Apologies to all, I was totally out of order.
I feel really stoopid 
Following Fish’s description as a jaunt through the ether where all I could do is observe and not interact with or be interacted with by others or the environment, depending upon the length of time I’m allowed (odd situation to ponder considering I’d be travelling through time), I’d shadow Ben Franklin. If I had a short time, it’d be pre-Revolutionary War. If I had longer, I’d follow most of his adult life, taking breaks to catch up with Washington and Hamilton and all the rest.
He’s my standard answer for who, living or dead, I’d like to have at a dinner party too.
I’m convinced that there has been no other time in the history of the world where so many great minds were together in one place for so long. It’d be a fascinating time to be around in and pick brains and draw inspiration from.
I take no offense, Clock.
If it’s certain one would go back as a tangible person, it would prohibit me from voyaging with pirates, because I’d go down with their ship. So let me give some answers that aren’t all about riches.
First, here’s where I would not go: to the Cruxifiction, to the JFK assassination, or to Roswell, NM, or similarly disputed events. No matter what my views on those events might be, others would be opposed no matter what I knew or didn’t know about the past. It would only be that much more frustrating to know which version is Right when you have concrete, incontrovertible ironclad eyewitness evidence that you could never prove and dissenters would never believe.
However, I’d love to go back in time and learn Elizabethan English from the natives there and sit in on some of Shakespeare’s plays as performed in the Globe. (I can’t give a precise date, but it would likely be a dozen or more visits between 1592 and 1612.) It would be an amazing discovery to see how things were performed, how the audience liked them, and how the writing/acting process of the day went. Also, after I came back, I’d record my imitation of the dialect for later study (presuming I learned to imitate it well enough).
I’d also like to go back to ancient Greece and see who Homer (or homers) really was (were). And heck, I’d learn Greek, too. (I’ve got a time machine. By comparison, learning a language should be a piece of cake.) I’d want to see how the Odyssey and the Iliad were performed. While I was in the neighborhood of Greece I’d drop in on 430BC and see if Socrates was a real person, and what might be learned of him.
I could always sit quietly in the corner and listen to the Founding Fathers debate what they really wanted in the Constitution, and why. That’d be pretty enlightening.
I could spend days going back in history and listening to opera and classical music performed on the original instruments, at the intended pitch. I could even just sit and watch a Mozart (for instance) compose or conduct. I’d go back and attend some concerts, of many genres, that happened before I was born. 
(This post is about logical possibilities, not physical possibilities. But if you’re hung up on the latter, why are you in this thread in the first place?)
To my mind, time travel* is logically impossible unless we also accept the notion of multiple universes: Any intrusion into the past must disrupt the future, causing the Grandfather Paradox much loved by science fiction authors.
*(With the exception of observer-only time travel.)
Thus, a time-travel machine is really a device for shifting yourself between different universes in the Multiverse: Whenever you arrive in a different universe, it bifurcates into two new universes, one that contains you and one that does not. You can’t erase your own existence because you can’t enter the universe that produced you. The closest you can come is creating a new universe that is otherwise identical to that one that produced you with the exception that it contains a universe-hopping version of you. This universe may not eventually produce the you that builds (or steps into) the ‘time machine’, but that doesn’t create any nasty causality paradox since it isn’t the universe you actually came from.
Such a machine would be of limited use in becoming rich, however: If there are multiple pasts then there must be multiple futures, so the lottery numbers of the future you visit (or come from) need not conicide with the lottery numbers of the game you end up actually playing. The same applies to the stock market, only moreso. By playing the market, you directly impact what the market does on a small and large scale. Stable physical phenomenon, such as the location of large oil reserves, would be much less resistant to tampering (if there are reserves under a given spot in this timeline, one could reasonably assume they’ll be in the same spot in all timelines similar to this one) but it’s a bit more difficult to take advantage of such information.
This could still be useful for historical observations of the past. You can assume that the effects of your presence in a timeline won’t be felt until some ripples have had time to bounce around; thus, you could go back to the day or week before a critical event and be reasonably sure you haven’t meaningfully altered what you intended to observe. And anything you do change won’t affect the universe you came from anyway.
Finally, it gives you a free hand in changing things. A suitably amoral person could do anything he wanted to, secure in the knowledge that he wasn’t going to erase his own existence in the process. He could go back to 1924 and kill Hitler right as he was about to enter the Fortress of Landsberg am Lech and begin the prison term during which he would write “Mein Kampf”, then jump ahead to view some of the many (infinite?) new timelines created by that alteration.
Wow, I had never heard of the Oak Island money pit!
Not wanting to hijack this thread, allow me to start a new one on this topic…
hmmm. I’m tempted to say something like just outside Tunguska, Russia, 1908, June 30. I’d like to see what an exploding cometoid looks like - if that’s really what happened, mooohhooohoohaaahaaa!
Two items of interest on the Money Pit: Cecil’s original, and a recent thread commenting on it.
I originally said I’d like to go back to the time of the crucifixion, I’ve changed my mind having read Fish’s post.
Wow! so many people I could observe, so many events that the crucifixion pales into an insignificant occurence.
Hastings 1066, Magna Carta, Building of Stonehenge,Battle of the Alamo, Custers last stand,Time of Robin Hood, Crecy, Agincourt…the list is endless.
Oh Lord if only!!
Depends on what you consider significant, I guess.
The death of Christ on the cross was not historically significant for a few hundred years. He warranted only a minor mention in the Roman histories of the period.
Hundreds of years after the Cruxifiction, yeah, the religion in His name did a whole bunch of stuff that was significant, but it took quite a while to get there.
I just don’t really know what I think I’d see at the Cruxifiction (apart from Christ and others hanging on crosses). He’d, well, die. That was the point.
If you went for reasons of faith, just to be there, I can kinda see that and kinda not. (Sounds a bit sick and voyeuristic to me.) If you went for proof that Jesus was the Son of God, it wouldn’t prove anything. I can think of three other events worth attending instead, for that: the miracles, the raising of Lazarus, and the Resurrection.
You could always pop into the Colosseum and catch the show while you waited for the rise of Christian power.
Ummm…the only thing you’d see is a humongous fire in the sky, shortly before your sudden demise. :dubious:
:eek: Good point. Maybe “in orbit” during the tunguska blast might be better. Thanks.
There are doubtless greater tragedies (by any objective reckoning) that could be averted , but (assuming history was set to play out the same over again) I would arm myself with accurate information on certain cases (as many as possible) of child abduction that have taken place, then go back with a view to preventing them, by deadly force in some/most cases, and I suspect that’s wrong, but I would do it all the same.
I suspect that Bob will not see the devastation, because he was the cause of it.
There’s a joke in there? 
It’d be kinda interesting if he turned out to be a raving fanatic, screaming about how he vowed revenge on all European Romans, or something, though.
I think so, although it may only be apparent to SF-inclined people. You travel back in time to find out what on earth it must have been to have caused such an explosion and it turns out that the explosion was you - trying, and failing to travel backwards in time.
If we are just observers and take no part in the event and can not be hurt by such event, I’m going to Mexico and see the impact that wiped out the Dinos. Problem is timing. I hope time travel has a really good fast forward and rewind. I sure don’t want to have to go through a couple million years +/- are regular speed.
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- Time travel wasn’t all it is cracked up to be. I got pretty bored with the time-travel trips I am going to make.
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- Time travel wasn’t all it is cracked up to be. I got pretty bored with the time-travel trips I am going to make.
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Nossir! This is verboten, you can only go back to observe not to change the course of history no matter how much you would like to
I would use my powers to get into Studio 54 in New York in the late 70’s and dance the night away. Because I’ve always thought it looked super cool.