Make it a good one.
Shoot Arch Duke Ferdinand. Few people even now about it today, but he was subject to a horribly mangled assassination attempt that many scholars belive would have set off a major war in Europe had he died.
Holy crap it took way too long for me to realise what you’re doing
Go back in time and do something to prevent Vasily Aleksandrovich Arkhipov from becoming the Executive Officer on the B-59 Soviet nuclear sub in October 1962. He’s the guy who talked the Captain and the Political Officer out of launching the nukes when they thought they were being attacked by the US Navy during the Cuban Missile Crisis. His persuasiveness is generally considered to have avoided WWIII from starting then.
He probably literally saved the world, he should really be talked about more
The scary part is, he’s not the only one
You could also flip the switch that was literally the only thing keeping the nuke from exploding over North Carolina in the Goldsboro incident.
Nuke going off over US soil at the height of the cold war could very well have started everyone firing.
You’re going to pretend we’re not on that timeline right now? I see your play, time traveller.
He did it.
The crazy son of a bitch did it.
Procrastinate, the world is going down the drain just fine without my help.
Can I appear anywhere? Pop into white house or Kremlin during the Cuban missile crisis and say: I’m from the future, you must attack, or… Then travel back to the future without finishing the sentence.
I hate the ‘hate’ part (pardon the pun) of the question.
I’d rather go back in time and get Jesus and bring him back here so that he can go all ‘temple money changers’ on today’s MAGA Christians asses, give them a proper yelling to.
You think they’d listen to a random brown dude who couldn’t speak English?
If there’s a jesus with powers in the first place, he could do the holy spirit thing that happened after his death where the apostles proselytized by speaking in languages they (previously) couldn’t to people who couldn’t understand the native tongue.
Something tells me that if Jesus was ‘Jesussy’ enough, that they’d listen to him, regardless of skin color.
I genuinely doubt it. And if he was proven to be truly Jesus and kept saying that then US Christians would either say “He doesn’t understand the modern world” or reject him for some other contrived reason (i.e. he was corrupted by modernity, the machine caused him to lose his connection to God, etc…)
Christians are full of hate because they love hate.
Jesus-y? Or Jesussy? Those seem different.
Yeah, no way the majority of Christians would instead opt to form schismatic sects, or simply adopt church doctrine decrying the false prophet of Brown Jesus.
I want to watch this series.
Jesus the time traveler tells off assholes.
The comedy series “Black Jesus” has some of that vibe, if I recall.
And yeah, it’s great.
I want to watch this series.
Jesus the time traveler tells off assholes.
I’m not religious by nature, but yeah, definitely would sub for that series, for sure.
I legit popped this thread open to type
ohhh I wish I wish I hadn’t killed that fish…
Go to back to the big bang. You presence alone will butterfly effect the earth out of existence.
I really like this question. So: rather than killing Hitler, what if, instead, you killed Stalin? Was it inevitable that a strongman dictator would have taken over, and ruined the potential of communism? I guess we have evidence that the answer is “yes,” in the form of Mao, but weren’t the Chinese communist party(s) greatly influenced by the Soviet model? What if Russia had, instead, developed a more democratic system of government - was it possible, and couldn’t it have affected how China’s developed? But, maybe it is always inevitable that dictators emerge from internal revolutions like this.
Here’s another scenario: what if you stopped Oswald, and prevented Kennedy from being assassinated? He was popular, and likely to win a second term. What would 4 (~5) more years of Kennedy look like?
My favorite version of “killing Hitler” is instead of murder, blackmail the school dean so Hitler gets admitted to art school. Goodbye genocidal tyrant, hello moderately successful landscape painter!
Check out the show 11.22.63 on Hulu. Exactly about preventing the Kennedy assassination and the fallout from that choice. Seriously good!
Thanks for the suggestion! I’ll watch it.
Based on the novel with the same name, by Stephen King. So that’s another option.
My name is Friedrich Trump (aka Frederick Trump) and I already did that and even had a nice hump.
Well current events lead me to believe that allowing the orange turd to live would do the job nicely so in the spirit of laziness I’d do absolutely nothing.
Buy a cheap pistol, go back in time, and shoot Gutenberg.
We’d still be living in medieval times.
I support this one.
Land the time machine on top of the first animal to walk on land. Don’t even have to get out of the machine.
I read about a study that said Homo sapiens may have been down to as few as 40 breeding pairs at one point.
I’ve got way more ammo than that in my closet.
By eradicating one species, you’re probably going to save the entire planet. I guess in 500 million years the descendants of modern crows could become the new dominant species and they’ll end up nuking the planet sooner or later. You win some, you loose some.
Land octopus ftw
Squid. They’re much more social than octopodes. I for one welcome our new TEN tentacled overlords. Everyone knows ten tentacles is better than eight.
How much power do I have?
If I could divert the asteroid that resulted in the K-T event, that’d drastically change history. It may not have stopped dinosaurs from eventually going extinct, but it’d have given them 33 million more years more to evolve, and would certainly have affected mammalian evolutionary history. Maybe, just maybe, raptors would have gotten smart enough.
Ooh! Take back a lot of ravens. They’re almost smart enough already. Heck, I wonder if taking ravens back even earlier would be enough for them to evolve into something dominant. Problem is, they’re not particularly social, and I think that’s been our greatest advantage.
Or: introduce modern octopus to ancient oceans.
Stopping the K-T event is my favorite, though. It would absolutely have changed how life on Earth has evolved since.
30M years between extinction events is about all you get, though.
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Corvids, in general, but ravens seem to be the most intelligent of the bunch.
Crows are really communal though so might be a better bet for human like intelligence in the long run. Magpies too, not because they’d help but because they are both intelligent and total jerks so even the eventual crow people wouldn’t get to be happy thus maximizing the chaos.
That’s a really good point; social animals will get farther.
Crows, then.
Those are great ideas but miss thr mark on the second part. They all require a lot of work and we’re lazy.
Maybe? Like, how hard is it to put a Tsar Bomba on the asteroid when it’s a light-year away? Or, if it came from the Oort cloud, a thousand years before whatever nudged it in, nudged it in?
I don’t know. Putting a bomb on a timer on an asteroid seems pretty simple. If we’re time traveling, we’re also space traveling, because the solar system was about a third of the way around the galaxy at the K.T. event. In comparison, the shift to the impactor 1ly away would be margin-of-error stuff.
There were no constraints posted; no “you can only take a truckload of stuff”, or, “you appear on the Earth where that point was at that point in time”. I mean, if all you do is travel back in time 1 year without also traveling in space, you’re going to be breathing hard vacuum when you come out.
So: I’m assuming:
- I can choose where I come out
- I can take anything I want with my - I’m not traveling Terminator-style
- I can get my hands on a working Tsar Bomba before I go (that’d probably be the hardest, aside from violating the laws of physics)
However, for the other ideas? What’s hard about transporting a murder of crows to the Triassic? I don’t even have to go myself.
