But how do we go back to prevent the worse disaster, say a nuclear bomb in Washington, if we don’t know it “occurred”?
It is all very confusing to me, and the movie TimeCop failed to remove any confusion…
By the way I love your monicker, flutterby is what my daughter called flies when she was a wee lass, and it always brings back fond memories when I see your name…
You know, i’ve always wondered if those 'box cutters" were actually box cutter handles, modified to carry longer knife blades hidden inside. It would seem to make more sense.
I would do this as well. I would also alert every single newspaper and call the news affliates starting Monday morning, and continuing until somebody broadcast it or published it. Things also travel fast on the Internet, so I would start spreading it online too. I figure the more people who know, the more people will panic, and avoid airports and work the whole day. I know I only have 24 hours, but I would work tirelessly.
And I would also find time to contact the Denver Broncos and tell them to bench McCaffrey for the game that night so he doens’t break his leg and end the season on their first game of the year. (Hey, if I’m stopping the horrible death of thousands of people, then I should be able to pull that off.)
Doubt it. Having spent a fair number of years using those things, I can tell you that an off the shelf model loaded with a razor blade is more than enough to do some damage to folks. Long before 9/11 it was illegal for anyone under the age of 18 to buy them in NYC since teenagers were buying them to slash one another at school.
And telling them that there was a bomb on board, might be enough to get the terrorists arrested for having the box cutters. Twice, back in the early 90’s I went to the Nashville airport to pick up my brother with box cutters in my pocket. Each time I had forgotten that I was carrying them, or I would have left them in the car. The first time, when I went through the metal detector, I handed the box cutters to the rent-a-cop who let me take them with me. The second time (some years later), when I handed them to the rent-a-cop, he made me take the razor blades out of the cutters and throw them away before I could continue on to meet my brother at the gate.
Given the general attitude towards Middle Easterners before 9/11 a group of them being found on a plane suspected of having a bomb on board, all armed with box cutters, would probably raise a few eyebrows.
Since Bjorn240 has presented a pretty definitive answer, I’ll go along with that. Once finished, I’d spend a day walking around in pre-9/11 America appreciating the security we felt back then.
An ironic, somewhat related story is that on September 9th, a messed up kid in Sacramento went on a killing spree thinking that he would be talked about for months to come. I only wish he had lived long enough to know that he wasn’t going to get the media frenzy he so coveted.
We don’t know that it occured… but somehow I think that sending someone back and just leaving them there to affect the future will work. Kind of like an anchor from an alternate future to the past right? Unless of course that will erase them completely from the future thus erasing them in the past as well like Marty in Back to the Future…
And anyway according to Time Machine even if we send someone back and there is the faintest idea of a paradox, no matter what we do we would not be able to prevent it.
And thanks… I kinda like my name too.
While we are on the Time Travel Saving A Life Plan:
I would like to somehow go back to some previous date and some how get a message (or speak to) Johnny Mike Spahn, the CIA agent who was killed in Afghanistan during the uprising and tell him there is an American Traitor amongst the Taliban.
I had a dream a few months after 9/11 that I & several other people did go back in time to that morning. We were in two groups - 1 group tried to get the airplanes grounded & my group headed for the WTC.
We were able to safely evacuate the buildings, but didn’t know if the other group succeeded. I made 1 last trip up to the top - and stopped to take pictures, just in case.
I woke up crying.
Of course, if I could deliberately plan my trip back to 9/10, I’d come back heavily armed with videotapes, books, magazines, and anything else I could get my grubby little mitts on that showed what happens on 9/11. I’d also come back with enough weapons to kill an army, then I’d kill everyone of the terrorists before they had a chance to get on the planes. When caught, I’d show my evidence as to why I did it, and then wouldnt’ give a damn what the authorities did to me.
:eek: Can I call you tonight at 3:00 a.m. when I’m still awake thinking about this one?
Nichol_storm’s idea:
Wouldn’t have much effect, sorry, Nichol_storm. Large office buildings, especially HUGE ones like the WTC, have independent alarm systems on each floor. Only floors where the alarm is triggered, and maybe 1 or 2 floors above and below, would be evacuated.
You think the WTC towers would empty out everytime someone on the 67th floor burnt popcorn in the microwave? 
I work in a 12-story building. We have had *actual fires * in the building where only 2 floors are evacuated.
I would rent a truck on the 10th, make a fertilizer bomb like Timothy McVeigh, park it outside the WTC and light it around 3 a.m. on September 11th. Then I could contact the authorities and give them all the information on the hijacking plot in return for a plea bargain.
This plane might kill whoever was in the WTC at that hour, but I would guess it wouldn’t be very many people. The authorities would have to listen to you. Indeed, it would be like a E.F. Hutton commercial! The worst that could happen is the terrorists would cancel their plans, and you would look like a total idiot. Plead insanity.
On the one hand, it’s possible that doing something to stop the hijackers would have one of two results.
One, you get accused of being a racist bastard–“where’s your proof?” As much as I hate columnist Kathleen Parker, she did a column about how anyone who would have gone after arabic people in the sense of law enforcement prior to September 11th would have been decried as such. I found myself agreeing.
Two, you stop them once, what’s to keep them from trying again, as it has been suggested?
Complacency had us screwed in these respects. Complacency would have had us screwed if the thing was prevented. Again, the fuckers could have another go at it. The best thing to do, it would seem, would be to smoke as many people as possible out of the WTC and Pentagon. I don’t see how the people on the planes could have been saved, but there would have been the destruction to serve as an awakening that September 11th was.
At any rate, my 20th birthday really sucked. Please don’t make me deal with that day again.
<just registered, hello everyone!>
I believe if transported back to 91001, I would buy a plane ticket on one of the flights leaving boston. Also of course i would call in bomb threats and/or warnings to the proper people in NYC, unfortunatly theres not much you could do to convince them to empty the offices at the pentagon.
However by having a seat on one of the planes, i feel i would have a better than fair chance at stopping at least one plane from hitting and as such at least one tower from falling down. Further more i could inform the governement of the intention of the higjackers as soon as they took over the plane (not WHEN THEY hit the towers as we found out) and the air force could procede with takeing out the remaing planes. I feel the only way to get an absolutly undoubtable message to the authorites would be to be ON one of the planes that was hijacked.
Certainly… I’m usually awake at that time anyway because of all the strange thoughts running through my head. Or you can just email me
Did anyone else see the Twilight Zone marathon? At least two of the eps had almost this exact scenario. In both cases, nothing major was changed. This old TV show has convinced me to do nothing at all. 'Sides, I agree that something worse could end up happening.
On second thought, I would call in a tip. Not sure what i’d say, but I do know that when the attack happened I’d be questioned at lenght. If I told them the truth, what could they do? I’d be right… some people would claim it’d be a miracle. I’d be asked the predict things, blah blah blah, love “The Dead Zone”… in other words, it’d cause lots of hassles. Around 90% of the people got evacuated, and we were alerted to the terrorist threat. If they got caught, it would be dismissed as a minor incident, and not much would come of it. I think it would be worth it, though I’m not sure what I could do.
Its possible (okay, not really, but…) that the plane in Pennsylvania was taken down by time travelers. We’re living in a timeline that dosen’t have an exploded White House and whatever came from that…
On the more mundane level, i’d use the time jump to fix my life. I made some stupid decisions last year, and, selfish as it sounds, i’d welcome the chance to get better grades and fix things up with my girlfriend.
Re: The Twilight Zone episode… I did see the one where the guy went back in time, tried to stop a church fire that injured 19 children, and ended up causing it…someone needs to perfect time travel. It’s so confusing!
That’s a difficult situation. Even if the FBI believed you and went after the hijackers while they were getting on the plane, nothing could be done because they didn’t do anything illegal (to my knowledge) until they actually hijacked the plane. If I were going to tip the FBI, I would beg them to put a undercover armed marshall aboard the plane and wait for them to actually initiate the act before arresting/killing them. Imagine going through all that trouble to have them arrested on a immigration charge, then released the next day just so they can plan it all over again.
Here’s a question: would preventing the World Trade Center collapse even necessarily prevent anyone from using that particular method of terrorism again? In other words, if it were just a prevented report of a plan, rather than a horrific act of mass destruction, would we still have the extra airport security? And more importantly, would we still have citizens who will, from now on, risk death to fight airplane hijackers?
So 9/11 never happens, the taliban get’s a hold of nukes. (An arrest on an attempt doesn’t awake the sleeping dragon, we just send another Tomahawk to Afghanistan) Securty never improves, so we end up losing all of lowertown manhatten.
Too much responsibility for me. I’d just buy a put on Enron for thousand of shares at .14 cents. A vegas trip involving Rams vs. Patriots might be in order as well.
Call me heartless, but doing something might be just as bad or worse as doing nothing.