If you could travel back in time...

Post Reply New Topic

What would you do? If it turned out that you could change anything without creating paradoxes because of whatever reason, what would you change?

If it were possible, I would travel back in time to the 1980's in a way where history couldn't be altered, and I would be able to see and look around and explore the surroundings without any having any consequences.

-LegoMaster2149 (Written on October 3, 2017)

I'd replace the author of the Gospel of Matthew. I would create a new version of Christianity with different values:

- Liberalism, including support for pre- and extra-marital sex, divorce, homosexuality, freedom of speech, and justice reform
- Free market capitalism, with genuinely free choices.
- Globalism and free trade. Disdain for national borders.
- Empiricism and valuing knowledge. Some basic scientific facts to get things started, including some verifiable using 2nd century technology but also basic medicine, electricity, and evolution.
- The equal value of all human beings, explicitly condemning sexism, ableism, and racism in all their forms as well as emphasising that wealth is often due to fortune rather than value. Emphasising the need to include the whole community in decision making.
- Acknowledgement and explanation that gender, race, and disability are social constructs.
- Secularism and tolerance of differing religious beliefs; actively encouraging free thought.
- Robust defence of your values.
- And of course, retaining Christianity's existing values for love, compassion, and charity.

That's probably the single thing you could do to best improve the world. Obviously ideally you'd repeat the process with other major religions but Christianity is by far the most popular and so the most capable of doing good.

Perhaps a more honest answer is that I'd give myself perfect instructions for investing in Bitcoin, and then betting on Leicester to win the 2015/16 Premier League title. With that money you could basically do anything. I think I'd hire all my friends and create a not-for-profit news website that spanned the whole world (although tailored for an English-speaking and particularly British audience).

I would travel back in time to too places/times:

1. 1893 Chicago World's Fair
2. Eastern Germany before the fall of the wall

Both of these times/places/events are really interesting for me and I wish I could have seen them in person.

Go back to the Great Library at Alexandria in Greco Roman times, and bring with me a printing press with movable type to show the librarians how to mass produce their books. That and install a sprinkler system.

I wouldn't have come into this thread.

Whatcha out for the serial killer targeting young women.
Read devil in the white city if you’re curious

I would eliminate the following people: Ayn Rand and Lewis F. Powell Jr.

I would go back to the 80s for the music and fashion.

(Not sure why this is in PPR)

I love that! It's almost gut wrenching to think of all of that amazing literature destroyed. It would be amazing to be able to prevent it!

I'd drown Moses in the river. Friday, Saturday and Sunday resolved in one fell swoop.

Haha, yes, I've read it It was a great book - it combined two of my interests: World's Fairs and serial killers!!

I'd go back to Dallas, 11/22/1963, to see who, if anyone, was behind that grassy knoll.

Keep my country out of the first world war. Many of our woes today stem back to that bloody conflict and its second half, WW2.

Why not save jfk?

Besides eliminating myself I wouldn’t unless I had a ship and shield that protected me from harm and temporal changes.
Might be interesting to visit and see history first hand.
Maybe try to change the future for the better.
Did Atlantis exist could just go back and see. Walk Ancient Rome etc.

To be sure, that war was a clusterf*ck that shouldn't have happened. Kaiser Wilhelm was hardly a genocidal monster like Hitler, and truthfully had only been pulled into the war due to his treaty with Austria-Hungary. I hardly think a continental Europe dominated by Imperial Germany for a few generations would have been comparable to the horrors of Nazism and communism - twin evils unleashed by WWI.