Where would you time travel to? (Please read the setup)

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

A time travel machine has been built, and you can use it BUT

You can see and hear (and record thereof), but you can’t be seen or heard, and you can’t touch, smell, or taste anything
It must go back at least 100 years - no snooping on your neighbors, seeing your parents meet for the first time, or using it to catch criminals.

It was very expensive, and more important coughrichercough people have already had their chance so all of the major world events have been captured. Highlights from the life of Christ is now a documentary that plays regularly - or possibly, a couple of different individuals have been targeted, and now all the Christian sects argue over which person was actually Christ. The mystery of Jack the Ripper has been solved. The battle of Gettysburg and Waterloo, and the reign of Queen Elizabeth and Julius Caesar regularly play on History Channel. Animal Planet now has footage of T. Rexes and trilobites. They even think they know who Arthur was.

You get my drift - the obvious stuff has been done.

So what do you want to see, or is there a subject you’d research?

Note: one nice thing about the machine is that it has very fine control. So once you get past the 100 year point, you can skip 5 minutes or 5 decades one way or another, or plonk yourself right down when you want. And you can move to any place on Earth (but not away from Earth!)

2

My person trip -

While I’m interested in a number of mysteries such as the Voynich manuscript & who killed the boys in the tower, I’m sure there are others who are at least as interested and have a better knowledge base to understand them

I would like to follow the evolution of different dances - probably starting with English folk dances and tracing their changes backward into pre-history.

3

Hey, what’s the point of a time machine that won’t let you assassinate Hitler? Pretty bloody useless, if you ask me…

OK, seriously … how about viewing the Tunguska impact. Unless that’s already playing on World’s Greatest Disasters (on the History Channel or wherever). Otherwise we can bring back PIE, well except all the linguists will be doing that. Make photocopies of the works in the Library of Alexandria? Ancient historians (and some who aren’t so ancient) will be there ahead of me. Hmmm … tough to think of something not obvious.

I got it. Track mass migrations in history. Watch the Goths migrate southeast from Scandinavia and figure out why they did it. That kind of thing.

4

Something just occured to me. In about 2 years, we could watch the Boston Molasses Flood. That would be entertaining.

5

You know who else assassinated Hitler?

6

That’s another thing that would interest me - track the Rom back to their origins. Goes with the whole dance thing.

7

If I could go back ninety years I’d see my grandparents when they were courting.

But, over 100 years? I’d look in on my great-great grandfather while he was incarcerated in Andersonville prison. He told his granddaughter, my maternal grandmother, the due to mistreatement by the guards(bellies make good targets for kicking) and poor food and water, that he still had bad stomach troubles on a regular basis.

8

100 yrs, huh? Maybe go back to WWI and see Hitler get gassed?

9

Everyone with a time machine? Isn’t it the first thing you try when you get one? Sort of a rite of passage.

10

I would assume that all the publicly interesting events (wars, assassinations, etc.) would have already been well covered, so I would choose something personally interesting to me. Like where all my grandparents actually came from (eastern Europe, yes, but where) and even more interesting, why. Especially my father’s parents, who emigrated in very early 1900s, probably 1902, but I don’t even know that. What impelled them to leave their families forever?

It would be interesting to be the fly on wall at the constitutional convention, but I assume that’s all been covered.

11

No maximum?

Drop me in the middle of the Cretaceous, somewhere in the area of Mongolia, or the centre of North America, and let me watch the dinos.

12

Using the parameters you give, I’d go back four billion years and watch life spontaneously develop.

13

Sounds tricky. It’s not like the first life form was a macroscopic being. You’d have to look at water samples under a microscope or make chemical tests. The rule against touching things would make this difficult.

So how about seeing the Big Bang? Or even what was around “before” the BB? Nothing? I went back 14 billion years and there’s nothing there? I want a refund.

14

I’d like to get to know the Neanderthals better - what they really looked like, how they moved, how they communicated, etc. etc. And the Denisovans. Really, the entire family tree leading to us.

15

Nm

16

This is a very minor mystery, but an enduring one:
Find out what really happened in the Borden household on August 4, 1892.

17

Well, assuming (as you said) all the mysteries have been solved, even the esoteric or trivial ones I might personally be interested in…I’d like to see a nuclear explosion with my own eyes. From a safe distance, of course.

If it hasn’t been cracked, though, I should probably try and listen to Lincoln’s lost speech. Knowing my luck, though, it’d probably turn out, by an astonishing but complete coincidence, to just be almost identical to Colonel Guile’s speech from the Street Fighter movie.

18

Since all the cool Kaspar Hauser- like mysteries have been solved… I guess I’ll just kick back and go watch something like the first performances of The Magic Flute, or Hamlet.

19

Optical microscopes would presumably still work (because if you can see the past with your eyes, you should be able to see it through more lenses), assuming enough natural light and suitable positioning of the subject. Or maybe the time viewer machine has a built in zoom function.

20

Anyway, for me, it’s going to be Roman Dodecahedra the Antikythera mechanism, the Baghdad Battery and other object-related mysteries, but I’d also like to go visit some Trilobites.