Messing with Time

Paycheck reminded me a lot of A Sound of Thunder by Ray Bradbury. They both brought up similar issues about messing with time. Should we be allowed to interfere with time for profit? In Paycheck, Jennings messes with the future to secure his own future and of course to profit with the company. It never quite goes into the time consequences of his actions, but his taking over Rethrick could have severely altered time. Rethrick could have brought on this oppressive society just by building and operating a time scope. So much can be changed with such insignificant things, like the one butterfly in A Sound of Thunder. Just building the time scope itself altered must have altered the future drastically.

Minority Report

The precrime system seems to be very full of problems, but I think that it was handled very well within the story. Detaining possible innocent people is not morally good by any means, but letting them possibly kill someone is even less morally good. Telling someone when and where they would kill another person would not be helpful in many cases. It seemed to me that Anderton finding the report is what gave him the idea to kill Kaplan in the first place. Some people were never going to actually go through with the murder, but being told that they would actually do it, may give them the courage to do it. A better way to handle the situation would be to follow the presuspects and watch so they do not murder their target. This however would be more risky and time consuming than just detaining them for a time. Many ethical questions are raised by this story, but I feel that they were doing the best job the could with what they had.