Time binoculars (thought experiment)

If you see something in the future, are you able to change it? Or is it predestined?

IMO, the potential for paradoxes makes the latter difficult to consider seriously.

So, assuming the former, then you are really only seeing what would have happened if you hadn’t looked. The act of looking would necessarily change the outcome, and the butterfly effect would make that change more significant the further into the future you had looked.

Therefore, I think there are two ways I would use this type of tech.

One would be to learn lessons from history (except in this case, history which never actually happened). You could see possible outcomes of inventing AGI, for example.

Another way to use it would be to learn facts about the present that we are currently blind to. For example, are there other intelligent alien species in the universe? Or how to create a vaccine for COVID 19.

That said, were I to suddenly find myself in possession of such binoculars, I’m not sure I’d want to use them.

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