What gadget would you bring on your time-travel trip?

In My Humble Opinion
21

If I was feeling responsible? I’d go back with a whiskey bottle full of VX, and bust it open when Mrs. Bin Laden is in the delivery room in 1957.

Of course, knowing my luck, when I got back to the present, I’d find out that the Taliban (which the U.S. now never toppled), launched a people’s crusade to retake Kashmir in 2003, which lead to a nuclear war killed half the population of Asia. (Not counting cholera, plague, and famine deaths because of the loss of infrastructure.) :smack:

OK, maybe I’d go back with a laptop loaded with some cleverly reedited footage from the Terminator and Matrix movies, and visit Bill Gates when he’s a college freshman and tell him that he’s responsible for building the machines that rose up and destroyed human civilization in 1995.

…And when I get back, he’ll have either turned into a neo-luddite terrorist who’s killed hundreds, or he became an Amish monk and Apple became a bloated monopoly that was content to rest on it’s laurels and technologically stagnate once it gained total market dominance, and now the best PC available to the public is a “Macintosh IVc” with a 100mhz CPU, a 16-color monitor, optional sound card, and it hasn’t been updated since it was released in 2001. :smack: :smack:

Some times you just can’t win. :frowning:

22

A hommade multiharddrive PVRs, so that I can sneak into TV studios and record all the great show you can get today. Nothing to do with bring down organized religion at all, really. :slight_smile:

23

Economics textbooks as far back as I could go; i.e., 1905. Thus we could avoid the ridiculous monetary policies that gave us the Great Depression.

WAIT! Only one thing/gadget?

I would bring a box full of history books to those who designed the treaty at the end of WWI. Maybe we could avoid WWII. That’d be nice.

Alternatively, a box full of history books on the horrors of the various communists holcousts (sp?). Prevent those would be nice, too.

24

I would head back to the 1920’s with a fully loaded laptop, and see if Tesla would trade it for one of his “death rays.”

25

Ahem…

Lincoln 1809-1865.

Unless you’re posting with a computer and internet connection that can post in 2005 from 1965. :slight_smile:

26

Gee, no one’s gonna go back and murder little you-know-whom, or prevent his conception?

(and no, I’m not saying his name, thereby ruining this whole time-travel adventure for everyone)

Me, I’d make a serious attempt to take back whatever would be necessary to remove George Gershwin’s brain tumor.

27

No, we can only go back a hundred years, an—Oh, you mean him! Good idea! :slight_smile:

28

I’d act out Larry Niven’s The Return of William Proxmire, with a syringe of pennecillin, and meet LTjg Heinlein on the deck of the USS Roper in 1923, IIRC. :wink:

29

Hmm…good question.

I think I’d go back about a year and three months and tell myself not to screw up with a girl I have a crush on.

30

Hoist with mine own petard.
:slight_smile:

31

Aw, screw it.
I’ll take the damn Time Machine ™ back to 1905 with me.