Twitter has gone nuts over this time travel question

If you’ve looked at Twitter in the last 24 hours, a few things are trending high. Adele’s newest single, “Hello,” is the best thing we’ve ever heard and the Internet has lots of thoughts about it. Also, baseball is happening so that’s very important. There’s one other thing that might strike you as a little bit odd, and it’s the fact that the term “Baby Hitler” is generating A LOT of Tweets, and there’s a reason why.

You see, this week we were all pretty obsessed with the idea of Back to the Future and time travel. So, The New York Times Magazine decided to ask its readers a very specific time-traveling question: If you could hop in a DeLorean (or, I dunno, a TARDIS) and go back in time and kill baby Hitler, would you?

NYT then published the results and they’re kinda surprising. 42% would, 30% would not, and 28% aren’t sure. “I thought more people would say they would,” Jake Silverstein, the magazine’s editor-in-chief told CNNMoney.

Yes, but he’s still just a little baby. When we go back in time, do we have solid proof that the Baby Hitler we find will be the one to grow up and become Hitler we know and definitely do not like today? Did we learn NOTHING from rewatching Back to the Future this week, and that every single tiny action has consequences in the future? Maybe we go back in time and Baby Hitler becomes so freaked out meeting someone from the future who’s yelling about trending topics on Twitter, he rethinks his whole life anyway. Twitter is just as confused/concerned abut this question as I am, as you can already imagine. A lot of users are actually referencing the last time the NYT suggested something and it totally divided the Internet, GuacamoleGate.

So, there you have it. That’s the story of the one day the New York Times got Baby Hitler to trend just underneath Adele’s long-awaited album. The Internet continues to be a weird place. Carry on, everyone.

(Image via Universal.)