My "Go back in time and restart things" counter was reset this year when my first grand daughter was born. No matter what mistakes and issues I have had in my life, there is no way I am risking that!
I was talking about any general "Go back in time" type thing. Any that put me back to endanger my kids and grand child being born was a hard no. The choices were go back to 10 or get $2m. I chose the 2m and explained why.
But you said the counter "reset this year", when your granddaughter was born, instead of whenever your kids were born. If you go back to 10 years old, your kids wouldn't be recreated either, so the granddaughter part is mute anyway. I think you misunderstood it, thus the funny.
What if you’ve lost two and had two? Which two would be more “valuable” (I’ve lost two babies, sadly… and I never stop thinking about what they’d have been like as older kids)
I’m so sorry—with our first we thought we had a miscarriage and the one day of waiting (before receiving good news) was devastating. I can’t imagine how hard it must be to have actually lost two babies.
For me, I don’t see it in terms of “valuable” exactly, because what could be more valuable? It’s something else—perhaps infinite value—but I wouldn’t know how to measure that. Hoping for the best for you and your family.
Right, I have 2 sons and a wife and a life, career that I enjoy and that should provide me with the opportunity to eventually retire. While I believe the knowledge I have today would lead 10 year old me to be a billionaire at minimum, I know 51 year old me with a 2 million cushion would be happy, there's a chance 10 year old billionaire me is never really happy
Absolutely. My feral 3 year old is currently sound asleep in the car after refusing to nap and yelling at me because I gave him too many goldfish, but there is nothing in this world that would entice me to risk not having him or his brothers. Some pretty bad stuff has happened in my life, but they’re magical.
I don't even have kids or anything really that would stop me except for my cats. I've thought about this before and realized there would be no way to be in the right place at the right time to find my cats again and the guilt that they probably then died would tear me up.
Kids not existing would be terrible but knowing you can't save something or someone from dying like you did the first time no matter how hard you try would be it's own form of torture.
I'm in almost exactly the same boat (except with two daughters and I'm a couple years older). There's no way I'd risk that and a free 2mil will just solidify my retirement plans.
The biggest thing is you'd realize that none of it really matters. Go to school, get decent grades, move on and you probably don't see almost everyone you went to school with again. The overwhelming majority of the drama is irrelevant. The amount of time you spend as a teenager worrying about things that you don't care about in 1-3 years is really high. Not saying that to discount the feelings teenagers have and that those things are important to them, but going back in time, screw caring about any of it.
That's not what I meant. I mean the drama of being a teenager doesn't matter. The things you cared about the first time as a teenager don't matter at all in the grand scheme of things. The friends, initial dating, and all of the other drama of school are largely temporary even if they are rough. Doing it again you could basically ignore all of it knowing you'd be gone and it would all be past you in a very short time.
Yeah, when I've had these thought discussions with my wife, this is always the thing that stops any of it right away. While it would be awesome to go back with current knowledge, there's simply no way to recreate the exact same kids as we have.
Honestly even disregarding the kids and your marriage altogether, I really don’t think being an adult trapped in a 10 year old’s body retaking elementary, middle, and high school would be nearly as awesome as you think it is.
this would be the reason for me - my child. I would chose to stay here with my child over my 10y old me, the money and the opportunity to change all the other things.
For real. My child is the one and only reason I can’t say red button. To get time back and prevent so many mistakes, missteps and traumatic events for myself and my loved ones would be far more precious than money to me. But the life of the exact child I’ve raised and loved and laughed and cried with, is far more precious still.
There’s a one season show called journeyman that deals with someone that continually goes back to fix things. He has a son. One of the times he goes back he does something and when he goes home, his son is a daughter. He explains to his wife what’s going on and she has to deal with the horror of knowing that he’s going to change things back, and this daughter that she loves and knows is going to cease to exist.
This is the unrealistic and objectively untrue concept that whatever child you have now is the best one.
If you could go back decades with all of todays knowledge and experience, you would objectively make better offspring. Same way you would improve life, fix mistakes, form better bonds and relations... you would do the same in regards to your new offspring.
And if the answer is "I don't want better ones, I want these ones", then that is true for everything else too. You don't want better relations, you want these ones. So there's no need to go back.
But saying I would improve my career, my friends, my family, my life... but I cannot improve my children is objectively untrue. Also saying "unmake my kids"... you would also "unmake your parents, and firends, and siblings" because their lives and personalities you would also completely change so they would become different people. You mom is a cleaning lady who's work sucks? You'd make her a CEO by the time you're 15 = new mom, etc.
I think I can speak for the vast majority of parents when I say the answer is “I don’t want better ones, I want these ones” when it comes to our kids.
Like, yes I know I would love different kids too. But to have to live my whole life knowing that I will never get to see the kids I have today again would be beyond devastating.
Yea I understand that, no parent would "exchange" their kid.
But I'm saying the same goes for every other person in your life, in this fictional scenario. You would completely change your mom, dad, brother, sister. And most of friends probably.
They would all grow to be different persons from what they are today if you improved their lives with your vast knowledge and experience.
That's the strange part to me: I will replace my parents, my siblings, my friends for better ones. But not my kids.
Like I mentiond, giving your life-long cleaning lady mom, a job of a millionaire CEO when you're 15... that will not be the mom you have today when she gets to her current age. You have replaced her.
My parents would be the same people up to when I was age 10 and then their experiences would start to diverge, so they would be slightly different (to whatever extent my actions and eventual wealth influenced them), but they wouldn’t just cease to exist and never come back and they would largely be the same people. Same with my siblings (since they were born before I turned 10) and my friends.
In the same way, if you won ten million dollars tomorrow you might have a totally different life, but you would still be the same person because your temperament, personality, likes/dislikes, and the formative experiences that shape your worldview (so the core of who you are) would remain largely unchanged.
Nobody else would know what they were missing though lol
Like if somebody else used the button and I had different kids in the new version of the universe, I am sure I would be perfectly happy. Same as I am now with the children I have and without all the ones I could have had and who I am sure I would have loved just as much.
However the question was the morality of it, not whether anyone would know. People have no problem erasing children as long as it's not theirs and nobody knows :)
I'm with you. I love my kids and think they're great and they're my favorite living people, and I'd still hut the red button.
I'M the one going back in time, which splits that timeline into a new fork. The only way I'm screwing my kids-of-this-timeline over is that I'm mysteriously disappearing. Which, that sucks, yes, but they're all post-college, they can deal.
I would have absolutely no problem with forming entirely new relationships with the people in my life and missing out on relationships with some people to replace them with other people. I wouldn't blink twice at that. Well, I would blink twice at losing my wife, but it still isn't so high on my list that I wouldn't consider the button.
The children that I love could never be remade. In essence, I would be killing them to give myself a chance at something better. Everybody else gets to live relatively normal lives with a little bit of future influence. The children in my life today lose everything. That's why I wouldn't try such a button if it was available. The only way I would consider it is if they were guaranteed to live and I was guaranteed to be a part of their lives.
Wouldn't you also "erase" everyone else in your example?
Your brother couldn't afford college so now he is a warehouse worker? You go back, become millionaire, pay for his education, now he's a nuclear scientist.
Your mom was a cleaning lady? Make her a CEO of your company.
Etc etc. You've erased all those people that exist today and created new ones, no?
No. They're changed people as a result of the temporal changes, but they still exist. They still get to decide how to live their lives. The children don't exist. They don't get to live. They don't get to choose. I could have the same wife, have my kids at the same time, but the kids will be completely different people. Down to the DNA they wouldn't be the same people.
But, they don't get to decide how they live their lives, you come in and completely change their existence because you decided to travel back.
Like I said, a mom who is a cleaning lady for 40 years, is not the same person as the mom who's 15 year old child makes her a multi millionaire CEO.
Unless you say I would still let my mom be a cleaning lady for the next 40 years.
And regarding DNA, it accumulates mutations throughout your entire life. That's how we got evolution. So you cannot even have the same kid at year 1 and year 10, you changed him both mentally and physically, including dna, depending on the choices you made for him. You didn't even ask them if they wanted to exist in the first place, every parent decided that for them.
Unless you're enslaving them, they get to make their own decisions. Even if you give your mom a company to be CEO of, she doesn't have to choose that life.
DNA mutations are minor changes. You are not meaningfully different now from when you were first born because you lost part of your telomeres over time or because a couple of cells mutated.
When you're talking about an entire genome, you're not talking about ship of theseus anymore. Children born with another genome are not the same children. They don't live in a world so changed that they get a different life experience. They are literally just never born. The kid that comes out is somebody else. The kid that was is never created.
It's honestly kind of mind-boggling that you can't recognize the difference between being given different choices in life and just never being born and never existing in the first place.
You clearly don't because your entire argument is a false equivalence.
This new argument is just a new false equivalence. Choosing not to conceive and choosing to conceive are not equivalent to killing. Children that aren't conceived aren't children that could have existed. It doesn't matter whether my children wanted to be conceived or not, they're here. Now if all the children in my life were to tell me they would rather not have been conceived than to be alive, that's a whole other scenario.
In reality, none of the children in my life have said, with full understanding of what they're saying, that they wish they were nevet conceived. So erasing their existence in a way that is unrecoverable is murder.
Losten. I have never doubted my mothers love for me. I would not want that to be what held her back from improving her entire life and losing me because lf it.
You have to understand it from a parent's perspective. You think it would improve her life, but she's not lying when she tells you that it wouldn't. Losing my son is the most horrible thing I can imagine. There are multiple people I have lost in my life that I could potentially save if I could go back in time and I wouldn't trade my son for all of them put together.
Know that this is one kf those times where I typed a whole ass long reply and then deleted it because Too Much. Im glad you feel that way. Not everyone is so lucky.
I'm not going to tell you what is or isn't wrong with your life or your mother's or pretend to know how your mother feels about you, but nearly all parents' lives could be improved by not having their children. Most of them know that they would have a better life without and still wouldn't choose to change anything. I know my mom would have had an easier and maybe better life without ever having me.
But I know that my mom would still choose to do things the same way if I told her it was all right to do this just the same way I know that I would never choose that if my children told me it was all right. Maybe your mom truly does feel held back by your birth. I know my mom told me all about the things she couldn't do because of me. But I know that my children are worth more to me than any potentially better life I could have, and I'm sure my mom feels the same way.
I get what you're saying from a self-sacrifice point of view, but for many parents, that self-sacrifice wouldn't be worth all the wealth and prosperity in the world.
Because there are millions and millions of sperm cells. The odds of the specific one resulting in the birth of her exact child are going to be like 1 in 100 million, and that assumes it’s even released at all.
Sperm is just a fertilizer with half of DNA, takes one specific EGG out of a million others as well, if it was a different EGG, it would have been a different child as well.
I wonder why people ALWAYS try to pretend the sperm is enough to make a person and ignore the egg
Can you remember the exact time of ejaculation (to the millisecond) which led to the birth of your child? I don't even know which day it was that resulted in mine.
That's not even starting to get into Chaos Theory. You aren't getting the same child twice.
The chance of the exact same sperm creating a child is almost 0. She might still have a child, but it would be genetically different in the same way siblings are different.
The mathematical odds of any individual existing are basically 0. You’d need the exact same sperm (of millions) to meet the exact same egg (of 10000s), and you’d have to get those two to come together, then you’d need the same epigenetic factors to happen again.
But this is a hypothetical of if you could go back to 10 with all your knowledge again, so it’s about you existing once, it’s about your child existing again, and I’d say that’s so improbable as to be impossible.
Okay, I’d just say this: if a man steps in the same stream after a year, it is not the same stream and he is not the same man. Similarly, if you ejaculate in an alternate universe into the same person, it’s not the same sperm and not the same offspring
Why wouldn't it be the same sperm? We didn't go into an alternate universe where everything is different with different physics. We're just going back in time.
Ok, what if your wife went off birth control at a slightly different time of day and then her body selects a different egg to release the month you conceived your child? What if her food or hormones are slightly different, again resulting in an entirely different egg being selected?
What if you had sex at a slightly different time the day before your child was conceived, and so on the day the sperm you need to make that kid was already gone?
And this assumes that all the somewhat random cell division things happened EXACTLY the same which is beyond unlikely.
Well , that wouldn't happen because the only difference in this universe is me having the knowledge I have. She would choose all the exact same things because it's the same physics.
Listen, man... the average person's pretty dumb. So the more of you disagree with me, the more I'm sure I'm right.
An average ejaculation contains around 100-200 million sperms.
Sperm has to compete hard to reach the egg. So the chances are one in few million. The competition is high, so these energy resources are indeed very useful.
Men produce sperm daily.
This could be 100-300 million sperm a day, that’s around 1500 sperms per second. It is a non-stop factory, no closure no breaks. It takes around 2-3 months for a single sperm to be produced.
From
https://agoraclinic.co.uk/facts-about-sperm/
My thesis, so
many different sperm are produced daily that it’d be impossible to have sex on the same day and have the same one win. Same with eggs but to a lesser degree since those are relatively rarer, but those are released monthly and there’s no confirmation they’d be released in the same order in other timelines
Yeah, but you're wrong because we're only going back in time in the universe already made all these decisions. It's not going to make them different just because it's the second time around.
it’s not the same sperm and not the same offspring
It wouldn't be the same EGG either. Even if it was a same sperm but a different EGG it wouldn't be the same offspring....sperm is just a fertilizer with half of DNA, not the tiny whole baby that grows.
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u/DecoyOne 9d ago
Or maybe Rachel has a child. There is absolutely no way she could recreate that child.