I would use it to solve the riddles and mysteries that I’ve always wondered about.
What really happened to the dinosaurs?
How did the unverse start? Exactly when?
Was there an Atlantis, and where was it?
How did the “proto humans” survive long enough to become us, with no fur, claws, fangs, or anything else useful. It takes time to develop a big brain and weapons, what the %$#% did we do while waiting around?
Then I would horde up lots of really old stuff, what would be priceless antiquities now, put em all on EBay and retire
The Time Machine limits you to Earth(you can go anywhere on earth in any time). Plus, go back to the beginning, and I don’t think there will be anything to breathe.
And as to the OP, well, no doubt I’d check out a couple of past mysteries, but by and large I’d check out the future to make TODAY a better place, at least for me!
I’d be making hops into the future to check out stock prices and medical reseach. I see no real reason I couldn’t end up owning most of the world and being immortal.
I’d go back about three million years and transplant some australopithecines to South America and southern Asia, for two reasons: First, so the local fauna could slowly adapt to the presence of tool-using bipedal hunters, so when H. Sapiens made it’s debut there wouldn’t be mass extinctions. Secondly, to see if the hominid line could radiate a bit, maybe have several species of “parahumans” about. Repeat experiment with H. Erectus if necessary.
I would go back in time, and briefly kidnap the very young me.
I would take mini- me forward in time, when technology has developed reliable implant technology, and I would have a transmitter implanted in the mature me, and a receiver implanted in mini-me.
I would then return mini-me to just a moment later than I took me from. ;j
Then I would advise me how not to fuck up so much in life. I would periodically appear in my own ear with advice based on having lived through the experience.
When the time machine is invented, I’ll be the wealthy powerful patron who funds it.
I was going to post that I would go back and force large scale breeding between Neanderthals and humans and hope for the best but I like your idea so much better. This is easily the coolest suggeston in the entire thread.
Since you guys are doing all the important stuff, I’d kind of like to have a box of Elvis’ “That’s All Right” unplayed 78s on Sun. I’d go back to Memphis the week the record came out, and buy 50 or 100 of them from Sam Phillips. Matter of fact, I’d buy a box of each record by all the blues artists who went on to fame, and some who didn’t. Early Chess records when they were still the Aristocrat label. I’d pay a couple hundred bucks for one of the first production Les Paul guitars, and get some original Fender Telecasters and Stratocasters and Jaguars and Precision Basses, and some Fender Tweed amplifiers. Here’s where I’d like to alter the time line - I’d go back to that fateful evening and sit up with Jimi Hendrix, or hide his sleeping pills.
Well, I thought about that, but then I decided that Jesus wasn’t absolutely necessary for Paul’s shtick. Having a genius for this sort of thing, he could easily have cranked up a religion based on some other sect.
I think that I would do things just to fuck with later archeologists and historians. Like take a bunch of plastic Star Wars action figures a million years back in time and bury them somewhere that I knew an important archeological dig was to take place. Or perhaps I could arrange to be in some of the very earliest photographs prominently holding a Starbucks coffee cup. That sort of thing. v
Go back to that fateful moment when I should have told The One That Got Away that I loved him. We may still have ended up a big, flaming wreckage, but I would know that I said what I had to say.
Go back to the year my grandma died and make that airline reservation in the spring to spend a week with her, getting everything about her 94 years on earth down, instead of assuming I had until Christmas to go see her. She died suddenly that summer.
Go back to that bar in New Orleans and NOT start smoking.
Go back to the day in high school when I fucked up a very important friendship and tell myself that heartbreak will trump pride everytime.
First:
I’ll drop myself off on my Grandpa’s front steps, early on some Friday night that summer when I was 15. I’ll walk the three blocks to the Friday night dance and see what’s happening. Since I’m already back there in time, I’ll stay through the whole weekend and play the hand out.
Sometime over the course of this weekend I’ll say a few things to Grandpa and Grandma, nice things they deserved and I never said. By Sunday night I’ll be ready to come back to the present.
Second:
I’d be swimming in the sea off of Catalina Island on the night of November 28, 1981. There I’d save Natalie Wood from drowning. She’d be ever so grateful and realize that I was the one she was meant to spend her life with. She’d dump that stupid Robert Wagner and Natalie and I would live happily ever after.
Third:
Having accomplished these two treasured dreams, I’d have no further interest in altering the past.
I can do these fun, selfish things without guilt because you previous posters have saved civilization, rescued Hemmingway from the depths of depression and ended religious intolerance, to name just a few remarkable achievments.
Thinkin’ about it, I’d make these two trips into the past and these two only, even if y’all hadn’t fixed the other things. I’ve seen the Law of Unintended Consequences operate too often to risk changing a whole lot.
So, we’re limited to Earth and we don’t have spacecraft? Well, that makes things a bit more contained.
[ul]
[li]First, be a tourist. Go through the past and just bum around as an average schmuck. Focus on the 20th Century, especially all of the World’s Fairs and Expositions and all of that. Visit famous authors at their peak, such as Hemingway in Paris and Kipling in Canada (he didn’t write much about it, but when he was writing about India he was living there). Fix up some famously wasted lives, like Monroe, Turing, Joyce, Hemingway, Hendrix, and Elvis. Kill Mark David Chapman, Lee Harvey Oswald, and John Wilkes Booth, and host a cage match to the death between Hitler and Stalin.[/li][li]Make a pot in land speculation beginning in the early 1800s America. Go into prospecting and inventing, but not stock market speculation: The stock market is too volatile, and my machniations would just ruin my foreknowledge. Invent the gallium-arsenide transistor in the 1920s, when electricity is becoming common, and make IBM defunct with my Electrical-Process Computing and Tabulating Machines. That racist SOB Shockley doesn’t deserve the credit. Hide my money in different places, put it in banks that won’t fail, etc., and maintain my wealth throughout history. Of course, all of these changes will negate my previous work, so I’ll be able to make a mint selling alternate history stories to Hugo Gernsback.[/li][li]Live in my altered future, going back and fixing things as they happen. Inventing solid-state electronics in the 1920s will push physics out further and faster, simply so it can explain what the hell is up with semiconductors. Einstein will get help from me personally, and his Nobel Prize will be for his work in the theory of transistors. I’ll be able to jump-start quantum theory in the 1940s, which won’t be marred by any unfortunate conflicts, and we’ll all be running Plan 9 systems on fast desktop machines in the 1950s.[/li][li]Give Goddard plenty of funding with the stipulation that he design jet planes that can become orbital, to jump-start space travel and get humans into space in force in the 1930s. By the 1940s, computer technology would be advanced enough to support a permanent space station, which would provide a jumping-off point for more advances. No pointless Moon Race, just an orderly progression into the unknown. [/li][/ul]
I touched upon the library theme in the first post. I’d love to see what was in there. I just hope the books weren’t the egyption equilvent of Danille Steele.
The Dark ages are tougher, as you’d need to keep the Western Roman Empire from going down the drain.
