If you could send someone to any historic moment, who and when?
It's been a while since we had a lighthearted talk on here about something silly, and this question has been bouncing around my head for years now. Figured it'd be fun to ask and see what people come up with!
So, you can take one person from any time period and send them to any historic event for a duration of your choice. You can go for serious stuff, like sending a bodyguard to save someone from an assassination, or yourself to some moment in history you're curious about... Or you could send Stephen Hawking to his own time traveler party. Maybe throw some conspiracy theorist at Roswell 1947 or let some ancient king crash Elizabeth's Diamond Jubilee.
The options are literally limitless. I'm just interested to see what everyone comes up with!
Send Hitler to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, anytime.
Would be interesting to see what happens next. Hitler was a product of the times in many ways. I think some kind of extremist taking power would have happened, but maybe it would now be a communist? Who nows. If you truly want to stop ww2, you would probably have a better chance sending Churchill to the meeting of Versailles to chance their minds.
Stalin invades Europe. After getting his ass kicked by the Allied Forces, the USSR covertly build up a massive army and invades the US aided by a psychic figure. In the background there's a banger of a song playing constantly.
That, or send Chamberlain to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, that might also work. But prepare for unforseen consequences. Anything from "Germany gets conquered within months of starting its first invasion. WW2 is short and without much suffering" to "Germany doesn't even attempt such a invasion, the project gets shelved for a while. After German scientists build the first nuclear bomb, the project gets revived with a vengeance" is possible.
WW2 May have been inevitable, but the Holocaust wasn't. Not necessarily.
Hitler may not have been the specific, sole cause... But it's not as if he didn't have a hand in things. He wasn't a moderating force by any means.
This line of thought always makes me think of Wikihistory by Desmond Warzel
That was a very fun read. Thanks for sharing! :)
Tbh Silverfox316 is a real bummer!
And Kissinger after that.
Alternatively, send Kaiser Wilhelm II back to Germany immediately after Ferdinand's assassination so that his military leaders and advisers couldn't do an end-run around him and force the country in the direction of war. Thereby avoiding millions of Europeans from being conscripted into a broader war that saw aristocrats wanting the lower classes to live in squalid conditions on the frontline to harden them against the realities of war, or whatever their silly excuses were. It made an entire generation jaded and reversed a lot of pre-war progress towards efforts for a lasting peace in Europe and disarmament/reduction of arms that would contribute to war (ironically, the third Hague Convention was interrupted by the war). And also so that a certain art school student who had frequented Jewish-financed soup kitchens wouldn't become a runner during said war and later use his status as a veteran to unite a fractured Germany.
But that still misses the opportunities to undo the Great Game or the Scramble for Africa, both of which contributed to the perceived need to enrich states at any cost so as to arm themselves against other states also dramatically growing in wealth. Not to mention the horrific genocides and abuses visited on those cultures and countries by colonial ambitions.
Yet we could go back further...
Christopher Columbus mysteriously falls overboard in the middle of the night just before first making landfall. The rest of the crew continue the voyage and exploration but maybe aren’t as needlessly cruel and brutal and maybe don’t even enslave natives to bring back to Castile?
I blink out of existence the moment you do it though, which is a funky dilemma about messing with time in general.
I'm assuming I can't go.
In that case, I would like to bring Benjamin Franklin into 2024. I would like to accompany him while the best historians bring him up to speed and I would like to watch the speeches he would inevitably makes about the state of things in the U.S..
I would send my dad back in time to Cleveland, Ohio. June 4, 1974. He would have a blast at 10 cent beer night. It's one of his favorite historical sports events to talk about. There is a Dollop episode about it anyone is unfamiliar with the story, it's pretty funny.
I really like this :) way better than a #1 Dad mug.
Let's say we cheat a bit and we send both you and dad back for the game, with ample 1974 money. Grab a beer and eat some hotdogs or something before the rioting.... What would you guys do before during and after the game goes to heck?
Oh man, well.. historically speaking, Cleveland in the 70s is not where anybody wanted to be. All the industries declined, they lost something like 25% of the population, and the rivers were so polluted that they could catch on fire. So... I dunno haha. Knowing my dad I think we'd wander around and look at architecture before we started getting belligerent. Then participate in a little chaos, yell at sports ball, talk to drunk strangers. A lovely time. Afterward, get the hell out of Cleveland!
I'm most curious to see who would answer NOT themselves : either out of sheer curiosity to see something themselves, or not wanting to risk travel injuries/harm to another person. Maybe if it was possible to change history, one would pick another who knows the language or has the specialises skillset?
I would guess that a lot of folks, including myself, would want to visit a historic time of deep importance to ourselves, for cultural or religious reason?
I would go to Jesus' home town a few years before He begins His travelling ministry. Probably easier to stay in town than being on the road with a large crowd. Not sure I would want to stay for the crucifixion but boy do I want to be there for the resurrection!
For folks who believe it's all myth anyway, wouldn't it be a neat way to Pascal's Wager with time travel, going to the epicenter where you believe the most likely candidate for theism could be proven? If it's real then you get irrefutable proof and it's not too late to turn your life around. If it's not real then you get to learn maybe how the belief might have come to blow up into such a big myth.
Being queer and not a dude means I'm less enthralled by the idea of being any further back in time than now. If it was a Doctor Who time travel scenario, maybe.
Oh yeah! Definitely nicer to have a travel companion who (mostly) has things under control.
That actually reminds me that travelling most places in history as a single woman who doesn't speak the language and doesn't have local men relatives will more than likely end up being a bad time. That's no fun as a what if. -..-
I think, to be honest, most people would have a bad time traveling back more than a few decades for any significant period of time. Language and social norms change very, very quickly, and going back any further than 50 years ago or so, even in a place you're familiar with would very quickly get you clocked as a strange outsider at the absolute best, and in many places put you in grave danger no matter who you were.
We currently live in a time where we're more tolerant of people who are different than us, and fitting in is less important than its ever been in history, and that's not saying much.
In every other time in the past, in every other place, people were far less exposed to other ways of looking, talking, thinking, and acting.
The only way I'd ever do time travel any earlier than the 19th century or so is if I could be invisible, bring my own food, and not have to mingle with the locals, and I'm an able bodied straight white man.
It's all fun and games til you walk up to someone and say they're a really hoopy frood.
I truly don't have an answer for the question but I know why I don't want to go backwards.
This is a great video I recommend that dives into this topic more. It's been awhile since I've watched it, but I believe he recommends disguising oneself as a traveling priest/monk.
I love this guys sooooo much. Everything about his videos feels like it should be boring, and yet - AND YET - somehow he's gripping and charming and you just can't not watch his whole back catalogue and then resent him for not having done more the selfish bastard.
Fascinating. What a great video and channel. I also went on to watch the one about how to gently advise Ghenkis Khan not to kill so many people, and the Medieval people did not eat rotten meat myth busting
Less about the doctor himself and more about the rules -
It may not be safe, but it won't be because society will impose its prejudices upon you. It'll be because there are actually aliens here. I can live with that kind of danger, probably.
Also magic translation
I was raised Christian but I am atheist, so apologies in advance if anything sounds harsh.
How does meeting historical Jesus prove Christianity/God though? Even if Jesus somehow turns water into wine, the more likely reason is slight of hand/world's first magician.
I think the only way I would get irrefutable proof would be if God chose to come down from Heaven and show himself to me, but that would present further questions. Why is he not willing to do that today? Wouldn't it be worth making it known that he exists if he could prevent Catholic priests molesting children? Why is he cool with toddlers getting cancer?
If I learned that God was real I would be shocked and disgusted that something so powerful chooses to let some people suffer and die "for reasons" when it could easily cure all world hunger and suffering with a blink of his eye or whatever.
Maybe sending a modern scientist back 500 years to educate people on germ theory would be the best use of this power.
I think coming back from the dead, if I had a chance to examine and confirm the dead body, might be some decent proof of something, although I’m not sure what.
If God, and particularly the Christian god, is real, then the existence of an eternal heaven may excuse some finite torment here on Earth. Mathematically speaking, it’s of measure zero.
It seems like a poor use of this one-shot ability though, as it’s virtually certain that it would just confirm the fact that there is no meaningful historical fact to the whole son of god myth.
Agreed and well put.
Yes, witnessing the resurrection would be compelling evidence. I would still have a hard time believing Jesus had actually been resurrected. Could I bring a medical doctor with me? I have no reason to believe that such a thing ever occurred, so I suppose I would need to rely on this magical power knowing when it happened and taking me there.
Yeah, pretty much the only thing that I can think of to ease suffering is to divide it by infinite joy. Divided by positive infinity, numerator approaches 0 sort of thing is how I usually like to think of it.
I'm a finite person and my understanding really only goes as far as my own memory. When I think back upon the worst things that have ever happened to me, I can already observe that the intensity of the pain lessens with time. Even if only a little, even if it comes back in pangs, grief and pain does become more tolerable with time, if the present feels less painful than the past. If I add infinite resources for getting perfect therapy, add getting perfect justice for wrongs and having an infinite number of kind people say all the right things about my getting said justice, and I can put infinite distance between myself and the perpetrator if I so choose, everything in my regular life of how pain works suggests to me that the pain will lessen towards a livable level eventually. Multiply by everyone who's ever been wronged by someone else.
Something to the scale of, this one time I saw a kid at a playground pushed another kid, and it scuffed their knee. I meet the kid again a million years later, and they smiled and said it was a long time ago, and they had had a chance to sort it out with the other kid ages ago, and anyway would I want to go ride bikes together?
Stretched out denominator big enough that we can get satisfactory answers from those responsible for the greatest harms done between persons, and long enough time of comfort and cheer that we feel distant from memories of regular no-fault pain. Plus the promised renewal of new heaven and new earth, which hopefully also means all creatures that have gone extinct, all beloved pets, can live pain free forevermore.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I can't think of anything more worth seeing/confirming, especially if this is it, it's not true, and there's nothing beyond heat death of universe.
At risk of turning a fun question into more Philosophy 100 I'll just chime in and reply just once :)
It almost doesn't matter if any god is real anymore, does it. That something with power exists isn't anything special, not something that could inspire awe, let alone worship. More than existence, if this being can't satisfy our accusations for the crime of all sins across all space time, it might as well be a mere demon. An alien. A Trek episode junior Energy Being of finite and local power. A time traveller just as helpless as the next man with a few more fun tech that ultimately doesn't prevent evils and heal wrong. We don't want living water or extra baskets of bread or our own resurrection, maybe because we can no longer conceive of any eternity worth living for. We have moral wounds in our hearts/souls from having witnessed horrors, from the pain of seeing millions of creatures in pain, and the sense that that ain't right and it ought not to be and the wish for not only the hurt to be reversed, but the crime itself to be erased entirely.
That's what I'm hoping for as well.
I feel like you made the argument for Q and I'm here for it.
It is possible in such a scenario that any given religious figure was just an ordinary human being or significantly different from the views of contemporary theists. When you get back they may refuse to believe what you have to tell them.
Oh absolutely there's not going to be any chance of convincing anyone. We have people who believe in flat earth and med beds. On the other end we already have the not believable "heard it from a guy who heard it from a guy" --> regular religion
I would send the last great "human" scientist(hopefully someone born millennia from now, but who knows?) back to Berkeley in 1960.
For some reason I hesitate to send that knowledge back before world war 2. Even though there is so much suffering, it just seems like so much could go wrong and I can't think of anywhere we can just drop them and trust that they will be taken care of and used wisely.
So, If possible, I would specifically place them near Carl Sagan. Like, Sagan is sitting, eating his lunch and poof! Future scientist appears in his office.
Hopefully they would find a way to communicate and have a nice long chat and maybe work on some projects together. Sagan is first to mind as someone that can communicate science brilliantly and seems thoughtful enough to make tough calls on how much to tell people and what ideas and technologies would be safe and of benefit to humans at that point.
If I don't blink out of existence or have my memory altered immediately after, then I can at least watch cosmos and see if anything seems different.
Personally, I'd either go for a chaotic option (literally anyone to the time traveler party), or want to try to solve some of history's greatest mysteries. Things that we will never be able to definitively answer. So off the top of my head, maybe I'd bring the infamous "Man in the Iron Mask" to the present long enough to learn his identity, though I'm sure there are far greater mysteries worth checking out. Heck, maybe Jimmy Hoffa wasn't killed but got brought to the future and never went back.
I'm laughing at the idea of some Joe Schmoe with a beer suddenly blinking into existence in front of Stephen Hawking with absolutely no explanation about how he got there, and then blinking out before anyone can figure out WTF is going on. 😂
The sheer confusion for everyone. Joe Schmoe would be of no help either. If he's from the future, imagine his reaction when he returns to his present and realizes "oh, that WAS me."
Literally anyone showing up would be hilarious. Imagine a caveman popping in, yelping and flailing for a bit in confusion, and then just popping out of existence. The questions people would have.
It gets even funnier if you expand beyond people. What if a random chihuahua appears mid poop, makes awkward eye contact with Hawking, then poof? 😂
Elvis got "hired" for a concert that hasn't happened yet.
So many ideas about getting an earlier start on technology, but I'm concerned tech isn't what we need ... I'd like someone from a future that solved societal problems stemming from capitalism/greed/exploitation/etc. who not only knows of a better way, but also has the ability to teach and convince especially the 1% that xyz really is the most beneficial for everyone including them.
So maybe like Star Trek without the Prime Directive where they CAN influence us to grow and be better humans.
I like this answer a lot. Though I have been watching a lot of Strange New Worlds, so I might be a bit biased. :)
Send Hitler to Hitler's birth and tell him the prophecy is that that child will be the one to end him.
And that he only has this one small chance to act and save himself. Whatever that may be.
Probably myself to the moment when AGI is invented. I don’t know when it will be, but I can say for sure it will be historic.
Me to when bitcoin was rising. XD
That’s as lighthearted as it can be I reckon.
I saw a trailer for a Korean drama where a woman gets to redo the last 15 years of her life. The first thing she did was to buy Apple/nVidia/etc stock :)
Rather than a single notable individual we write about in history, I'd like to research the possibility to enhance technological development instead.
There are a few interesting times this could work, such as Persia or the Qin dynasty. But I'm just going to pick for now one people are often obsessed with, the Roman Empire. I don't know all the emperor's but Augustus is famed for large road constructions. So any kind of more skilled development would probably catch his attention eventually.
So, what would then make the most impact? Personally, I'd say a civil engineer. Ideally someone with a background in one or more of the following industries:
This person would then obviously need to ideally already know, or be taught:
Of course, they should be given coins that are easy to make now so he can start. Obviously he would need to be a man given the Roman concept of property...
I doubt this would cause an immediate industrial revolution but:
And more, would really slingshot human society forward. Ideally the connection between physics and math would be acknowledged.
One thing you might run into here quite often is that you need energy. And all modern sources of energies are annoying in one way or another. Consider that back then metal refining was done using charcoal for fuel, and using lots of manual labor. And anything your engineer would come up with is probably somewhat reliant on large amounts of high-quality metalwork.
So you need energy. Fossil fuels will be a pain - they make for a decent gap technology at best, but they're labor intensive and an ecological nightmare. For the most part that leaves you with biological sources (bio fuels and muscle, really), which are also labor and land-use intensive. Nuclear power. And renewables. Renewables are a decent shot, particularly water power can be used somewhat cheaply - if you use steep mountains like there are not too far from Rome, you don't even need huge dams. Wind really only pays off with modern electronics (DC-DC is a pain) and modern materials (composite blades for example) - they're IMO only a decent choice if your modernized economy already has some scale. Solar has some low-tech variants (solar thermal) that can be reasonably achieved. PV is unviable because it requires high-purity materials that will be a nightmare to replicate in a Roman shed. Though, once you've stood up some amount of a base, PV might pay off because there you get a lot closer to computers using the same processes.
We haven't talked about nuclear. May I suggest you yoink /u/nukeman off into the past? In a past discussion on this, he claimed that a CANDU-style reactor should be doable with relatively simple methods. In particular, CANDU reactors completely forgo Uranium enrichment and can use natural uranium. In exchange you need heavy water as moderator, but that is much easier to achieve.
As a bonus,some skills I'd consider essential: Really basic chemistry. It's not terribly hard to make basic explosives, which would be a great boon for construction and mining. Plus, fertilizer is pretty neat too. Also, at least basic electrical engineering. Telegraphs for the roman empire would be a quite easy project with really broad utility.
Actually, that's part of the reason why I said civil engineer. Water streams alone can give some power for work, but mechanically. And some of the improvements possible wouldn't require electrical energy!
Of course, if I really had the power to send someone back, I would first make sure to get funding to research all the possibilities, and how to make it most effective. Gotta mind the butterfly effect after all!
Some kid built a nuclear reactor in his backyard. I'm going to go for that option.
Plus it's funny to imagine Roman citizens working as nuclear physicists one day and struggling in a phalanx the next.
I hate to disappoint, but it was not a reactor, just a very haphazardly built neutron source. Still pretty hot, but way less cool.
I'll take your word for it. I recall your nukeman moniker isn't just for show.
I would bring Vladimir Lenin to 2000s and see how he would deal with the internet and the right because we sure ain't doing a good job.
I would send some modern day polymath to the earliest time people spoke their language and give science a few hundred years head start.
Make sure you pick one who has a clear scientific understanding and reasonable political interpretation of climate science though, or you’ll just screw things up faster.
Not sure about that. I can imagine that if the industrial revolution happened in a "smaller world", all the painful early development towards better methods and tools will happen with fewer total emissions.
Basically, having multiple nations try to develop towards higher efficiency in parallel causes unnecessary emissions. An economy of 10 million people can basically emit as much as they like for as long as they like without tipping the planet over. Of course I'm assuming that non-fossil sources are a technological inevitability here, but I just want to point out that there's a bit more nuance to that argument.
This is less altruistic, but I would send myself back to the city of Rome during the reign of Trajan. No specific goal or anything, I'm just very curious as to what people and the buildings looked like then, and I think I would have an enjoyable time wandering about. Assuming I could, and my presence with all my teeth wasn't immediately suspicious or something.
I like the idea of bringing someone to the modern day whose impact on society happened primarily after their death. I believe that was the plot of a Doctor Who episode with Vincent Van Gogh. It doesn't have to be an artist, there are many scientists and engineers, or activists, that fit the bill as well.
I would send Kanye West and Ben Shapiro to Berlin in 1944.
I think it'd be fun to send an ancient philosopher/mathematician/whatever to some sea-change moment. Like what would Aristotle think of the first drilled petroleum well in Azerbaijan? The Greeks were already using petroleum for Greek fire, but seeing it harnessed as an energy source would be mindblowing and get those creative parts of the brain working in overtime.
Or Archimedes at the first powering-on of a nuclear reactor (let's keep him away from the Manhattan project, thanks!).
Or someone from an ancient culture to the living room of an average American family on the day of the moon landing. Would be cool to be a fly on the wall and hear what they think about these kinds of things.
I will be very pragmatic. Me, to me 15 years ago for a few days.
Or some genius scientist from the future (+ few kiloyears) to our time for a year.
Or putin and hitler and stalin to the Mariana Trench. No suite required.
Bring Newton or Jean-François Champollio into 2024, have them absorb as much information as possible, then send them back in time to speed up the evolution of science.
I'd have to do my homework to minimize risk, but there are so many moments in time it would be awe-inspiring to see from just the right vantage point. Pompei, the highest point on Pangea, the battle of Troy, the Zheng He treasure fleets, etc. It would be agonizing to whittle it down to a single moment.
I’m of two minds:
Nothing to do with nukes? :)
I think it could be very likely that there are religious scholars who are also biologists. Or maybe they could be cross trained...funny image of a priest in cassocks and butterfly net.
Alternatively we could send a team of well armed biologists to defend NZ from colonization. Have them understand this is a one way mission and it'll be up to their descendants (plus modern weaponry) to time capsule NZ for eveyrone....
While I would like to go back and give the Manhattan Project folks info on reprocessing/reactor design to give them a head start and reduce the environmental impacts, I figured that was a less interesting scenario than the ones I outlined.
Send me to the jurassic era.
Reminds me of an entertaining thread about actually surviving in the Jurassic period: https://www.reddit.com/r/Survival/comments/tdlqsx/comment/i0lygb1/