So, you get a time machine...
If offered a time machine the first mission that always comes to my mind first is: rescuing the library at Alexandria. Maybe showing the librarians how to set lead type, and how to do modern book binding so they could print a thousand copies of each scroll. Or just bring a PC or mac back with me and scan everything in the library into it. Then come back to the present and put it all online.
But hadnt thought of that thing about impowering the Iroquois to stand up to White expansion. That is also pretty cool.
thomas81
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if i couldnt travel for selfish reasons, i'd travel to Russia in 1924 and warn Lenin about what happens to the Soviet Union under Stalin so that Trotsky could become his successor.
I would go back to 1820 and dig up all of the gold that I could find around Sutter's Mill, and then use it to finance each of these as my own 'inventions': telephone, internal combustion engine, airplane, penicillin, transistor, radio, anesthesia, incandescent lamp, solar cell, assembly line, "The Pill", integrated circuits, and the desktop computer.
Then I would introduce a young Klara Pölzl to a nice Jewish boy...
I'd like to go back a few hundred years, jump out of my time machine, then start laughing and making fun at how ridiculously everyone was dressed. Then I'd dash back to my time traveling device, an angry mob in tow, jump in and get the hell out of there.
Of course, I'd have to make sure I had my time machine perfected, first. If something went wrong as I was trying to get back to my time...well, s**t, I'd really be in trouble!
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M'hmm, then later have a sit down with FDR and Henry A Wallace sometime prior to WW2 and give them a future 20th century history primer with a special emphasis on all of Hitler's movements, the Cold War and the 44 DNC.
Last edited by Nebogipfel on 26 Feb 2015, 10:10 pm, edited 5 times in total.
A pivotal question in the Guy Pearce movie, "The Time Machine" was "why can't I change the past?". The time traveler could change the past, but the past would self-correct in another way, and the same outcome would ultimately happen.
Much later he found out that the reason he was not able to change the past was because he was not willing to make himself part of that past. As some have said above, "jump in and then leave", so perhaps, what is effected that day would be counter-balanced if one just left.
Wow! 5 of us picked Alexandria.
But as for "other," I'm not sure I could pick. There are so many places and times I would love to visit. I guess that why the many lives reincarnation idea is so appealing. I would love to spend a whole lifetime in certain eras and a shorter time in others. But would I get to choose what type of person I was in each era - scientist, actor, artist, explorer? Once again, I reckon that's why people who are into past lives were often named people and not just your average nobody.
So in a sense, it can be a question of who would you like to have been or been close to at least? Consequently, your time machine would end up more like that TV show, Quantum Leap.
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I'm not blind to your facial expression - but it may take me a few minutes to comprehend it.
A smile is not always a smile.
A frown is not always a frown.
And a blank look rarely means a blank mind.
maintaining the time line, can I have a time ship like in star trek , where its out of time, then one can see the effects of the changes and try to correct them to get the proper one.
prevent ww1 and you prevent ww2. what if hitler had been accepted to art school. his paints weren't really bad, he'd been busy painting not waging war. though what if you prevent the later half of the nazis, a lot of what they did was good, so if you prevent the genocide and war, but kept the inventions and econ recovery, cheap cars fore the people etc.
thus where a time ship out of timeline would come in handy as you wouldn't be effected by the changes and could edit it to obtain the balance. slight changes could have drastic effects.
as for the idea set here, creating another time line could be bad, what if the new timeline travels back and changers your timeline. by creating it and editing it you then have a new timeline with another time machine. I'd would rather be able have my ideal, though if not then be limited to my timeline and my life time only possible effecting 30 years worth of time, even still dangerous though. perhaps some future time agency would come back and stop you.
Agreed. The only way it wouldn't be a total disaster is if our time line was fixed no matter what. Then, by time traveling you would create a second timeline that would operate like an alternate dimension. You could spend some time there and make changes, and when you returned to the timeline you came from (i.e here), it would be to the point in time you left from + the amount of time you spent in timeline 2. If you wanted to go back to the timeline you created, it could only be at the point in time concurrent with timeline 1. This is a good system for preventing paradoxes and erasures.
I put in a vote for Alexandrian Library too, though like naturalplastic I would find a way to help the librarians preserve and disseminate the information and only take copies back to the present,not originals.
Cracked weighs in:
http://www.cracked.com/article_18539_7-lost-bodies-work-that-would-have-changed-everything.html
What collected human knowledge was lost? What advances could have happened if it wasn't? During the Renaissance, scholars of the time looked back to whatever ancient writings they had access to and acted on that information. What if they had access 650K scrolls (at minimum) more?
Cracked also grieves the loss of Tesla's work:
Before he moved to Colorado Springs to help Wolverine do magic tricks in 1899, the bulk of Nikola Tesla's research could be found at 35 South Fifth Avenue, New York. Within this real life mad science lab could be found Tesla's full collection of equipment, notebooks, laboratory data and a secure perimeter of Tesla coils.
For personal rather than "make the world a better place" reasons I would also like to go back and show scientists of the past how much we appreciate their work and give them "spoilers" about questions that bugged them. I want to show Galileo a picture of the spacecraft named after him and show him close-ups of the planets. I want to tell Darwin about DNA because not being able to figure out the mechanism of information transmission through the generations reportedly bugged him to his grave. I want them to know how much we appreciate what they did.
Much later he found out that the reason he was not able to change the past was because he was not willing to make himself part of that past. As some have said above, "jump in and then leave", so perhaps, what is effected that day would be counter-balanced if one just left.
Actually, the reason he couldn't change the past was because the tragic made him build the time machine, if he prevents that from happening, he wouldn't build the time machine to go there in the first place, resulting in a time paradox.
Following this line, I would invest in companies like Microsoft, Apple, Google etc.
I once read a book called The Microsoft Story (or something like that), written in 1995-ish. In it, they talked about the joke of Microsoft employees who owned million dollar snowmobiles. At one point, a lot of employees sold off shares and bought themselves things like snowmobiles. But if they had waited a year or so, with a share split and giant leap in MS share prices, their shares became worth a hundred times more.
_________________
I'm not blind to your facial expression - but it may take me a few minutes to comprehend it.
A smile is not always a smile.
A frown is not always a frown.
And a blank look rarely means a blank mind.
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