So let’s say we find ourselves in posession of a time machine and, having been afflicted with an appropriately insane penchance for chaos and anarchy, we decide that we’re going to use it to mess with our ancestors’ heads. However, our time machine has several strict rules regarding its’ usage:
The time machine may travel backwards in time to any year one wishes, but may not travel past 2005 into the future.
Living organisms placed in the machine will die in transit, meaning that a live person, a microbe, or a small army of leprechauns would all prove ineffective.
Linguistically significant information will be instantly obliterated - no sending back a quantum physics textbook or explicit instructions on how to go from the stone age to electrical engineering in fifty years.
Your machine has an infinite payload, meaning any object (or cluster of objects) of any size may be transported back in time.
The machine will burn out after its first use, meaning that one cannot send multiple objects to multiple destinations.
With these prohibitions in mind, if you wished to create as much chaos as possible, what would you send to what place in what year?
I considered IMHO, but I wasn’t entirely sure; though posed for less than serious reasons this is a serious question, so I figured it had a better chance of getting honest scrutiny here.
C’mon, if there’s no limitation on mass, why not send the whole earth back? Or send the sun back 3 billion years so that it collides with itself and doubles in mass?
I’m still not convinced, though; all of those scenarios, lethal and destructive as they are, lack a certain elegance and sense of social upheaval. I was more thinking something along the lines of sending a small fleet of ironclad ships to the costal indians ten years before columbus and his cronies showed up, or motorcycles and a vast amount of fuel to Genghis Khan. ^^
Well, if I’m going to be an efficient mad scientist (the most time-transport bang for the least number of expended henchpersons, you know), I think I would transport a load of flintlock guns and ammo, which can be replicated using available techniques, to Ghengis Khan.
Okay, how about a couple of hundred tons of Cobalt-60 into the magma chamber of Krakatoa just before it erupts?
“Pain is scary.”
That, or maybe the contents of several dozen cemeteries right into emperor Constantine I’s forces, right before the Battle of Milvian Bridge. (A few thousand human corpses in varying states of decay raining down from the skies might shake the enthusiasm for Christianity, a bit.)
Or the entire Chernobyl nuclear power plant back to the Mayan kingdom around, say, 1200 AD. A massive, seemingly cursed building of incomprehensible design and construction appearing out of thin air…it’d make for some interesting ghost/adventure stories, at least. Especially when it’s got some nice plant overgrowth after a century or two.
