Not too long ago some friends and I got into a heated debate about time travel. One said that if he were 8able to travel in time he would take an infant Adolf Hitler and give him to an American Jewish family. While the notion had pure intent, I couldn’t help but see the flaw in his idea. If we were to move Hitler to America, we would be opening a door with nothing but the unknown on the other side.

Without Hitler we wouldn’t have had World War II and while it does sound like a benefit, (let’s face it, the war and its damage done by it was awful) we’d lose many things in the process both good and bad. In a world without Hitler becoming Nazi dictator we lose the Baby Boomer generation—which some argue are to blame for the economic crisis we face today—our grandparents who are the reason our parents, and by extension us, exist. Along with the dangers of erasing ourselves, we also face the possibility of an even worse Nazi leader than Hitler that manages to win the war and wipe out an entire nation. By changing how Hitler was raised, in trying to save the world, would erase himself from existence and potentially make the world even worse.

Many people think of time travel as a means to correct mistakes, and that is a possibility. But by changing one thing we could potentially shift the flow of how events would follow. A new cause equals a new effect. It would be like saving a game right before a serious decision is made and then seeing how it progresses. You pick one branch of the story to follow and take it all the way to the end. Once the final credits roll, you decide to load up from that save you made right before the vital choice and take the opposite path to see a completely different ending.

For example, we have a subject named Tom, who decides he is going to kiss random stranger Amy. Amy punches Tom in the face, and Amy storms off and leaves Tom on the ground. Tom is then helped up by Stranger Beth, and the pair hit it off. They soon begin dating and later marry and start a family together. Everyone is happy in this scenario until one day Tom has a bad day and gets into a fight with Beth. He decides to go back in time and try the day he met Beth over, and instead of kissing Amy he asks her out. With this the life Tom and Beth made is gone, the family they created erased. And that is just Tom’s life. By trying to see if the grass is greener on the other side you could be causing everyone else to lose their happiness, their families, or even their lives just because you didn’t like the outcome of one choice.

With the knowledge that our actions can’t be reloaded like in video games, many people live cautiously and try to think before they act. If people had the ability to turn back the hands of time and try to fix one mistake it could have disastrous consequences on everyone. So while I’d love to undo the time I got embarrassingly lost in my new neighborhood riding my bike and trying to familiarize with the area around me, it is the reason I received a cell phone so I could tell my parents whenever I was lost instead of riding around on my bike until I get cursed out by my father from a minivan. Although the idea of time travel may seem like a good idea in theory, people tend to forget that by correcting one thing it could potentially destroy another.