Black hat also missed his one chance to protect the world from Hitler’s paintings, which in his own words “defy all rules of composition.”
Also, Godwin’s Law!
June 1st, 2012
No worries for Godwin. If there weren’t a Hitler there’d be someone else generally considered the symbol of evil for Godwin to use. The probability of a mention of Stalin or George Lucas would approach 1.
June 6th, 2012
A little late to the party so I’m posting up here. If you enjoy these comments and links as much as I did, you might want to read Stephen King’s 11/22/63 time travel novel about the Kennedy assassination.
Or, if you prefer spoiling a decent book: http://stephenking.wikia.com/wiki/11/22/63
June 1st, 2012
On April 30th 1945 Black Hat shot Hitler in the head at the very moment he, That’s Hitler, chewed on his cyanide pill.
Loud?! That’s the least of your worries when you are at the receiving end of an artillery barrage…
June 1st, 2012
I’m surprised you didn’t define “BRB”.
June 1st, 2012
OK, now we have to: it is internet slang, an abbrev. for “be right back” (usually in reference to one’s imminent return to a computer terminal, often after a snack-fetching or toilet break.)
June 1st, 2012
Or BathRoom Break, implying same, but considered over-sharing.
June 1st, 2012
Slang for a bathroom break is often simply put as “bio” short for “biological function”. Can be combined to form “Brb bio”. “Bio” can also mean to get a drink or snack, but is less used in that way.
June 1st, 2012
and “abbrev.” being an abbrev. for abbreviation
June 1st, 2012
If Black Hat had just gone back one day earlier, he could have saved Hitler’s dog Blondi.
June 1st, 2012
May be the pun is that you only know that Hitler died in 1945 because Black Hat fed him cyanide in his bunker on April 30 1945 when he went back in time.
Maybe Hitler lived for a lot longer in the original timeline before Black Hat departed on his mission.
June 1st, 2012
Beat me to the punch
June 2nd, 2012
Similar basic premise to the New Dr. Who episode, “Let’s Kill Hitler,” — SPOILER WARNING
in which the Doctor and crew use the TARDIS to kill Hitler but actually wind up accidentally saving Hitler from an early assassination attempt instead…
“Fortunately” (for historical continuity only, not for the world), the assassination attempt is only the result of a date misjudgment by the time-traveling “Department of Justice,” which intentionally seeks out those whom history has judged as its greatest criminals, right before the moment they would have died anyway within the natural (untampered) flow of history, and secretly tortures them to death. Just as Black Hat presumably does here.
So instead of changing history, the Doctor winds up inadvertently preserving it from others who would have inadvertently gone back in time and killed Hitler before he had time to incite World War Two.
Similar quandary in Star Trek, “The City on the Edge of Forever”.
June 3rd, 2012
“…secretly tortures them to death.” That’s kind of fucked up. Shouldn’t it be called the Department of Revenge, then?
June 5th, 2012
Yes, I think that was the point of the episode.
June 5th, 2012
Yup, pretty sure that’s it.
Or for you lost fans out there, “whatever happened, happened.”
http://lostpedia.wikia.com/wiki/Whatever_Happened,_Happened
June 1st, 2012
Who’s to say Black Hat didn’t just give him the cyanide pill, therefore changing history to the one we know from the alternate one where Hitler gets arrested and tried for his crimes against humanity…
June 1st, 2012
PS That would be a bad thing.
June 1st, 2012
Thank you Black Hat
June 1st, 2012
Surprised no one has posted “Everyone Kills Hitler on their First Trip,” so I guess I will: http://www.abyssapexzine.com/wikihistory/
June 1st, 2012
Thanx for the post. That was a pretty good read.
June 1st, 2012
I came here to upvote this or post it. Though I’d have used http://www.tor.com/stories/2011/08/wikihistory (not for any particular reason, that’s just the first copy I found while searching)
June 1st, 2012
Also a Doctor Who reference: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKDtDtl13pA&feature=related
June 1st, 2012
Fist thing I thought of… Looks like a TARDIS to me!
June 5th, 2012
Reffering to the Doctor Who episodes, TARDIS would match, but considering the shape of the windows it’s more a “Bill and Ted”-phonebooth, isn’t it?
http://goo.gl/yrT4H
Details, details….
June 1st, 2012
It would be better to go back in time and travel to Kenya, and interfere with the birth of B. Hussein Obama.
June 1st, 2012
That’s be a neat trick. Like going to Cleveland to kill Hitler.
June 1st, 2012
Barack Hussein Obama, born in Rachuonyo District, Kenya, in 1936.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama,_Sr.
June 1st, 2012
Yeah, I’m sure that’s what he meant. (not)
June 2nd, 2012
Actually, it might be.
June 4th, 2012
Perhaps. But that just leaves it a terrible sentiment rather than an idiotic one. He’s proposing killing someone because of political differences.
June 4th, 2012
“He’s proposing killing someone because of political differences.” Not to be pedantic, but isn’t that technically what we’re doing when we propose that we kill Hitler?
June 4th, 2012
I wondered if someone would bring that up. I almost made my concluding sentence “He’s proposing killing someone because of political differences rather than because they’re a mass murderer.” But wanted to see if someone would actually try to claim the objections to Hitler were just political ones.
(They’re not. Nobody advocates killing Hitler because they disagree with his socialist economic policies or increases in deficit spending to combat the Depression. They object because he systematically robbed and murdered millions.)
June 1st, 2012
How did he get back to the present if it’s a one time use machine?
June 1st, 2012
Maybe it creates a two way tunnel but can only create one tunnel, or maybe you can only stay in the destination time for a limited period of perceived time, or possibly a wizard did it.
June 1st, 2012
Had the same question
June 1st, 2012
It’s implied that he means “I can only use it to go there and back one time.”
June 1st, 2012
Nope, you inferred that. Clearly others inferred something else. Hence the question.
June 1st, 2012
At least, he spoke of “one use”, not “one way”.
So the question did not rise for me,
June 2nd, 2012
No, it is implied because he did come back.
June 1st, 2012
Show me a person who would kill Hitler with a time machine and I’ll show you a person that never played Command & Conquer Red Alert.
June 2nd, 2012
Also preventing WWII would create a hell of a paradox since most of us wouldn’t be without WWII. The war killed a lot of potential partners of our grandparents and forced a lot of the surviving people to move elsewhere and by that meet partners that they wouldn’t have met else.
June 1st, 2012
“Be right back” is a nice expression going in a time machine, because it never takes long.
June 1st, 2012
Is the revised directive playing to the temporal prime directive from star trek?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_Directive#Temporal_Prime_Directive
June 1st, 2012
Travelling in the past to kill Hitler may not be a good idea. Remember the 2004 movie “The butterfly effect”. If you try to change an element in the past, you may cause a worst future. Killing Hitler to prevent the Holocaust is a good idea at first sight, but it could result in a future worse than Holocaust! Hitler fails his mission, but maybe the “alternative Hitler” did not!
June 1st, 2012
Wouldn’t that just create a self-correcting paradox? If someone goes back in time to kill the oiginal hitler then by the time time travel is invented then there’s no Hitler, so no one goes back in time to kill him because they have no reason to, so hitler stays alive and resumes the holocaust plans.
Also, susprised no one has pointed out how Black Hat’s time machine looks an awful lot like the TARDIS from Doctor Who, which recently did an episode called “Let’s Kill Hitler”
June 1st, 2012
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novikov_self-consistency_principle
June 1st, 2012
The problem is that you’re trying to impose fiction onto a hypothetical situation. Life isn’t binary (we’re not going to argue “it from bit” right now); an event isn’t simply “on or off”. “Because I changed event X, event Y must inherently be changed” isn’t completely accurate. I’d say a better example would be Genghis Khan who was much closer to taking over the world than Hitler. It’s mostly agreed that since everyone has hit nuclear capability now, no one is going to be taking over the world any time soon. Not unless they want a charred and irradiated husk.
BUT. We do know that without Einstein, nuclear technology would have taken longer to develop (how much longer? Do we know for sure that no one else would have thought of it shortly after?), and we know that he fled to America during World War II.
Put simply, you could be right, but for the wrong reasons. Making a change in the past doesn’t guarantee a worse result. You could just prevent that one, too, and take the even worse result. Eventually you will approach a limit and then you’ll be guaranteed to make things better. Theoretically you could stop Hitler and then give America nuclear technology. It depends on how time travel, if possible, would work.
(P.S. Without us bombing Japan during WWII, we wouldn’t have the same mass fear of going to nuclear war.)
June 3rd, 2012
People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint it’s more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff.
June 6th, 2012
The most accurate definition of time that has EVER been proposed in science fiction
Love it.
June 21st, 2012
That one got away from you didn’t it?
June 1st, 2012
The phrase “Reverse Directive” may be a reference to the Prime Directive in Star Trek, which is also a code of non-interference.
June 1st, 2012
“If you were given the power to travel through time and Set Right What Once Went Wrong, what would you do to prevent the atrocities of the past? Well, for many, the answer is obvious: kill Adolf Hitler. This would prevent World War II, the Holocaust, and their myriad side-effects… right?
Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to work that way.”
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HitlersTimeTravelExemptionAct
June 1st, 2012
Can anyone explain what the title text means? For me, the joke of the comic (well, it’s a possible interpretation) is that Black Hat went back in time and killed Hitler, but did it without changing history. The title text follows the same idea: If you’re going to travel in time, don’t change anything, so take a history class and you’ll know what’s supposed to happen.
June 1st, 2012
As far as I understand, it is not about knowing, what changed, but about making better choices, what to do in/with the past. Like the theory part of driving license lessons only for changing history.
June 3rd, 2012
In this case, cueball didn’t specify *when* to kill Hitler. With the proper knowledge of history, one would know to do it before he killed millions, however black hat – either out of ignorance, trolling, or to preserve the space-time continuum – did not.
To me, the title text is saying if you’re going to go back in time to fix something, make sure you know what happened and how it happened, otherwise how are you supposed to fix it?
June 1st, 2012
Wow, I have never seen Black Hat any meaner. Not even here: xkcd.com/206/
And I am sure he acted that way on purpose, and not because of ignorance.
Maybe he is up to something needs some Nazis for something, so he declined to prevent their rise in the past? xkcd.com/984/
June 1st, 2012
Am I the only one that thinks Black Hat is pulling Randall’s leg, or am I the first to point it out? Travelling to the past to NOT change the past is really close to NOT travelling to the past and lying of have done it. He may also have gone to the past to secure that the event happened–the death of Hitler inside his bunker.
June 2nd, 2012
Well, he did say “We have all of time we could explore” so I’d imagine that he was willing to take Randall(?) along until he got obsessed with Hitler and ruined the whole experience.
June 3rd, 2012
It’s almost as if Black Hat was punishing cueball by wasting the one opportunity.
June 5th, 2012
Oops! I meant Cueball, and I wrote Randall. NOW I see it.
June 1st, 2012
Once travel back in time is invented, the past starts getting changed. Again and again. Until a change is made preventing time travel from being invented.
Time travel is an inherently self-canceling phenomenon; the only stable timelines left are ones where it never gets invented.
The other thought I had was, “someone would inevitably go back and pick up Robert Heinlein and bring him forward to a time when he could be cured.”
June 1st, 2012
Exactly. Either (A) it is impossible to change the past, because anything that you “change” you “always already did change;” (B) every time you go back in time it creates a new universe, so if you try to cause a paradox it doesn’t matter (I never liked this theory), or (C) time travel inevitably leads to a stability (or destruction of the universe, which would be stable.) Assuming it is possible to actually change the past, and that time travel is eventually going to be invented, then the history we know must be the one everybody agrees upon at some point, the best possible (or least evil) history. Who knows what would happen if you got rid of Hitler, but it can’t be any better than what did happen.
June 1st, 2012
Personally, I think the whole idea of time traveling is flawed.
How would a time traveler materialize? It would violate basic conservation laws in that past world as well as in ours, where the time traveler vanishes from.
And anyway, since none of us has ever met a time traveler, it can be assumed that time travel will never be invented in a way capable of interfering with the past.
There is, however, a concept of time going backwards, tied to entropy. Thermodynamics assert that overall entropy in the universe can never decrease; however, it can “move” and decrease locally. That means time in that area (called micro time) goes indeed backward, according to that idea. But macro time can never go backwards.
Even if somehow our whole galaxy should experience decreasing micro (assuming the idea is correct), I do not think history will go backwards.
I strongly distinguish between “time” and “history”. History is what happened and is happening, time is basically a physical dimension.
Going backwards in history also implies more determinism than can coexist with quantum mechanics. Otherwise, if one travels twice to exactly the same point in space time, one would find two (possible ever so slightly) different universes, and never the past that “really” happened. Likewise, traveling back could be difficult for the same reason. Besides, the process of traveling back is technically traveling forward into the future, and that implies that the future is as deterministic as the past is.
So, in my view, time traveling (or in my terminology: history traveling) like in this comic fits well in comics and some SciFi, but is conceptually impossible. Notwithstanding cyrogenic applications, but these do not change history.
June 2nd, 2012
I like that concept “history traveling.” Useful distinction.
June 3rd, 2012
“And anyway, since none of us has ever met a time traveler”
How do you know? Wouldn’t the careful traveller try to blend in? And anyway haven’t we all met people who seem really way out on some axis of world-perception, so much so that “coming from the future” might be the simplest explanation?
June 5th, 2012
I always assumed the materialization part as possible. What worried me was: what if I materialize in a place where is a wall, or a tree, or another thing? I suppose it must be painful…
June 7th, 2012
Don’t worry. If you travel through a significant amount of time (more than a few seconds I assume) the Earth would have moved out of your position and you would materialize in space. There is only a very low chance of a wall. Still painful, I assume
June 9th, 2012
Keeping in mind the laws of Newtonian (or Special Relativity, I dunno) physics, it’s important to keep in mind that there’s no “position” without a frame of reference. Relative to a particular point on the surface of the Earth, the Earth hasn’t moved or rotated at all. Relative to the Sun, the Earth is indeed moving and rotating very quickly.
So any hypothetical time machine would have to get around this problem by being able to drop you wherever you want whenever you want, at whatever velocity (relative to a point of reference of course).
Someone correct me if my understanding of physics is way off.
June 18th, 2012
I actually here it isn’t that painful. I assume you mean depressurization. I’m told you first feel your saliva evaporating, and are unconscious after about ten seconds. If you are in line with the sun, immolation would likely be even quicker. As a way to go, it’s probably preferable to a lot of the ways people actually go.
June 2nd, 2012
Black cats (or the One Black Cat) being the exception. Only time traveler I’ve met, as far as I know.
June 1st, 2012
I would just like to point out that the horrors that Hitler committed after 1945 were worse by far than that little warm-up crap he did during World War Two. So Black Hat saved all life on Earth, and all human history. I don’t see the problem.
Wait, what time-line am I posting to here?
June 2nd, 2012
Don’t worry, boys. I got this.
June 2nd, 2012
Remember guys: Hitler’s clone wars have to go in the appropriate (either Covenant or ReichsWasser Project) forum. Please don’t spill the beans in “muggle” Internet fora such as explainxkcd or explainexplainxkcd, or travelers will have to go to 2012 and wipe the traces out. Again.
June 3rd, 2012
Oh hey, here’s something that went unnoticed. I think the “original directive” (perhaps for anyone capable of time travel) is to “Kill Hitler” as the title says. However, the revised directive is to not interfere until you’ve taken a class.
June 3rd, 2012
The “original directive” normally is not to interfere at all.
June 3rd, 2012
Well, except if you know exactly what you are doing or because of the fun.
June 6th, 2012
Anyone seen “The Time Machine”? A not-so-good movie about a guy who invents a time machine to save his love from an accident? Well the movie boils down to one point:
1. Wife dies
2. Man goes nuts, builds time machine, saves wife.
3. Wife doesn’t die.
4. Man doesn’t go nuts, doesn’t build time machine, doesn’t save wife.
5. Wife dies.
…
Same goes for black hat:
1. wants to Kill Hitler
2. Decides to go back in time
3. Hitler dead
4. No reason to go back in time and kill Hitler (since he is dead…)
5. Decides not to go back in time, but rather post lengthy comments on explainxkcd
6. Hitler is not killed
7. Wants to kill Hitler
…
June 6th, 2012
Unless, of course, you are merely a ”time-browser” (history browser?), wandering around history for pure tourist reasons, and you happen to ask for directions from a pleasant looking Austrian fellow, not knowing that you are infecting him with an influenza from the future (against which Hitler’s immune system is defenseless).
I guess you can only acheive the things which you are not trying to do, or which you are actively trying to avoid, but inadvertantly end up doing.
June 6th, 2012
In the movie step 3 and 4 always get omitted because the protagonist only experiences timelines where a time machine is built so from his point of view, every time he saves his wife, a bizarre accident occurs shortly after and she dies anyway. Interesting illustration of the Novikov self-consistency principle.
Though I like how Doc Brown avoids that problem by using information about the future to save his life in a way that still appears to lead to his death so that the motivation to go back and attempt the rescue still exists.
June 10th, 2012
request(”http://explainstig.com/”);
June 20th, 2012
You mean the film based on the original science fiction classic novel by H.G Wells, The Time Machine?
June 6th, 2012
This might be of interest, and relevant to traveling back in time to kill Hitler: http://www.abyssapexzine.com/wikihistory/