Okay, I’m a Dick with a Time Machine™, I have a time machine with the capability to make a single return trip to anywhere in the past. The time machine also prevents any paradox affecting me, so if I wanted to I could go back and prevent my own birth, and still exist.
I also have a Star Trek style disintegrator, capable of firing one lethal shot, but it never misses.
Which single individual could I go back and murder to cause the biggest and/or most horrific changes to the present?
The only rule is that the human race should still exist in the present.
Zapping the Greek commander at the Battle of Salamis might keep Europe from dominating world history the way it did.
Zapping Alexander the Great might also be influential.
Going back to abstracts, if you could find the first hunter-gatherer tribe that settled down to agriculture in a big way, and wipe them out, you might push human history back a couple thousand years.
Shoot Octavian in the face sometime before the battle of Actium, and Marc Anthony becomes the ruler of the Roman Empire. The Empire collapses soon after, and bingo-bango, European history as we know it ceases to exist.
Marc Antony was corrupt and decadent but the empire survived for hundreds of years after Caligula and Nero who were far worse so I don’t think it would have collapsed if he was in charge.
I’d be more inclined to try and stop Julian the Apostate going off and trying vainly to conquer the persians. If he’d lived and succeeded in re-establishing Pagan religions it could possibly have prevented the domination of western civilization by Christianity.
On second thoughts, arranging a vision to Constantine the Greats mother (Helena) to convert her to Paganism might work better.
You cannot alter the now by changing the past.Simply because[assuming you did go back in time]the present is what it is.So you go back and kill FDR.But you must not have done so because you didn’t.It would be more reasonable,not that reason exists in this context,that a divergent "now"would exist. You would be the "Creator of all on heaven and earth"GOD.You can go ahead but a permit is required along with a modest fee.
Ok, sorry if I can’t arrange visions or disrupt in other ways just zap paul the apostle while he’s still Saul. Most likely Christianity would stay a fringe jewish only cult, the rest of world history would be radically different.
That, I didn’t know… I suppose, though, it probably developed at lots of loci in a narrow vicinity. A nice rain followed by a warm spring, and lots and lots of wild berries growing in profusion… It could occur over hundreds of square miles…
Sigh; going too far back in time runs up against good old-fashioned Marxist “historical determinism.” We need to find the earliest really influential individual. So, I’ll go back to the Battle of Salamis: find the Greek commander and snuff him.
I may be unfairly dismissing the Egyptian Pharaohs (Christ, that’s a hard word to spell!) but I have the sense that their influence is simply too limited to be meaningful. If the Nile River had never existed at all, would European History be all that much different?)
Domestication of crop plants occurred independently in several places in China, Africa, the fertile crescent, Papua New Guinea and in a couple of places in North and South America.
You’d be able to put one culture back and give the others an advantage if you could prevent domestication of crops but I don’t think you could identify a single individual.
What if, shocker, he doesn’t resurrect? The you have wasted a journey in a one-shot time machine, which no one will believe you made.
If he does resurrect, then zapping him is only going to piss off a capricious, malevolent deity who knows your every thought (and could correct any action you take if He so chooses)!
Yeah, I’m leaving Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha etc alone in their respective time periods.
Going for biggest, but not necessarily horrific, changes in the modern world, I might zap either John Wilkes Booth or Lee Harvey Oswald in time to prevent their respective acts of infamy…
