Suppose that it is sometime in the future, probably 2 or 3 years at the most, science has figured out all of this crazy multi-worlds quantum theory stuff and we have a device that allows us to travel through time in our own universe, but also to other universes as well. Suppose that we discover a world where there's humans but they've been enslaved by some giant ants or perhaps a lizard-like mutant. In fact, you can even find your slave-world human equal, except they wouldn't have a name - just an ant language symbol to indentify their relative rank in the slave caste system and another to individually identify them for recordkeeping. Anyway, what would you do? Would you try to overthrow the ant or lizard regime and return it to the humans? Why or why not? Which countries would vote against this if you bothered to take it to the kitty cats at the UN? Which would vote for it? Remember - this is a universe we didn't know existed until about 45 seconds ago.
If you chose to overthrow the ants or lizards, how would you do it? After you've crushed them, how would you install a transitional government in a place that was ruled by giant ants? Would you make the humans speak English? If there was a really hot girl in this universe and your wife would never know because it's in a completely different universe, would you, you know? Finally, do you think that sending robot sentries to do this kind of thing would be a lot safer and entail fewer marital infidelity complications thus we should increase funding for the robotic arts?
If you did not choose to overthrow the ants or lizards, did you ever think that they could've seen you there - staring at their slaves who are obviously their brothers and sisters - and they could figure out this quantum travel crap, too? What's to stop them from travelling to our universe and overthrowing our government and enslaving us? Wouldn't we be safer if we had robots that were prepared to unemotionally crush any extra-universe invaders and thus we should increase funding for the robotic arts?
