Edith Keeler Must Die
In Depression-era America, two men show up at a
local soup kitchen with nothing but the clothing
they're wearing—itself stolen off a
clothesline several blocks away. They befriend the
soup kitchen owner, arranging to do odd jobs in
exchange for a small stipend. One of them falls in
love with the proprietor—Edith
Keeler—while the other spends what little
money they have on a scientific experiment to look
into the future. What the latter sees when his
experiment is successful makes him utter the
now-famous line, "Edith Keeler must die."
The two men are Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock, from
television's "Star Trek." The plot comes from "The
City on the Edge of Forever," often voted the best
"Trek" episode ever. In this story, Doctor McCoy
travels back in time, changing the events of the
past and thereby altering the course of the future.
Kirk and Spock go back to stop him, and in so
doing, learn that Keeler is the key. Somehow she
lives when she is meant to die, and leads a
pacifist movement that keeps the United States out
of World War II—thus allowing Hitler to win
the war. In order to set things right, Edith
Keeler... must die.
The issue of Edith Keeler's death is an ethical
dilemma common in time travel fiction. If it were
possible to travel in time, how would we do so
without "polluting" the natural course of history?
Even the tiniest pebble, dropped into a body of
water, creates ripples that expand outward at a
geometric rate. Traveling back in time, your mere
presence could set in motion a chain of events that
irrevocably alters the future as you know it.
One of these dilemmas is the so-called
"grandmother paradox." What would happen if you
went back in time and caused the death of your
grandmother before she gave birth to your mother?
Would you cease to exist? If so, then you would
never have gone back in time in the first place to
cause the death of your grandmother. If not, then
how were you ever born, so that you could grow up
and go back in time? This dilemma also found
expression in popular sci fi entertainment, namely
the "Back to the Future" movies. When Marty McFly
found himself back in the 1950s, he inadvertently
prevented his parents from meeting, thus preventing
his own birth.
But what if restoring the proper flow of history
means being responsible for someone's death? Or
many deaths? If your presence in Ford's Theater in
1865 prevented John Wilkes Booth from assassinating
President Lincoln, could you pull the trigger
yourself? If you accidentally prevented Hitler's
rise to power when you went back in time, would you
have the stomach to put history back on its proper
course, knowing six million Jews would die as a
result?
Even from a more passive perspective, time
travel is fraught with such ethical dilemmas. If
you could go back and simply stand by as a witness,
could you watch the crucifixion of Christ without
lifting a finger to help? Would you be able to
stand motionless as Gavrilo Princip shot Archduke
Ferdinand of Austria, knowing the result would be
the death of over seven million people in World War
I?
Time travel is not yet a reality (though
theoretically possible, according to some), so such
ethical conflicts remain no more than an
intellectual curiosity. But, as always, science
fiction allows us to explore such dilemmas while
they're still just academic exercises, so hopefully
when and if the "time" comes when we face such
challenges, we'll be prepared for them.
©2003 Michael
Strickland ALL RIGHTS
RESERVED
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