Congratulations, you an aspiring newly graduated chrono-historian has just been awarded one of the few spots on the new time-mind transferro device program.
You can pick an era and location and you get to experience/control the consciousness of an individual in the past. Theres a few gotchas:
•You are inside the persons mind and experience everything they experience for a period of a year. It appears (from other peoples experiences) that you are controlling their actions, but really the scientists who invented the time-mind-transferro-device aren’t too sure if that’s an illusion or not. You may well be just a “ghost rider” who thinks he’s controlling the body… anyway the illusion of control stops you going mad…
•You don’t have your own memories while in their mind, you don’t remember anything about future technology, where you came from etc. You inherit your host bodies memories and can speak the languages they speak, have all their skills etc.
•if they die you jump back to your own mind.
•No picking anyone super famous, since we’re not really sure if you are controlling them or not we don’t want to risk changing history too much. You can be minor nobility / hangers on on the fringes of a famous event but not a major player.
• one shot at it only
When you return you write it all up as an academic essay for posterity.
So while you are in the other person, you don’t remember who you really are.
But one must presume that when you come back, you remember (potentially, at least) everything that happened while you were the other person, plus everything in your own life before the jump?
I think I would want to be one of Socrates’ pupils (not Plato). It could be very enlightening in a number of ways.
-What was life really like in Athens during that period?
-How much of what Plato wrote was filtered through his own ideas and values?
-What kind of a person was Socrates, and how did he get to be that way?
Roddy
I dunno. As cool as the idea sounds from a scientific standpoint, the idea of spending a year as someone else without having my own separate consciousness (and therefore, presumably, having the belief that I am this person and always will be) has too much of a downside for me. Sure, I could choose to be Joe Schmoe, who was the right-hand man of some great pioneer. But will the history books have told me that Joe Schmoe also suffered from debilitating hemorrhoids? I can’t take that chance.
I’ll anxiously await the report of the brave soul who takes on the job.
I suppose Jesus of Nazareth a year before he got nailed would be too obvious, but it would be nice to be able to search his distant memories even as he’s approaching his destiny to fill in a few gaps in his resume–and to answer the question once and for all: how hot was the sex with Mary Magdalene?
I think I’d choose my dad approximately 1 year before I was conceived. For as much (or as little) control as I’d be able to exert for the year I inhabited his mind, perhaps it’d be enough to cause him to be a little less of a dick to my mom and me when I was growing up.
Sorry your request is denied, should have made clear they only accept applications for more than 100 years ago.
Roderick Fenmn, yes you don’t remember who you are while on the trip but when you get back you remember what happened and your whole previous life as well.
You can’t be Moses or Jesus, too famous, but you could be one of the minor disciples around them. Personally a year following around ascetic preachers in the desert doesn’t sound too appealing to me.
I’m thinking being a Roman Ambassador from a Senatorial family appointed to Alexandria in 47BC would be my choice. Get to rifle through the library just before its burnt (for the first time), still plenty of chances for unbridled hedonism along the way.
I don’t get it: I don’t have my own memories during that year . . . yet, in some sense, I’m me, and not the other person? So I’m me, but with his memories? That’s kind of an oxymoron.
Anyway . . . I want to be Vincent van Gogh, in the last year of his life. Let’s see how sane I’ll be when I come back.
Like I said they don’t know it works exactly, those that have come back report feeling like they were still “themselves” during the year. Anyway I wanted to side step all the changing history obvious ones and make it about where you’d go just for the experience and the potential knowledge from the past you’d bring back. (rather than the usual someone with knowledge from the future going back in time).
Van Gogh - still too famous, you can be one of his understudies. Still want to go?
The problem with the ‘no memories’ thing means you couldn’t go back with a purpose in mind, whether it be to read a library or stop a person from being a dick. If anything, you’d be a ‘passenger’, not a ‘driver’.
I’ll have to do a little more research before I decide for sure, but I’m sure a year inside the skull of Grigory Efimovich Rasputin would be very interesting indeed.
Just which year? Do I wait a few more years until December 1916 is available? Or go ahead and take a window in 1908 when he was busy getting busy.
