This thread is an extension of a late night bull session I had last weekend. Basically it goes like this:
An entity (god(s), alien, time travelers from the future, elvis, whatever) is going to allow you to go back in time to any place/ time you choose. You can go back to any time and any place for the entire history of the Earth. The entity will ensure that when you go back you won’t be dropped off in a river or inside a mountain or anything…you will be safely transported to whatever time and whatever place you choose.
Its a one way trip…once there you have to live out the rest of your life there. There is no going back.
You are given 2 years to prepare but not given any more material assistance than that…i.e. you have to use your own resources to prepare for the trip.
You are allowed to take with you whatever you can carry on your back. In addition you are allowed one animal/vehicle but it can’t be bigger than 2 tons. You can also take with you anything that can be carried by your personal animal/vehicle.
You are allowed to bring members of your immediate family if you choose…Wife/Husband/SO, children, etc. They can also bring whatever they can carry and one animal/vehicle, again no larger than 2 tons.
The reason given you to go is to change history for the better. YOU get to define what ‘for the better’ means though.
You would be going back to an alternative history time stream…i.e. you wouldn’t be changing history in THIS time stream. Once you arrive anything goes as the future isn’t set at all. Up to the time you get there though time and events are exactly what they were in our own history.
So, the questions to respond to in this thread would be:
Would you go? This is not a small question as no only would there be a lot of danger involved but how would you know what effect your changing of history would have.
When would you choose to go back too and why?
What would you take with you?
What sorts of training would you give yourself in preparation to go? What sort of other measures would you take in the 2 years you have to prepare?
What would you try and accomplish? How would you accomplish it? What effect do you expect it would have?
How would you live out the rest of your life in your new time?
Who would you bring with you from your immediate family? Or woud you go alone?
I would go back to 12:30 and have the soup for lunch instead of the fish. Maybe it’s just because I’m not feeling well, but the fish didn’t satisfy me.
In terms of going back and making bigger, more substantial changes, I don’t think I’d risk it. There’s just too much at stake, and no way of knowing if a change you think is for the better can have long term deleterious results.
I would go back to March '00 and short the hell out of QQQQ.
On second thought, all I’d really need to do is go back to yesterday before the market opened and put all money on a call or put of whatever stock had the biggest change in option value. Then I’d only be out one day, and I’d be filthy rich.
I’d go to January 12th, 2004, and convince my mom to stay the night at my sister’s house instead of going home that night. I’d need nothing, really.
This would change the past for the better in that her car accident would never happen and my niece would be alive. Maybe only in that alternate world, but she’d be alive.
I would not go at all. The chances to screw things up in unexpected ways is all too likely.
There are numerous fiction stories on this topic. I cannot remember the names of them anymore but will try and loosely relate the ideas.
In one story people are taken back in time to hunt dinosaurs. They pick a dinosaur to hunt that they know will die moments after the hunter kills it even if the hunter were not there. They tell members to be very careful to stay on a predefined path. In the story one of the hunters freaks when the T-Rex comes barreling out of the jungle and runs off the path. Once back in the time machine for the trip home he notices he squished a butterfly but thinks nothing of it. Upon returning the whole world is almost, but not quite, the same. Killing the butterfly had a ripple effect through time that had unexpected consequences (maybe an animal died because it did not get its butterfly dinner and another animal never came across that animal to eat it and went elsewhere and ate something else and so on and so on).
In another story the earth has been devastated by nuclear war. The remaining survivors figure a way to go back in time and kill Einstein (or someone…I forget) so the nuclear bomb can never be invented. They succeed. Upon returning to the future they find the earth massively overpopulated with mass starvation, disease and other nasty issues.
If fiction does not work for you try a book called What If? that offers up counter histories taken from real history. Basically, historians ponder on what might have been different had just one thing in history had changed. Granted this is speculation but it is scholarly speculation from noted historians. What I found amazing reading it was how one seemingly small thing could drastically alter history (one of the “rules” they impose on themselves doing a counterhistory is that one and only one “thing” go differently than it did).
Finally, remember that what may be better for you may not be better for everyone. What if you save someone from your past along the lines Snickers mentioned. Perhaps that person then grew up and married someone. Had that person stayed dead there would be life partner probably meets someone else and has kids and whatnot. By changing the past you are making things better for you but undoing someone else’s life (perhaps literally such that they are never born). The ripple effect from that, all the people you touch and meet in life, is broad and can have effects we can never know. Perhaps good, perhaps bad but it would all be undone. I can sympathize with Snickers desire absolutely but I am not sure it is correct to change the past in this manner even if I could.
Single change to make the world better: Easy as heck. Go back to August 2001. Describe everything about the Sept 11th plot. It’s recent enough that I can remain confident of no ripple effects, and major enough (Patriot act! Iraq war!) that I can remain fairly confident of no equally major opposite effects.
I’d love to kill Hitler, but I don’t even want to think about the ripples from that.
You raise an interesting point Whack-a-Mole, but I am not sure I agree with your final opinion. Certainly changing history can have ripple effects that are huge, but they could also be small - or even nil. Furthermore, the effects could be net-positive or net-negative. I think that if you could calculate the probabilities of all of the possible outcomes of saving the life of a single “anonymous” person (by anonymous I mean a person that is not currently influential) and then weighed these probabilities based on how positive or negative they turned out to be, then it is likely the result would be net-zero. I don’t think any of these outcomes are more “correct” than the others - even the original outcome. The hard part would be if you changed history for the worse, you would then have to live through it with the full realization that it was your fault. If I was in a situation like Snickers, I would be willing to take that chance.
Right. Even if we change the one thing, there’s no telling about the follow-up consequences. Still, just to stretch the imagination…
I don’t know. Maybe convince Lincoln that the play he had tickets for really wasn’t that good, or convince him to wear this new vest from, ah, the obscure Kevlar province of, ah, Sweden.
…Somehow arrange for Adolph to have a super-embarrasing wardrobe malfunction during one of his great speeches. Arrange for the microphones to pick up a really rude noise during some good part. I imagine that if there’s one thing that would have given him apoplexy and an early stroke, it would be getting laughed at.
This is my personal taste, but I am pretty impressed with the computer and information-age revolution. Do you suppose that we could have gotten anywhere by teaching binary math to, say, Franklin or Jefferson? We could call it a new military code, maybe, and somehow overlook all the other practical applications…
I’m not a doctor, but we could save a lot of suffering by coming up with good anaesthetics that much earlier, somehow convince earlier medics of the benefits of hygiene… even just from the practical benefits of it.
It’d be great to save the library at Alexandria, but I’m not sure how we’d do it. Uh, was it destroyed all at once, or by many people each objecting to different parts of it?
The name of this story is “A Sound of Thunder” by Ray Bradbury. They’re making a movie out of it. Not sure about the name of the other story.
If I wouldn’t be altering this world, but creating a new alternate one, then what’s the point of going? The millions of people who died in the Holocaust or the thousands that died in the tsunami or whatever tragedy I attempted to divert would still have happened in our current timeline, and those people would still be dead. Also, the way I’m interpreting it, if I choose not to go an alternate timeline wouldn’t be created. If I did create the AT and my changes wound up having terrible effects, then I’m responsible for the destruction of those new lives, which wouldn’t have been there to be destroyed by me if I hadn’t chosen to take the trip.
There’s an easy way a time traveler could convince people he was genuine: DVDs. Just travel back about a week before September 11, 2001 and send copies of a 9/11 documentary DVD to the FBI and the media. Even the most sophisticated special effects technology couldn’t simulate Peter Jennings and Dan Rather so perfectly, after all. Just for good measure, you could send them the complete Lord of the Rings Extended Edition DVD set. Wouldn’t that be absolute proof of time travel?
Go back to Germany sometime in the twenties (would have to do research to figure out the best date), go into an early meeting of the NDSAP with my best Hamas style suicide bomb vest and take as many of the bastards out as I could.
I doubt it. Given the choice between believing someone dedicated a huge bank of computers and oodles of man-hours on a massive fake documentary project and alien-sponsored time travel, I’ve still have to go with the former.
Explaining away the Lord of the Rings would be tricky, too, but given the choice, I’d have to go with a mundane, if impressive, human technological feat.
If one wanted to prevent 9/11, the best bet would be quietly assassinating the various hijackers. This may also lead Al-Qaida to believe that the FBI/CIA/NSA has detected their agents and moved against them, prompting them to turn on each other as they search out the mole.
I’d personally just go back a month with various lottery results. I’d live in a hotel, paying cash for everything, and step back into my life (tickets in hand) just as the one-month-younger-me disappears into the timehole.
New York Herald Tribune
April 20, 1866
AN ALARMING REPORT!
Among the effects of the Late President was found on his person a vest of peculiar material. Reports from Washington state that this strange fabric has the ability to withstand a minnie ball of .50 calibers when fired from a Springfield rifle at a distance of some three feet. O tragic day that his dastardly assassin fired from close range directly into his head where the vest could offer no protection.
Well, CG would have to convince Abe of the benefit of Swedish earmuffs, too.
I dunno about Larry’s idea of suicide-bombing an early Nazi meeting. It’d be easier to just drop an RPG into their midst and pick off the survivors with a good sniper’s rifle.
The ripple effect of such a massive change in history would most probably be that none of us less than 65 yo would ever be born.
We’re only born because a specific spermatozoid amongst millions of others fertilized a specific egg. Had any of our parent, grandparent, etc…not had sex in a specific way, at a specific moment, making specific moves, and we wouldn’t be there. The slighest change in their past everyday life and most likely, off we are. A major change (like no WWII) and essentially everybody born since then doesn’t exist.
Anyway, as pointed out by previous posters, if you’re only creating an alternate timeline, then you aren’t undoing anything. Everybody killed as a result of Hitler’s rise to power is still dead in our timeline.
And finally, you don’t know what will be the result of your action. No WWII? Maybe there will be instead a thermonuclear war in Europe during the 60s?