If you had a Time Machine...

[WayneLigon]

Well. First thing, I'd go way back and kill all the dinosaurs to make sure that mankind can evolve in reasonable safety.

Um, huh? Dinosaurs were gone for millions of years before we were even a gleam, much less showed up on the scene.

After I did the normal 'make myself wealthy as a god' routine, I'd go back and become an historian for a time. Document things that happened, so we could know the truth of them. The great prehistoric beasts. The extinction-level-event. The tunguska event. Show the people building the Stonehenge or the Pyramids. Follow the migrations across the landbridge from Asia. Show our ancestors bringing down a mammoth, and our vastly more primitive ones roaming the plains of Africa. Do a multi-thousand-year stop motion showing how Babylon, Ur, and the first great cities were built. Find the tribe that first said to itself 'let's just stop here and put the plants where we want them instead of roaming around looking for them and maybe getting eaten'. I want to record the Library of Alexandria. Record the last hour of Hitler's life. Things like that.

After that.. I travel and enjoy things. Establish some identities as a 'wealthy traveller' to take advantage of some of the real ammenities of the past. California before it became a crowded pit. Cuban nightclubs before the revolution. The hotels and spas of The Gilded Age.

If I can change things without screwing things up, as in causing Causality itself to unwind and unmake the universe or something... oh, man! The possibilities.

I guess the first thing is to take a couple thousand teachers and scientists back several thousand - or ten thousand - years and make sure the boom-bust nature of society levels out. Introduce medicines and safety practices. Curb superstition and misunderstanding. Instill peace, inquisitiveness, and desire for prosperity. Prune and shape. Mold. Come back to present, take hourly shuttle to the Moon and then on out to the star colonies.

 

[Harmon]

Any alteration in the past has a ripple effect in the future. Breathing the same air as Ben Franklin could alter the course of what we know as history. I would rather not take that chance.

Though it would be cool to see some things built, and some other things changed (convence my Dad to wear rubber gloves and a mask to help protect him from the chemicals in the rat poisons he use to throw about the pins bare handed or have him seek medical attention for that tick bite in Texas fifteen years ago).

 

[rom90125]

I'm certainly not a devout Christian or anything, but that's where I'd go. I'd probably visit every major religion founders, just to see what happened.
AR

Exactly what I would do. So much of what shapes our world today, politically, socially, and economically can be traced back to the foundation of the major religions...

 

[Tarrasque Wrangler]

Paradox, shmaradox. I'd bring a sniper rifle and take care of some personal business. I put my Time Machine Murder List together a long time ago.

Hitler? DEAD!
Stalin? DEAD!
Lee Harvey Oswald? DEAD!
James Earl Ray? DEAD!
Cortez? DEAD!
Joe McCarthy? DEAD!
John Wilkes Booth? DEAD!
Mark David Chapman? DEAD!
Guy who invented Muzak? VERY VERY DEAD!

 

[Acquana]

Paradox, shmaradox. I'd bring a sniper rifle and take care of some personal business. I put my Time Machine Murder List together a long time ago.

Hitler? DEAD!
Stalin? DEAD!
Lee Harvey Oswald? DEAD!
James Earl Ray? DEAD!
Cortez? DEAD!
Joe McCarthy? DEAD!
John Wilkes Booth? DEAD!
Mark David Chapman? DEAD!
Guy who invented Muzak? VERY VERY DEAD!

All excellent choices. I would at least like to see what the alternate timelines those would make would be like. We got an alternate universe viewer too? I wanna use that.

 

[Tarrasque Wrangler]

I got another idea. Everyone keeps saying they'd go back in time with stock tips or football scores, but I'd go forward in time a couple decades and bring along a tank of clean air, a few bottles of water and a couple gallons of unleaded and live like a king.

Because I'm a nice guy, I'll let your great-grandkids have a free hit off the oxygen. After that, they gotta pay like everyone else.

 

[Wombat]

I dunno

I think I'd make a list of artists, composers, and writers who I really like, go look them up, and thank them for a job well done...

...though I probably leave off Beethoven. Despite loving his music, the man was a serious curmudgeon

 

[Dark Jezter]

Things I'd do...

See Led Zeppelin in concert at Madison Square Garden, New York 1974.
See KISS in concert at Cobo Hall, Detroit 1975.
Stop Ronnie Van Zant from getting on that plane.
Find a way to stop Robert E. Howard from killing himself.
Go back to 1985 and try out New Coke to see just why everybody hated it so much (I was only in preschool at the time).
Find out who came up with the idea of Political Correctness and toss them into the ice age before they could unleash their horror on the world.
Go to an opening night showing of The Empire Strikes Back just to watch everybody's reactions when Darth Vader reveals that he's Luke's father.
Kidnap a ninja from feudal Japan, kidnap a pirate from 18th century West Indies, and finally find out who would win (and maybe throw a cowboy in there just to make things more interesting).
Find a way to force the studio executives to let John Milius make the Conan the Barbarian sequels the way he originally intended instead of driving him off by telling him that the Conan franchise should be more family-friendly.

 

[kenobi65]

Go back to 1985 and try out New Coke to see just why everybody hated it so much (I was only in preschool at the time).

Have a can of Pepsi, and you'll get the general idea.

I was in college, studying marketing at the time, and it was a great case-study-in-action.

The braniacs at Coke decided that, to compete vs. Pepsi, they needed to taste more like Pepsi. So, New Coke was sweeter than Coke, since Pepsi was / is sweeter than Coke. (This was during the days of the original "Pepsi Challenge" TV ads, in which consumers in blind taste-tests preferred Pepsi.)

Their market research showed them that their new formulation should have been a winner. But, there were two things that they didn't consider:
- As a general rule, sweeter things tend to win in head-to-head taste comparisons.
- They negelected to consider how current, loyal Coke drinkers would react to the change in taste of Coke. Most of those loyal Coke drinkers preferred the taste of Coke in the first place...and now it tasted like Pepsi!

The uproar was massive, and, IIRC, they introduced "Coca-Cola Classic" (i.e., the old formula) within a month or so. "New Coke" stayed on the market for a while (a decade or so, in some markets), but really never succeeded. There are those who suggest that the entire debacle was planned, in order to generate PR for the Coke brand in general (and it certainly did that, intentionally or not).

That's your Marketing 101 lesson for today, kids. This is kenobi65, your old-geezer advertising guy, signing off.

 

[cignus_pfaccari]

1. See how the pyramids were constructed and how the ancient Egyptians lived;
2. See if the ruins in Turkey really are the ruins of Troy, and whether or not the Trojan war really occurred in any way resembling Homer's epic.

Both good ideas.

The obvious thing to do is to go around copying down as much literature as humanly possible. There's so much that's lost and that we know of (like, for example, the Menelaid), one has to wonder how much we don't know about. Alternately, arrange to have period copies of those assembled in a securable location and "lost", so I can find them later.

I'd be strongly tempted to carry a bunch of machine guns (and vast quantities of ammo)back to Constantinople c. 1453. No, wait, back to c. 1070. And I'd gut that punk Andronicas Ducas, too. (Hey, if postponing the fall of the Byzantine Empire is good enough for Harry Turtledove, it's good enough for me!)

Brad