So many time travel hypotheticals involve do-gooder scenarios replete with handwringing over the unknown consequences. I was browsing HuffPo’s pictorial on the birthplaces of American fast food, and I couldn’t help but think of the consequences of someone shotgunning the founder/owners of these various franchises in their infancy, and how drastically that would change the landscape. So check your moral compass at the door, and do your best to drastically alter the world we know, damn the better or worse. To make it sporting, you cannot travel back in time before September 2, 1945. Points awarded for deviousness - favoring the covert over the overt.
ETA: to clarify, shotgunning the owners in the *franchises’ *infancy, not murdering Dave Thomas as a toddler with a 12 gauge.
Murdering a fast food franchise founder would have little if any effect on much of anything substantial. More market share for the other major players, or one of the second tier companies rise to fill the void.
Taking out Bill Gates or Steve Jobs might shake things up a bit…
Well, it would be nice to see Stuckey’s make a comeback, but that’s just not going to have any serious effect. A hamburger is a hamburger. Without Gates or Jobs, computing as we know it–including the internet and cell phones–might be radically different. The effect would be far more widespread, touching pretty much every current business, and most individuals.
Assuming that we are not limited to murder, I might suggest that a very early head’s-up to the initial investigators into what became known as HIV would have had long-lasting, significant positive results. Imagine if patient zero in 1959 were isolated. Along with knowledge about the mechanisms of the virus and preventive protocols, it is entirely possible that the plague could have been greatly reduced very early on.
Potentially, 25 million people’s lives would have been saved.
I shoot Mao Zedong. That should have a pretty big effect on post-1945 history. Especially with 1945 being a critical period. Mao had consolidated power over the Chinese Communists but hadn’t taken over China yet. Killing him in 1945 would have thrown the communists into a succession crisis while they were in the middle of a war.
I do not see anything in the rules as set forth in the OP that disallows altruistic ventures. A lack of a moral compass does not necessarily lead to evil results, in the same way that a diligently maintained sense of ethics does not ensure a positive result. My suggested course of action would have profound effects upon many people and the method is subtle and (apparently) unanticipated by the originator of the challenge.
I think if the founder and “visionary” of McDonalds was taken out of the picture, that would have a pretty profound effect. Nobody else was looking to completely saturate the restaurant industry with ultra-fast food, so nobody was looking to buy that much beef.
I’d provide sufficient funding for the team shooting the first Dune movie so that they could actually get it done; one of the writers followed the failure of the shoot with a bounce-back project titled Alien. Without the need for a fallback, I sorta wonder where we’d be.
If you really want to address the fast-food problem, the best way would be to get into a hamburger/pink poultry slime plant with a camera back when they first started. The fast-food franchises are just the advertising front for the real semi-food production.
If you could get Americans good and grossed-out before the fast-food became a necessary part of our over-stretched lives, then society would be forced to develop in a different direction.
You should be able to find a contagious smallpox patient sometime between 1945 and the eradication of smallpox in the 1970s. Bring them to a popular event today. The Super Bowl or the World Cup finals should do nicely. Even better, bring them to such an event in late 2001 or 2002, when there was a lot of media hysteria about bioterrorism. Bonus points if you get someone who looks like the stereotypical idea in 2001-2002 of a “terrorist”. Smallpox was eliminated last in the developing world, so this shouldn’t be a problem.
Messing with JFK’s medications in late October of 1962 might have some interesting results, too.
Go back to the ultra-conservative era say 1900-1930 and pay to have someone take cases to the Supreme Court claiming that people have a “right” to abortion, religion-free schools, gay marriage, etc. So that the court can say “are you nuts!?” and establish stare decisis against all the liberal causes.
I wonder what would happen if we did the opposite of killing the fast food people, and instead killed the likes of James Beard, Julia Child, and Alice Waters.
How about killing people who have had a big impact on all of us on the Dope.
First I kill J. C. R. Licklider who was instrumental in the creations of GUIs and ARPNET, which of course lead to the Internet.
Then I kill Bill Gates and Paul Allen before they form Microsoft; Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak before they form Apple; And Jack Tramiel before he forms Commodore International.