Assume for a moment, you have a time machine. This time machine can deliver you to any moment in time, and move through space to any point on Earth.
What would be the 4 things you’d most like to do with it?
My list.
Buy a newspaper from the future and make stock purchases/bets accordingly.
Go back to Berlin, May 1st, 1945 in Hitler’s Bunker. Sneak into Hitler’s room and beat the living **** out of him with an aluminim baseball bat. Then set him on fire.
Go back to the night before the Library of Alexandria burned down and steal as many of the books that I can take. Bring them back to the present. Hand them over to various universities and scientists
Go back to July 12, 1562. Locate Diego de Landa and when he’s alone, kick him square in the nuts, repeatedly. Then go back a day and steal as many of the mayan books(which Sr. Landa burned on the 12th) as I can carry. Take them back to the present. Hand them over to various scientists and universities.
Bwahahaha! Thanks for that one. Made my afternoon.
Immediately get Thomas Jefferson and bring him back to right now. Plop him down in front of CNN and C-Span for a week, then take him back and watch him be a lot more specific.
Harry Anslinger? Dead meat.
Check with future me, see what we should have done different. Also, what should we be patenting, stock tips, etc.?
Well, if I didn’t care about ruining the timeline…
•Take an Air Force Airborne Laser Platform back to ancient Judea, and use it to incinerate Jesus as he’s giving the sermon on the mount.
•Pull some strings to arrange Karl Marx’s inheriting a vast fortune, and a ranch in Hawaii when he turned 18.
•Arrive moments before Hitler kills himself, subdue him, and replace him with a dead lookalike. Then I’d take him back to the present, and personally deliver him in chains to the Knesset.
•Misc. assassinations. Possibly hundreds.
•Stop by a Spanish galleon loaded with treasure, that’s just about to sink in a storm, and help myself to a few bars of gold. (I’d probably do this several times.)
•Reenact Amanda Plummer’s episode of The Outer Limits.
•Kill Lee Harvey Oswald…in some bizarre, nonsensical way. Like by transporting some Velociraptors or Sabre-Toothed Tigers into the book depository. Or making it look like the KGB staged a commando raid to keep him from killing JFK. Something like that.
•Reunite the Beatles…to play at the 1996 olympics. Along with Richie Valens, and Beethoven.
•Dump some fake spacecraft wreckage and a bunch of dead “Cosmonauts” near the Apollo 14 landing site.
Go back to last Wednesday night and tell myself to do my Algebra/Trig homework then instead of procrastinating and having to stay up late on Thursday to finish it.
Go to Rome, circa 24 A.D. and practice conversational Latin. I’m talking Classical Latin, none of this sissy, “ci is ch like in chapter” Ecclesiastical stuff.
Go to c. 3 billion BC. Find the tidal pool where the first protocells were forming. Take a flamethrower to 'em. Check to see if I still exist.
Convince my maternal grandfather to not take up smoking, so he might still be around today.
Go to 1985, and buy a large amount of Microsoft stock.
Go round to Einstein’s house about an hour before he gets the theory of relativity. Walk up behind him, pretend to look at his notes, and say “Hmmmm. I think you’ll find that e=mc squared.”
Win the biggest honkin’ lottery out there, just for a safety net.
Buy a lot of diamonds or something, that I can trade for currency when I go back in time to buy Union Pacific, Procter&Gamble, Standard Oil, AT&T, General Motors, IBM, Xerox, and Microsoft.
Now that I’m rich, I can become enlightened. Go back and learn from the Buddha.
Take care of Hitler in his crib.
Take smallpox vaccine to the Indians before 1492, to give them a fighting chance.
Warn Jesus, Paul, and Mohammed about what they’re starting. Only Jesus will listen.
1920’s Paris – endless afternoons at the Closerie de Lilas with Hemingway, explaining to him how to make the females of his novels three demensional, convincing him to ignore Pauline and be faithful to Hadley and slipping him a supply of prozac from the future in a sealed bottle that cannot be opened until he is desperate for relief from his depression. (I allow myself at least one self-indulgent and fanciful one.)
The Mayflower Compact and all governing laws thereafter will forbid any form of slavery and racial discrimination.
Post-WWII Palestine: Palestinians spontaneously welcome the Jewish outcasts from Europe and all agree to live side by side with each other in peace, mutual respect and sharing. Each acknowledges the sacredness of the other and they seem to develop a natural affinity for each other.
The First Constitution Convention of the United States is made up equally of men and women and has representation from Native American groups.
•Rig an X-Box into a coin-op machine, and set it up next to the first Pong machine, with a stack of business cards for my front company.
•Steal and set off a multimegaton nuclear bomb in Jerusalem…just as the Crusaders manage to breach the city walls.
•Buzz Hernando Cortez with the biggest, loudest, scariest looking aircraft I can find, right as he comes into sight of Tenochtitlan. 'Maybe rig up some kind of massive loudspeaker system so I can play the message “THY SHALL LEAVE MY CHILDREN BE!” in Spanish and Aztec.
•Sneak into dozens of historical photo-ops over the decades, making sure to get my face very clearly in all of them.
•Recover Joseph Merrick’s tissue samples, before they can be destroyed in the blitz.
•Hijack the infamous Mary Celeste in the mid-Atlantic, before it can deliver it’s cargo of mustard gas to Prussian agents. With a little luck, I might be able to keep the First World War from nearly destroying Europe in 1875.
I second the idea about Jefferson on CNN (and I’d raise one Lincoln). Give them a few minutes on the opposite side of the desk from Bill O’Reilly. Heck, give the pair their own TV show. It’d be better than anything on now anyway, and more intelligent.
Make myself a little money in the stock market or some other way.
Record some artists history (or Alan Lomax) didn’t get enough of: a young Son House, Charley Patton, Robert Johnson, etc.
Round up a panel of history’s great minds (like Jefferson and Lincoln, plus Bill Clinton for his familiarity with current events) and take them to September 10th, 2001. Tell them what’s going to happen the next day and what its consequences will be. Figure out if we should stop it, alter it, or what.
Oh, some other people to meet: Einstein, T. S. Eliot, Shakespeare of course… and I’d be seeing a lot of concerts by artists who didn’t make it to the 1990s.
Systematically and as unobtrusively as possible, go back and obtain incontrovertible evidence to correct the entire historical record where there exist errors or points of contention.
