Los Angeles, 1967. I would live the through the drug culture and cool hard rock music, and see the birth of the LA punk scene…
I’d bring a walkman, and say I invented the thing.
Buy a round-trip ticket?
I’d like to go to September 10, 2001 if I could change the past, or September 11, 3001 if I couldn’t, to see how everything turned out.
France 35.000 years ago.
sorry, why:
well, to experience life when surviving was still the main goal throughout the day.
I’d love to be able to make everything I need myself: weapons, tools, clothes, you name it, and be completely self sufficient.
also: nature must’ve been breathtaking, then.
I can’t imagine what unspoiled, untouched earth looks like…
but I’d sure love to see it.
I’m quite surprised that the vast majority of people would choose to go to the past.
My choice would definately be the future. If i only got one shot, then i’d probably want to go to 2600AD - hopefully far enough in the future for everything to be very different, but close enough to the present day that i’d at least be capable of understanding it. Location - doesn’t really matter, i’m sure they’d have a very quick transportation system.
The best thing of course would be to move forward in 50 year increments, and see how things change from the normal society/culture that we’re used to into something totally different and strange.
I’d take a newspaper (can be carbon dated to prove i’m from the past), and some supplies in case civilisation gets wiped out!
How, exactly? Does C-14 decay at an accelerated rate during time travel?
Carbon would decay at its normal rate - thats the point.
They’ll see the date on the newspaper (ie a date 600 years in the past), carbon date the newspaper to be say 1 year old, and voila… theres my proof.
Actually now that i think about it, they’ll probably have technology advanced enough to be able to fake it pretty easily, so it probably wouldn’t be proof after all.
Maybe i’d just take a selection of things, and hope the volume of stuff would be enough to persuade them…
Ummm… we have the technology to fake that today. I can create a newspaper that has the date May 13th 1281 on it, have it carbon-dated, and by your logic I’ll have proved that I’ve time travelled from the year 1281.
Ever want to change the world? There’s nothing more meaningful you can conceivably do with your life, is there, than to change the world for the better?
But no matter what you achieve in life, how do you know what you’ve really changed? The political cause you fight for might have triumphed without your help. The scientific discovery you make might have been made by some other researcher a month later. History might be deterministic.
But suppose you have a time machine that allows you to visit a POTENTIAL future – that is, this is how the world will turn out if you, the traveler, NEVER COME BACK from this particular trip. But you can come back, and you can bring anything you want with you, including newspapers and history books. That would be ideal. I would love to do that. I would go into the future by five-year increments – so at each stop I get a chance to acclimate myself, and at no stop do I appear to be an idiot or a lunatic or an immigrant from some primitive country. At each stop I gather up some books focusing on the history of the previous five years. With heavy emphasis on the stock and financial markets, for obvious reasons. Then I decide what, in my view, the future really NEEDS. What’s going to happen that should be avoided? What opportunities will present themselves to humanity and be tragically missed? Then – after I make enough in the stock market to become rich and powerful – I focus all my efforts on changing those things. As soon as world events start unfolding in a noticeably different way than the accounts in my future-history books, I know I’m succeeding. Of course, from that point on, my inside stock tips become worthless . . .
You’ve hit on one potential problem right there. The more you change the world, the more useless your knowledge of the future becomes as it refers to a different future.
Chaos theory says that there are certain complex systems where tiny changes in the starting conditions will leads to radically different changes in the outcome. Weather is one such system, and world history would be too. This means it would be effectively impossible to predict in advance what your changes would do. You might want to change the world for the better, but end up making it worse…
Assuming I can come back, DINOSAURS!
I’d need camping gear,weapons, video recording gear, and a woman because man does not live by paleontology alone.
I’ll plump for Rome, circa 15 BC (after Augustus has got things stabilised). I’d take the secret of paper (in my mind), some really good maps, and a printing press, and lots of easily-portable valuables. Then I’d see Rome colonise America.
But to be there to hear The Aeneid recited by the author…
I’d go back about an hour ago and eat that sandwhich again…
That was a good sandwhich.