Another counterfactual: if the South had won the civil war, not a single one of us would be here. A world full of other people would be here
— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) June 30, 2015
Yes, Richard, it is all connected.
I wanted to build on this later, but since I am pressed for time, I’m just posting this now before I lose it.
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“If things were different, they would be different.”
-RD
one of the great minds of our time!
That’s actually something that others have noted about time travel in science fiction. An individual is the product of one monthly egg and one out of millions of sperm. Replace either or both and you have a different person. Unless you believe time unfolds perfectly like a recording, then the generation following the Point of Divergence will be made up of entirely different people.
To address the time travel problem simply look at a video game simulation which (hypothetically) built in the ability to rewind the game back to a certain point in time. Each time you rewind to replay the game in an old saved state, the game is slightly different and is a new instance of a game, it’s not the same game. So in order for time travel to work without the paradoxes, one would have to create new instance (copies) of the universe in a state that it was before. The butterfly effect means that yes if you change one little thing, everything changes. This butterfly effect also shows how stupid God’s design is: he creates a male reproductive system with millions of potential babies in it, mostly failures (sperm that never make it to the egg).
Imagine someone designing a machine gun where 99 percent of the bullets are misfires and one of them happens to be successful. No intelligent designer would design a machine gun to have 99 percent of its bullets misfire. Similarly, God seems to have a strange problem with poor design of animals. over 90 percent of all animals go extinct due to extremely poor design. Neil de Grasse Tyson (who is not an atheist but an agnostic) has this nailed down and calls it Stupid Design on youtube.