Introduce Shakespeare to D&D, and encourage him to popularize it.
Not only would the campaigns he ran be amazing, but goooodlord imagine the subversive effect it would have socially. Unpinning good/evil from lawful/chaotic in the public perception that early on would be a Big Deal; bringing the idea of consumer-generated content would shift attitudes to art and literature away from a purely top-down concept, and the resulting rise of Victorian fan-fiction would be so amazingly terrible it would rip its own hole in the spacetime continuum.
Yes. The idea that he wasn't real is frankly laughable. We know where he lived, we know who his wife was and what she was left in his will (their second best bed!), he met the queen for crap's sake!
The first time Heinrich Kramer tries to show someone the Malleus Maleficarum, I appear directly in front of him and set the book on fire. Not only is the book destroyed, but a clearly supernatural event took place to put the fear of god into him. Bam. No witch trials.
Or, the first time he steps foot in Innsbruck, he slips on a banana skin and slides down the street, much to the comedic delight of the locals. Helena Scheuberin even giggles and praises him for his comedic wit and skill. With high praise from an affluent local, and a natural penchant for comedy, Kramer leads a cult following in banana-skin comedic antics, and kick starts surrealist humour centuries before Monty Python.
I'd prevent the Challenger launch. Manned spaceflight doesn't get shelved for an entire generation, and a young me doesn't lose hope for the future at such an early age.
Through a bizarre series of butterfly effects, the successful launch and its international attention gives bureaucrats in Pripyat an extra nudge to encourage cooperation amongst their engineers and nuclear scientists, and a critical flaw in the operation of the plant at Chernobyl is caught before it causes a catastrophic meltdown.
The cumulative effect is a continued culture of progressive technological expansion into the 90s, and the fading of the anti-intellectualism that threatened to overtake the world during the Reagan and Thatcher administrations. Hand in hand with this is a decreased militarism, as technology is increasingly seen as a tool for the betterment of humanity, and less as a means of building better weapons.
One other immediate result is in the US presidential election of 1988. A lack of meaningful engagement with the public (no "skipped the surly bonds of earth" speech) led to increasing apathy toward the outgoing Reagan administration, giving G.H.W. Bush a tougher hill to climb, and less solid footing on the issue of defense. Dukakis doesn't feel the need to do a silly photo op in a tank, but instead campaigns partly on an expansion of the space program and educational outreach programs similar to the one that brought in Christa McAuliffe.
Neoconservatism and neoliberalism wither together on the vine. Permanent human presence in space continues uninterrupted for the next two decades, with a base on the moon by the end of the century and a manned mission to Mars planned for a decade after that.
No Bushes, no rise of Al-Qaeda in 1988, no Gulf War, no Rush Limbaugh, no Clinton's, and no 9/11.
Administrators considering stopping entire space program.
“It must be some kind of message”, said Jerry Jenkins, head of NASA’s department of deciding whether to continue with space exploration whatsoever. “The time traveler knows something we don’t, and if he’s back here stopping launches it must mean there’s bad outcomes from space stuff.”
Not per se necessary to prevent it - either listen to the on-site rep from MT, who raised concerns in OTL that were disregarded, or make that day warmer. All other things being equal, without the crisis, we would have learned a great deal - but not at the cost of several lives.
It haunts me to this day that an improved version of STS would likely still be an option for launches, if only McDonald had been listened to.
I can fault the company, but he made a good faith effort to stop it because testing hadn't been done at the current temperatures, AIUI.
On the ohter hand, those lives vs [GHWB | Dukakis | anyone else] directly impacts OTL - Arguably, we'd never have a Trump presidency, but Duke is simply a gentler, faster version of the same.
Not sure we wouldn't still get Bushes, or Gulf War, but certainly what we ended up with would be more tempered, and there's a real benefit to that. All these years on, perhaps we'd still have the 'old school' Republican party instead of the "I'm not a fascist, I swear!" Republican party.
I'd save RFK and give him a full two-term presidency. Just because I've always wondered how much a difference it would have made in the course of American history. It definitely seems like things took a severe turn for the worse in the late 60s and the American political system has never recovered.
I personally believe there were conspiracies to assassinate both him and JFK because they were not susceptible to being controlled by their donors or political mentors, as is the case with the vast majority of politicians. They were rogue elements with a strong potential to disrupt the status quo (i.e. gravy train) for the rest of the oligarchy, so they got taken out.
I wasn't alive for these events and I am possibly missing context. But I just see an inflection point in the 60s and I don't know if another term from Carter in 1980 would have been enough to turn things around. I also feel like he was a less impactful character than RFK
Introduce radio to the Romans. They had the metallurgy to create coils. Even a simple Morse code system would easily keep their empire going. Probably end up like that Star Trek TOS where Centurions are carrying sub-machine guns, though. If want to read what a great SF writer did with this (guy from 1938 ends up in 535AD), read "Lest Darkness Fall"
The world would be a different place because so much happened as a knock on of that but at the same time it's hard to imagine what the world would be like. Probably very similar but also different in substantial ways.
Like obvious things like no war in Iraq or Afghanistan (at least not those wars), and less obvious things like how the attacks have reshaped liberal democracies like the US and Europe (for the worse imo), and how they empowered right wing politics in many countries (also bad imo).
The TSA is just a federal jobs program. They don't actually provide any value; it's been demonstrated that they miss the vast majority of contraband. The most notable function of the TSA is the temporary imposition of an authoritarian-esque environment of suspicion and control on innocent civilians, reminding us to follow the rules, or else.
Next time you want to prevent 9/11, you probably have to prevent all the reasons they had to hate us.
From ChatGPT-4:
The history of Western involvement in the Middle East before the September 11, 2001 attacks is extensive and complex, involving a range of diplomatic, economic, military, and political actions. Some key instances include:
Sykes-Picot Agreement (1916): A secret agreement between Britain and France, with assent from Russia and Italy, to divide the Ottoman Empire's territories in the Middle East after World War I.
Balfour Declaration (1917): The British government expressed support for a "national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine, which was then part of the Ottoman Empire.
Creation of Modern Middle Eastern States: After World War I, Western powers, particularly Britain and France, were instrumental in redrawing the borders in the Middle East, leading to the creation of many modern states.
Iranian Coup d'état (1953): The CIA, with British support, orchestrated a coup to overthrow Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh and strengthen the monarchical rule of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
Suez Crisis (1956): France, the UK, and Israel invaded Egypt in response to Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser's nationalization of the Suez Canal.
Support for Various Regimes: Western countries, especially the United States, supported various regimes in the Middle East, some of which were authoritarian, for strategic and economic interests, particularly during the Cold War.
Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990): The U.S. and other Western countries were involved in various capacities during the Lebanese Civil War.
Soviet-Afghan War (1979-1989): The U.S. and its allies supported Afghan mujahideen in their fight against the Soviet occupation.
First Gulf War (1990-1991): A U.S.-led coalition expelled Iraqi forces from Kuwait. This war also led to the stationing of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, which was one of the grievances cited by Osama bin Laden.
Sanctions against Iraq: Following the Gulf War, the United Nations, with strong U.S. and UK backing, imposed sanctions on Iraq that had significant humanitarian impacts.
Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: The U.S. and other Western countries have been deeply involved in this conflict, often perceived as being biased towards Israel.
Various Military Bases and Operations: The U.S. and its allies have maintained a military presence in various parts of the Middle East for strategic reasons.
This list is not exhaustive and simplifies a complex history. Each of these events has a nuanced background, and their impacts are still felt in the region's contemporary politics.
A highschool physics book translated in ancient Greek/linear B to mass copy and distribute to everyone. Maybe it'll give the advantage to stop the Bronze Age Collapse.
@JeffKerman1999 bring some plans for the printing press and some plans to mass produce paper too. Back in the ancient times one sheet of paper was about $30 in todays money. A whole book would be the equivalant of tens of thousands of dollars.
Something that would do that neoliberism in the 80's with Reagan and Thatcher would not become the dominating political and economic theory it has been since that time.
Start flamewars on robotic astroturf accounts about how dumb Donald Trump is until Instagram starts and people try to prove he's not an idiot, but in protesting they protest too much and nobody believes them by 2016.
So, I need a robot chatbot algorithm cookbook for the naughties and beyond.
I often wonder how people would react if you showed up to a concert hall in, say, classical music era Europe or something and performed modern music. Assuming you could kit it to provide infrastructure for whatever your performance required, and the acoustics of the venue were idealized.
Would attendees hate it? Would the unfamiliar musical styles be repulsive to them? Would the sounds and textures of modern instrumentation like electric guitar and synthesizer upset or even frighten them? Or would they find something to appreciate about it? Would the music be copied and spread, becoming a time worn classic folk tune in an alternate future? Or would it be rebuked and suppressed, condemned for all time as evil influence? Which genres would have the best acceptance chances in which cultures, and which eras?
In my mind in particular, I think about this with the niche realm of video game soundtracks. If not just the music played as-is through some playback device (which would probably be rather boring, but who knows, maybe the novelty of recorded music alone would be fascinating enough) then perhaps arranged for live performance, like the orchestral performance of Undertale, or the Sinnohvation big band album. Or, of course, if the soundtrack was itself a recorded live performance, just perform it. These collections of compositions often outline rich adventures, communicated by a wide range of musical styles. I wonder if they are strong enough to stand alone, and if audiences would respond to them without the context that they were written to accompany.
Failing live performance (which would be trickier than one would think--to sound good, live music has to be written with its venue in mind, and I'd assume most modern music would sound like garbage when performed in victorian era concert halls or ancient ampitheaters), I'd also consider putting them to vinyl LPs and dumping them in old record shops in any era that had phonograph or turntable technology and see if they get discovered.
Why not just send back the video games themselves? I dunno. I guess I'm less interested in wowing them with futuristic technology and more interested in how they'd react to something they already have (music), but in a strange, new context.
It would also stop much of the progress humanity made. Unfortunately, plastic is pretty much the cheapest and easiest solution for a lot of problems, specifically for packaging food and stuff like that.
You may very well travel back to a world that no longer can build that time machine.
I'd swap some of the first clay documents around until I ended up with a timeline where we live modern life with a gift economy rather than a money economy. We'd all have a lot more options to pay off our debt rather than the streamlined ridgid money system.
Take the current highest-yield nuclear bomb and destroy England right before the begin of their collonial era.
Generally speaking, I believe removing a global superpower just before they do their world-changing thing is probably going to have the biggest effect on the timeline.
Everyone was building empires at the time and fighting over who got what. All that nuking England would do is to mean France, the netherlands, germany, spain etc would get more bits
France wasn't a pushover around WW2. They had enough manpower to fight nazi Germany toe to toe. What they did, however, was underestimate how fast they could advance. France also ignored a warning that the germans were amassing to push through the Ardennes, which allowed the nazis to face little resistance on that front. Apparently, if they took immediate action, they could've mobilized an air raid to completely destroy that nazi battalion, which would royally fuck up the rest of Hitler's plans
It would only be a deterrent for empire building if there's a pattern (probably 3 or 4 similar events), otherwise people would consider it a random hateful act of god, of which there are many, and of which have been interpreted many different ways
I was focussing on changing the timeline, not on deterring nations from doing something. Without English colonializers, there would have certainly been other colonizers, but e.g. the whole China situation would have likely been very different. There would not be a dominant anglo culture right now. No English-speaking USA, no English-speaking Australia, no large countries with an anglo common law-based legal system.
They wouldn't be able to build it. It wasn't until the 16th or 17th century that metallurgy and machining were advanced enough to build atmospheric steam engines, much less high pressure ones.
You need a lot of tech to jump start an industrial revolution.
The demonstration is key. The Greeks actually had one in 80BC or thereabouts, but as far as we know they never figured out a use for it. Wiki is here: Aeolipile
I want to say leave a modern computer or some other piece of technology at some point in time (maybe 50's) but I'm not sure if it could be reversed engineered
Even if it had infinite power and was unbreakable, it would end up being fought over and coveted as holy relic, instead of being played with and studied
Hardly. The miniaturization required to make modern chips is ages ahead of anything possible in the 50s or 60s. Hell, them even getting some x-ray microscope to see the stupidly small transistors we have today would be a challenge in itself!
I've always wondered about this kind of theory. If I stole and published Harry Potter before JK Rowling will it be as successful? If I do the beatles' songs before them will they be a hit?
Well you can't go back in time and delete "someone" that never existed in the first place. There is no historical evidence anywhere that "jesus" ever lived. He's a myth.
I meant remove religion, from everywhere.
Guessing it's because I was busy looking at them boobies, also tried to play inaccessible young man with strong moral backbone, who don't want to rush things, we both were virgins back then
Bring the secrets of caravel making to the Phoenicians/Carthaginians some 50 years before the first Punic wars. Maybe also some scribbles of the coast of Africa and the best winds to reach America.
By doing that you would leave behind so many new and much more complex cells (modern bacteria, yeas, maybe even spores)
You would probably boost evolution by millions of years!
Introduce Shakespeare to D&D, and encourage him to popularize it.
Not only would the campaigns he ran be amazing, but goooodlord imagine the subversive effect it would have socially. Unpinning good/evil from lawful/chaotic in the public perception that early on would be a Big Deal; bringing the idea of consumer-generated content would shift attitudes to art and literature away from a purely top-down concept, and the resulting rise of Victorian fan-fiction would be so amazingly terrible it would rip its own hole in the spacetime continuum.
is it confirmed that shakespear was a real guy and not a pen name?
Yes. The idea that he wasn't real is frankly laughable. We know where he lived, we know who his wife was and what she was left in his will (their second best bed!), he met the queen for crap's sake!
Also he had a daughter he left his entire estate to, and the town of Stratford-upon-avon was sick of his show stealing antics for many many many years
Id show up at the time travelers convention.
give my bro harambe a bullet proof vest
In before it's a self correcting timeline, and now it's the best that gets him killed
The first time Heinrich Kramer tries to show someone the Malleus Maleficarum, I appear directly in front of him and set the book on fire. Not only is the book destroyed, but a clearly supernatural event took place to put the fear of god into him. Bam. No witch trials.
Or, the first time he steps foot in Innsbruck, he slips on a banana skin and slides down the street, much to the comedic delight of the locals. Helena Scheuberin even giggles and praises him for his comedic wit and skill. With high praise from an affluent local, and a natural penchant for comedy, Kramer leads a cult following in banana-skin comedic antics, and kick starts surrealist humour centuries before Monty Python.
I'd prevent the Challenger launch. Manned spaceflight doesn't get shelved for an entire generation, and a young me doesn't lose hope for the future at such an early age.
Through a bizarre series of butterfly effects, the successful launch and its international attention gives bureaucrats in Pripyat an extra nudge to encourage cooperation amongst their engineers and nuclear scientists, and a critical flaw in the operation of the plant at Chernobyl is caught before it causes a catastrophic meltdown.
The cumulative effect is a continued culture of progressive technological expansion into the 90s, and the fading of the anti-intellectualism that threatened to overtake the world during the Reagan and Thatcher administrations. Hand in hand with this is a decreased militarism, as technology is increasingly seen as a tool for the betterment of humanity, and less as a means of building better weapons.
One other immediate result is in the US presidential election of 1988. A lack of meaningful engagement with the public (no "skipped the surly bonds of earth" speech) led to increasing apathy toward the outgoing Reagan administration, giving G.H.W. Bush a tougher hill to climb, and less solid footing on the issue of defense. Dukakis doesn't feel the need to do a silly photo op in a tank, but instead campaigns partly on an expansion of the space program and educational outreach programs similar to the one that brought in Christa McAuliffe.
Neoconservatism and neoliberalism wither together on the vine. Permanent human presence in space continues uninterrupted for the next two decades, with a base on the moon by the end of the century and a manned mission to Mars planned for a decade after that.
No Bushes, no rise of Al-Qaeda in 1988, no Gulf War, no Rush Limbaugh, no Clinton's, and no 9/11.
TIME TRAVELER STOPS NASA LAUNCH
Administrators considering stopping entire space program.
“It must be some kind of message”, said Jerry Jenkins, head of NASA’s department of deciding whether to continue with space exploration whatsoever. “The time traveler knows something we don’t, and if he’s back here stopping launches it must mean there’s bad outcomes from space stuff.”
Not per se necessary to prevent it - either listen to the on-site rep from MT, who raised concerns in OTL that were disregarded, or make that day warmer. All other things being equal, without the crisis, we would have learned a great deal - but not at the cost of several lives.
It haunts me to this day that an improved version of STS would likely still be an option for launches, if only McDonald had been listened to.
I can fault the company, but he made a good faith effort to stop it because testing hadn't been done at the current temperatures, AIUI.
On the ohter hand, those lives vs [GHWB | Dukakis | anyone else] directly impacts OTL - Arguably, we'd never have a Trump presidency, but Duke is simply a gentler, faster version of the same.
Not sure we wouldn't still get Bushes, or Gulf War, but certainly what we ended up with would be more tempered, and there's a real benefit to that. All these years on, perhaps we'd still have the 'old school' Republican party instead of the "I'm not a fascist, I swear!" Republican party.
I'd save RFK and give him a full two-term presidency. Just because I've always wondered how much a difference it would have made in the course of American history. It definitely seems like things took a severe turn for the worse in the late 60s and the American political system has never recovered.
I personally believe there were conspiracies to assassinate both him and JFK because they were not susceptible to being controlled by their donors or political mentors, as is the case with the vast majority of politicians. They were rogue elements with a strong potential to disrupt the status quo (i.e. gravy train) for the rest of the oligarchy, so they got taken out.
Reagan is where things got fucked. Give Carter two mandates instead.
Por que no los dos
Carter?
I wasn't alive for these events and I am possibly missing context. But I just see an inflection point in the 60s and I don't know if another term from Carter in 1980 would have been enough to turn things around. I also feel like he was a less impactful character than RFK
The main turning point was 1971, as referenced by the website (https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/).
Nixon was the president then, and the main force was that the economy was decoupled from the gold standard
Edit: president
Nah that was Nixon. If RFK had been elected, withdrawn from Vietnam earlier and not been corrupt, things may have gone differently
My brain goofed, I knew that. Thanks for the correction!
It makes me sad the site seems to be pushing crypto. Or maybe it's that crypto bros keep referencing the event? Chicken and egg? I dunno
Introduce radio to the Romans. They had the metallurgy to create coils. Even a simple Morse code system would easily keep their empire going. Probably end up like that Star Trek TOS where Centurions are carrying sub-machine guns, though. If want to read what a great SF writer did with this (guy from 1938 ends up in 535AD), read "Lest Darkness Fall"
I'd go back and prevent the 11th Sept attacks.
The world would be a different place because so much happened as a knock on of that but at the same time it's hard to imagine what the world would be like. Probably very similar but also different in substantial ways.
Like obvious things like no war in Iraq or Afghanistan (at least not those wars), and less obvious things like how the attacks have reshaped liberal democracies like the US and Europe (for the worse imo), and how they empowered right wing politics in many countries (also bad imo).
Yeah and also no more TSA (at least the one we know). Fuck TSA all my homies hate the TSA.
The TSA is just a federal jobs program. They don't actually provide any value; it's been demonstrated that they miss the vast majority of contraband. The most notable function of the TSA is the temporary imposition of an authoritarian-esque environment of suspicion and control on innocent civilians, reminding us to follow the rules, or else.
Next time you want to prevent 9/11, you probably have to prevent all the reasons they had to hate us.
From ChatGPT-4:
The history of Western involvement in the Middle East before the September 11, 2001 attacks is extensive and complex, involving a range of diplomatic, economic, military, and political actions. Some key instances include:
Sykes-Picot Agreement (1916): A secret agreement between Britain and France, with assent from Russia and Italy, to divide the Ottoman Empire's territories in the Middle East after World War I.
Balfour Declaration (1917): The British government expressed support for a "national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine, which was then part of the Ottoman Empire.
Creation of Modern Middle Eastern States: After World War I, Western powers, particularly Britain and France, were instrumental in redrawing the borders in the Middle East, leading to the creation of many modern states.
Iranian Coup d'état (1953): The CIA, with British support, orchestrated a coup to overthrow Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh and strengthen the monarchical rule of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
Suez Crisis (1956): France, the UK, and Israel invaded Egypt in response to Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser's nationalization of the Suez Canal.
Support for Various Regimes: Western countries, especially the United States, supported various regimes in the Middle East, some of which were authoritarian, for strategic and economic interests, particularly during the Cold War.
Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990): The U.S. and other Western countries were involved in various capacities during the Lebanese Civil War.
Soviet-Afghan War (1979-1989): The U.S. and its allies supported Afghan mujahideen in their fight against the Soviet occupation.
First Gulf War (1990-1991): A U.S.-led coalition expelled Iraqi forces from Kuwait. This war also led to the stationing of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, which was one of the grievances cited by Osama bin Laden.
Sanctions against Iraq: Following the Gulf War, the United Nations, with strong U.S. and UK backing, imposed sanctions on Iraq that had significant humanitarian impacts.
Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: The U.S. and other Western countries have been deeply involved in this conflict, often perceived as being biased towards Israel.
Various Military Bases and Operations: The U.S. and its allies have maintained a military presence in various parts of the Middle East for strategic reasons.
This list is not exhaustive and simplifies a complex history. Each of these events has a nuanced background, and their impacts are still felt in the region's contemporary politics.
To be fair, it's easier to stop 1 of the planes that crashed into the towers than to stop stuff that had a LOT of powerful people making decisions.
No damn tiny bottles and metal detectors before flights. But I dont fly anymore lol
A highschool physics book translated in ancient Greek/linear B to mass copy and distribute to everyone. Maybe it'll give the advantage to stop the Bronze Age Collapse.
I think hygiene and modern concepts of medicine and transmittable diseases would more likely prevent that collapse
@JeffKerman1999 bring some plans for the printing press and some plans to mass produce paper too. Back in the ancient times one sheet of paper was about $30 in todays money. A whole book would be the equivalant of tens of thousands of dollars.
@hai
Without digisation possibilities, limited oil usage, and an ever-increasing demand for paraphanalia, there will be no trees left.
Idk sneeze on a dinosaur or something.
Dinosaur: "bruh? 🤨"
hands you a tissue
So that's why they all died out...
Something that would do that neoliberism in the 80's with Reagan and Thatcher would not become the dominating political and economic theory it has been since that time.
I was going to post something like this. Thank you for your service
Nuclear war in 1993
Start flamewars on robotic astroturf accounts about how dumb Donald Trump is until Instagram starts and people try to prove he's not an idiot, but in protesting they protest too much and nobody believes them by 2016.
So, I need a robot chatbot algorithm cookbook for the naughties and beyond.
ChatGPT with an unlimited account from several proxy IPs in 2016 could have changed the world.
I often wonder how people would react if you showed up to a concert hall in, say, classical music era Europe or something and performed modern music. Assuming you could kit it to provide infrastructure for whatever your performance required, and the acoustics of the venue were idealized.
Would attendees hate it? Would the unfamiliar musical styles be repulsive to them? Would the sounds and textures of modern instrumentation like electric guitar and synthesizer upset or even frighten them? Or would they find something to appreciate about it? Would the music be copied and spread, becoming a time worn classic folk tune in an alternate future? Or would it be rebuked and suppressed, condemned for all time as evil influence? Which genres would have the best acceptance chances in which cultures, and which eras?
In my mind in particular, I think about this with the niche realm of video game soundtracks. If not just the music played as-is through some playback device (which would probably be rather boring, but who knows, maybe the novelty of recorded music alone would be fascinating enough) then perhaps arranged for live performance, like the orchestral performance of Undertale, or the Sinnohvation big band album. Or, of course, if the soundtrack was itself a recorded live performance, just perform it. These collections of compositions often outline rich adventures, communicated by a wide range of musical styles. I wonder if they are strong enough to stand alone, and if audiences would respond to them without the context that they were written to accompany.
Failing live performance (which would be trickier than one would think--to sound good, live music has to be written with its venue in mind, and I'd assume most modern music would sound like garbage when performed in victorian era concert halls or ancient ampitheaters), I'd also consider putting them to vinyl LPs and dumping them in old record shops in any era that had phonograph or turntable technology and see if they get discovered.
Why not just send back the video games themselves? I dunno. I guess I'm less interested in wowing them with futuristic technology and more interested in how they'd react to something they already have (music), but in a strange, new context.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
orchestral performance of Undertale
Sinnohvation big band album
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
You wanna fuck up the timeline? Somehow mess something up so plastic was never, and never will be invented. That would change sooooo many things.
It would also stop much of the progress humanity made. Unfortunately, plastic is pretty much the cheapest and easiest solution for a lot of problems, specifically for packaging food and stuff like that.
You may very well travel back to a world that no longer can build that time machine.
When the fork I use for lunch and throw away will outlast my civilization, I'm very much ok with destroying that technology.
I would bring a sandwich for Gavrilo Princip.
Id go back and push a kid into the gorilla enclosure at Cincinnati zoo, just for a laugh.
If I went back in time, between stoping hitler or stopping you the choice is clear.
I'd swap some of the first clay documents around until I ended up with a timeline where we live modern life with a gift economy rather than a money economy. We'd all have a lot more options to pay off our debt rather than the streamlined ridgid money system.
Take the current highest-yield nuclear bomb and destroy England right before the begin of their collonial era.
Generally speaking, I believe removing a global superpower just before they do their world-changing thing is probably going to have the biggest effect on the timeline.
Everyone was building empires at the time and fighting over who got what. All that nuking England would do is to mean France, the netherlands, germany, spain etc would get more bits
Of course it wouldn't stop colonialization, but it would change the future quite a lot.
I think that should shake up the timeline quite a bit.
No, you'd just have the exact same thing but with another nationality. France had like half of Africa so they'd definitely be bigger.
And wouldn't that completely shift worldwide powerbalanes for centuries to come?
For example, would WW2 have happened if France had been a global superpower instead of a pushover?
Would the american revolution have happened with another colonial ruler?
Without that example, would the french revolution have happened?
Without both revolutions, would democracy be a thing by now, or would we still have totalitarian monarchies?
You know the butterfly effect? It's the same except we aren't killing a butterfly but instead one of the superpower nations of that time.
France wasn't a pushover around WW2. They had enough manpower to fight nazi Germany toe to toe. What they did, however, was underestimate how fast they could advance. France also ignored a warning that the germans were amassing to push through the Ardennes, which allowed the nazis to face little resistance on that front. Apparently, if they took immediate action, they could've mobilized an air raid to completely destroy that nazi battalion, which would royally fuck up the rest of Hitler's plans
France was never a pushover. The idea that being invaded by a bigger stronger army was their fault is weird and one I've only heard in the US.
Most countries that are colonies eventually seek independence, including most that France had.
It would only be a deterrent for empire building if there's a pattern (probably 3 or 4 similar events), otherwise people would consider it a random hateful act of god, of which there are many, and of which have been interpreted many different ways
I was focussing on changing the timeline, not on deterring nations from doing something. Without English colonializers, there would have certainly been other colonizers, but e.g. the whole China situation would have likely been very different. There would not be a dominant anglo culture right now. No English-speaking USA, no English-speaking Australia, no large countries with an anglo common law-based legal system.
It would change the timeline quite a bit.
The ancient Greeks had simple steam engines. They were children's toys because slaves were cheaper
They wouldn't be able to build it. It wasn't until the 16th or 17th century that metallurgy and machining were advanced enough to build atmospheric steam engines, much less high pressure ones.
You need a lot of tech to jump start an industrial revolution.
The demonstration is key. The Greeks actually had one in 80BC or thereabouts, but as far as we know they never figured out a use for it. Wiki is here: Aeolipile
I wanna go back and be part of the Fallador massacre!
I want to say leave a modern computer or some other piece of technology at some point in time (maybe 50's) but I'm not sure if it could be reversed engineered
Even if it had infinite power and was unbreakable, it would end up being fought over and coveted as holy relic, instead of being played with and studied
Hardly. The miniaturization required to make modern chips is ages ahead of anything possible in the 50s or 60s. Hell, them even getting some x-ray microscope to see the stupidly small transistors we have today would be a challenge in itself!
Grays. Sports. Almanac.
i'd write everything shakespeare did before he did
maybe Shakespeare did that to you
I've always wondered about this kind of theory. If I stole and published Harry Potter before JK Rowling will it be as successful? If I do the beatles' songs before them will they be a hit?
Go back and destroy religion.
So you'd take like 1 Jesus or what?
I think this dude Judas aleady tried it, didnt help.
No shit, with this "betrayal" and Jesus knowing he has to go on, this really looks like they knew it was an attempt to stop this horror
Well you can't go back in time and delete "someone" that never existed in the first place. There is no historical evidence anywhere that "jesus" ever lived. He's a myth.
I meant remove religion, from everywhere.
Killing Bill Gates. It would be a weird timeline, maybe Microsoft would still exist, but in a different shape.
Microsemi. A slightly more over-medium version of our operating systems.
XerOS
I have some suggestions: http://toastytech.com/evil/killbill.html
You weren't too shy to tittyfuck her, how'd you miss the BJ hint?
Guessing it's because I was busy looking at them boobies, also tried to play inaccessible young man with strong moral backbone, who don't want to rush things, we both were virgins back then
I'd love to see Socrates as modern day politician
I would go back in time and arrange Genghis Khan to have a better father.
Bring a time machine with you and teach ancient Egyptians how to use it
Teaching Abraham Lincoln how to do egirl makeup and being a femboy.
I'd bring a universal encyclopedia to the mesopotamians.
Isreal
Back in 1948
"So we're all agreed, we give the jewish people this land over here and we force the people who live there to go live over there!
::Touching grass busts down the door::
"NO! Thats a stupid idea!!"
"Arrest the anti-semite!"
And the time traveller spends the rest of his life in jail while people slowly realise he was right.
It would be fascinating to go back and prevent monotheism from taking off. See what happens.
Jesus. Not white, on Drugs, probably a mushroom
Bring the secrets of caravel making to the Phoenicians/Carthaginians some 50 years before the first Punic wars. Maybe also some scribbles of the coast of Africa and the best winds to reach America.
I wonder how much difference one Stinger SAM would have made at Blair Mountain in 1921.
Ending the first living cell on earth. If we are alone in the universe, preventing life from forming would do the most to change the timeline.
By doing that you would leave behind so many new and much more complex cells (modern bacteria, yeas, maybe even spores) You would probably boost evolution by millions of years!