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Here's a time machine, now go [change history]
Richy
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Here's a random idea that came to my mind earlier today. I thought it could be interesting to see what people around here think.
Alright, so here's a time machine. The rules are, you walk in, and you can go to any place, at any time in the past, from five minutes ago to a billion years ago. But there is no return trip: once you leave, you can never come back. You are of course still you, knowing everything you know now (or learn before you leave). You can take with you anything you can carry - so a couple of books, money, a gun, but not a skyscraper or a car. And as a bonus, the machine automatically makes you fluent in the language of the people in the place and time you're going to.
Your goal is to go do something to change history and make the world a better place.
So, where would you go? What would you take with you? Who would you meet? What would you do? And more importantly, how do you hope your actions would change the world in the long term?
Alright, so here's a time machine. The rules are, you walk in, and you can go to any place, at any time in the past, from five minutes ago to a billion years ago. But there is no return trip: once you leave, you can never come back. You are of course still you, knowing everything you know now (or learn before you leave). You can take with you anything you can carry - so a couple of books, money, a gun, but not a skyscraper or a car. And as a bonus, the machine automatically makes you fluent in the language of the people in the place and time you're going to.
Your goal is to go do something to change history and make the world a better place.
So, where would you go? What would you take with you? Who would you meet? What would you do? And more importantly, how do you hope your actions would change the world in the long term?
Richy on
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For the obligatory stopping Hitler.
On a more serious note, I suppose the biggest thing you could do is try to take the concept of literacy as far back as possible. Once we learned to write, and mass produce writing, technology and human progress start to lurch forward at a tremendous pace. I don't think you can just bring back medicine, or the steam engine, or anything advanced. That would just look like magic, and you'd end up with people worshiping it rather than trying to understand it. If you take back writing, people still get to develop at their own pace, but since everything is recorded, there won't be as many false starts or as much lost knowledge.
I mean, bringing mating pairs of dinosaurs back would be pretty cool, too, but less helpful.
Maybe I could combine the two efforts and establish a Hypatian order of Dinosaur Warrior-Monks . . . .
It's the only way the McFly family will learn some damn respect.
That, or giving them a really angry lecture about backing up their information.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pastwatch:_The_Redemption_of_Christopher_Columbus
I'd go with introducing rudimentary antibiotics right before the plague started to hit Europe and made the dark ages last an extra couple hundred years.
Yes, I could go back in time and give them a bunch of moleskins and a fire safe.
Whoever said the thing about writing, that's a good idea. You gotta be able to enforce the literacy, though, or otherwise you end up with a situation not unlike how Catholicism and Islam maintained centuries of educational stagnation by simply building a religious hierarchy around a text that its followers couldn't understand and its officers refused to teach.
The spread of mainstream literacy in Europe began mostly as a by-product of protestant churches printing Bibles in languages other than Latin and forcing their parishioners to learn what their own religion was about.
Less chance of majorly fucking up the timeline by going too far back and creating who knows what kind of ripples, and jumpstart science, medicine, computers and prosthetics tech to where 2012 looks more like 2060 or beyond in advancement.
But I don't think you would do much, or any, good by killing someone. Teach something to a group of people, I'd say. Germ theory. Basic sociology, perhaps.
I sort of want to say the printing press, but physical technology is so dependent on being allowed/propagated by the culture it's in.
Still not sure which idea was the most transformative. They all build on something else - women's rights is huge, but that's contingent on people giving a shit about anyone's rights.
The trilogy is kept pure!
Or, we'd have President Gore in 2000, then 9/11, then a Republican landslide in 2002 and 2004 over perceived inaction in the wake of the terrorist menace. I mean, maybe Gore's administration would've paid more attention to intelligence, but I'd bet it wouldn't.
My idea was to find a more sedentary civilization in North America, perhaps the Mississippi culture or earlier, and to help them make their cities more stable. Irrigation, masonry, metal works, and of course writing. Hopefully technology and city-building would spread from there, and the North American native population would be better fit to confront the Europeans centuries later. They'd have both a more advanced civilization, and more immunity to the plagues since they'd already live in cities.
Wouldn't that just lead to Nuclear Armageddon in the Third Cree-Hapsburg War?
Or stop Barry Goldwater from running.
Getting them to start developing calculus (and optics) would be the first thing, but I'd then use any position I could obtain to have all the content of these books chiselled into stone walls, but also transcribed and widely disseminated.
Because the development of calculus, and the field of astronomy, laid the foundations for the renaissance and the age of reason (and they were aware their were planets at the time that did not go around the earth). Shift that to happening a few thousand years earlier and you open the possibility for a few thousand years of technological advance.
If we actually do go with tensed theory, then I'd just cause some kind of paradox by messing with events, destroying(or at least diverging from) the future I came from.
I think it would be the height of arrogance to believe I could actually manipulate events within an absolute degree of certainty so as to affect largely positive change. Simply to assume I(or anyone) possess the knowledge and insight possible to determine what would be the best course of action implies some kind of omnipotence that I'm just not comfortable with.
This, so much this. I'd probably focus on convincing all of the European monarchs that the Earth was far too large for a voyage west to succeed, and convince them not to finance such a trip. By the time anyone attempted it, the New World would hopefully be strong enough to protect itself.
Actually, I might go back even farther and try to stop Europeans from leaving Europe at all until they were a little more civilized.
None of this makes any sense to me. Why would the Native Americans have become more unified/advanced/stronger when their civilization was working just fine?
A history professor I had in undergrad posits a theory, that I think is pretty solid, that the only reason Europe advanced as it did was all the pressure applied to it. Competition and such.
Outside of some godlike power over the basics of reality, there is no way to do what you suggest.
The smartest move would be to start up a human rights campaign a few centuries early.
Arch,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_goGR39m2k
The GOP did landslide in 2002 even though it was fairly obvious they were really fucking this country up. I liked Bush's State of the Union speech that year "Guys, I fucked this country up a lot over the past twelve months, but 9/11 happened so we're cool right? Okay, now here's some countries I want to invade."
Well, in the book, they rig it so this happens with a Mesoamerican/Caribbean empire that sails back to Europe with a vast armada after Columbus' voyage is sabotaged.
Huh, I'll have to give that a read. I think you'd have to go pretty far back to set that up though, none of the civilizations in the Americas had that kind of ability.
Shit, they did, didn't they? Slipped my mind there. But I imagine we'd have seen some kind of Tea Party equivalent or some bullshit that might've been even worse than what we got. Which I suppose is the point of temporal prime directives in the first place...
I'm still going with murder Cromwell, start the enlightenment early though.
Well the biggest difference would be disease immunity. It's estimated that they lost something like 80% of their population to disease after the European explorers arrived. In 1492, the Native Americans had only just recently started living in big cities, and hadn't really had time to develop diseases or an immunity to them (or the necessary medical knowledge about quarantines, etc) so they were all completely decimated by the natural bacteria of the Europeans. With a couple extra centuries of city life, they would have become much more resistant to European diseases.
And really, the idea that Europe had more pressure or competition and became naturally "tougher" strikes me as... troublesome. It's not like the rest of the world was lacking in pressure or competition.
I never checked out Card's claim that there were some small tribes who were close to both building larger ships and discovering iron working in the late 15th century, but Columbus showed up, disease, boom. But that was the premise (eventually), it meanders around for a while, discovers Atlantis, all kinds of silly things.
Interesting.
Going back far enough to effect widespread change on the world would mean giving up all the modern creature comforts I'm accustomed to.
Alternatively, going back in time 5 years with a sports almanac, extensive knowledge of the sociopolitical, economic, and financial of the past decade, and the legal know-how to stay under the radar and out of trouble would allow me to become an anonymous trillionaire god-emperor that could bankroll, well, just about anything.
I think that would be swell.
Also the Aztecs were total dicks that everyone hated. That was kind of vital.
Native Americans, anywhere in the northern or southern hemisphere, lacked the requisite conditions to innovate too far past the stone age. The predominant cultures lived within the tropics, making farming a virtual impossibility, and the other cultures in the temprate zones lacked any real understanding of sustainable farming techniques, making many of them nomadic tribes who harvested non-potable foodstuffs by following bison or deer or whales. Worst of all, all of these cultural groups lacked the critical ingredient of domesticated beasts of burden, making the economics and potentials of mass-production farming unattainable.
The Native Americans were duly fucked in just about every culturally significant way possible.
I know it's not much but I get the feeling that if I succeeded it would change things quite a bit.
battletag: Millin#1360
Nice chart to figure out how honest a news source is.