Time Machine

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If there is a time machine like in Back To The Future, would you go back to the past? And which decade.

I would only go back to the 90s to inform myself of future events for financial gain or a better career path.

I'd just get the car, because Delorean rocks (I could use a car of my own too)! just hoping it would get some 2016 upgrades to make it not actually suck IRL.

10,000 BC - Introduce crop rotation, selective breeding, the alphabet, mathematics, the Scientific Method, fire, smelting, smithing, metallurgy, germ theory, antibiotics, anesthesia, anatomy, steam power, the shuttle loom, the moveable-type printing press, the microscope, and the telescope to every possible human community. Abolish human slavery, religion, and war, and teach human equality everywhere.

Then come back to the present.

1960s

I'd like to go anywhere in the past, but especially to the time when my parents were kids, so I could see what their life was like. Then I'd go to the future and see what would happen so I could warn everyone.

There was an interesting plot thread in the series 'Warehouse 13' in which something like this happened. The end result was that the bad guy utilized all that wonderful tech to make an even-harder-to-defeat fascism. Human nature being what it is in some subgroups, you'd also need to set something in motion back in 10,000BC to prevent such a thing. If it were me, I'd find a way to shift humanity away from Alpha dominant/patriarchal/capitalist social structures, then let the clock run forward. Given that we appear to be apes that are a social structure mix of gorilla, chimp and pygmy chimp, that might be quite a trick as the more violent/aggressive ones would need to be institutionally neutralized somehow.

Other than that, there haven't been many other time periods in dominant Western culture where women were not treated as property, so I might just tag along with Fnord, trigger an alternate future and return home to see what happened. No reason to not keep trying until I like the results...

My methods would be purely selfish and lame. I'd go back to the 1920s and live to swing.

Yay! Such a rare treat to come across someone who is anti-patriarchy.

I would like to go back to my early childhood, purely to see what it was like through 'fresh eyes' to live in that time. And to observe myself from the perspective that I've got today. I have my own daughter. I'd like to look back and see how alike we are/were.

And little things, like seeing what books were on the shelves at school when I first started (I remember a lot, but I'm sure there are some good ones that I'm missing and would love to share with my own daughter now), enjoying some of the foods that no longer exist, browsing some old shops.

Wouldn't want to change anything at all, but would like to just soak up those memories from my current perspective.

Oh, and I'd like to go back and interact with my past selves.

I would want to see lots of different decades in lots of different centuries.

I'd go back in time twenty seconds and not post this reply.

I would go back to Rome at the height of the empire, to see how day-to-day life was lived by the typical resident of Rome. How different was that from the medieval era (about which we seem to know much more as it was more recent)?

Maybe I would go forward in time to gather historical data on this era, as well as a few higher-tech artifacts that I could come back and "invent" in the present.

Hmm ... going backward in time and inventing the powered airplane before the Wright brothers ... the radio before Marconi and Tesla ... the Theories of Relativity before Einstein ... Penicillin before Fleming ... teh Interwebz before Al Gore ( ) ... these could also be fun!

Funny thing about most of those milestones is that they didn't happen in a vacuum. Rather, it was often the case that the body of knowledge was moving toward that conclusion in a very steadfast way, and that person we all know was the one who tied them all together *and* had the social or political connections to push it through. I think if I tried to go back and be that focus-person, I'd fail miserably and have the same sort of followers that Nikola Tesla has today online...