OR you could just bring back some plans for a cotton PICKING machine and preclude the need for slaves while keeping the economic advantages.
Or introduce the boll weevil so cotton can’t take off as a cash crop.
I’d use it to go back to the 1950’s, where I could pretend to try to rape my mother so that my father could pretend to save her from me.
Which SF book? That’s an interesting idea about the supposed cause of the darkness. According to Matthew 27, verse 45, “Now from the sixth hour there was darkness all over the land until the ninth hour.”
Personally, I think I would go back and talk to myself in high school. There’s a bunch of advice I could use. Hopefully, I’d listen.
Assuming we take modern medicine with us, and are somehow exempt from the reactions of those we come across (sorcerer! spy! heretic! or whatever), then I’d quite like to see something of the politics of the English Civil War period, or Elizabeth I’s time.
First I’ll go back to when Aluminum was fairly new and ludicrously expensive and trade a few bricks of it for some gold.
Honestly I’d grab a linguist and a geneticist and visit a couple of places.
Cahokia at its height.
Derinkuyu at its most vibrant.
Caral about 2400 BC.
Visit some of the early Yamnaya peoples.
The same. To save him from tim-n-va
I forgot. I should also take an archaeologist.
So we can laugh every time s/he says something must have religious significance.
I’m quite certain I would tell myself to piss up a rope.
mmm
+1
I’d go back to the precise time and place where abiogenesis occurred on Earth and stomp upon the primordial stew just as it was about to spark into life and begin its ~4 billion year evolutionary journey into our current biosphere. Then, I’d take a dump in that puddle, travel back to present day, and see if I created a better world. It would be good to be* Poop-God*.
…or, maybe I’d just go back to the premier of Beethoven’s 9th symphony, instead.
You, sir, have the right of it.
November 9, 2016. I’m really, really tired of this election bullshit.
To be fair, I also skip ahead to the ending of books. I’d like to just get this over with.
Oh, how could I have forgotten: Find out what the hell a Roman dodecahedron was used for.
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Battle of the Little Big Horn.
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Battle of the Alamo.
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The Tunguska event in 1908. (At a safe distance.)
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Signing of the Declaration of Independence.
If time travel exists, wouldn’t they record any event and show it? It would be some sort of virtual reality or high-tech whatever that we don’t have yet.
You could have the Time Travel Channel.
“Well, class, let’s watch Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling.
Go to the VR Time Travel Holo-Theatre and don’t forget your language interpreter helmet.”
Wait 'til they figure out that creating one was a test of a worker’s skill - creating all those surfaces and “gluing” them together.
Kinda like a “Masterpiece” (original usage of term), but for Journeyman level.
Or were created as parts pf a “High School”-type “Science Fair”?
If I have to choose the past I wanna see all the dinosaurs.
If I can go anywhere, I’m heading to the future…say 400 years or so. By then we’ll have our shit together even if we blow it all up in the near future.
I’d rather go to the future. If I can’t, I’d go back to when I was 15 so I could give myself advice. Mistakes not to make, investment advice, things like that.
In 400 years I’d wager we will be multidimensional beings of light and energy.