I’d go hunt down Ronald Regan at about age 30 and empty an entire magazine of .45s into his dome while he slept.
Oooooh I like this one! Please do humanity the favor!
I’d find the first motherfucker that started smoking stuff, whether it was first tobacco or whatever, and get rid of him/her before anyone else ever learned of the practice/habit.
Would have been better health for countless people afterwards, if simply nobody ever knew…
Eliminate tobacco smokers? US Govt. tried, however American Indians are still with us today.
No, eliminate the single individual that originally invented tobacco smoking. Then nobody from that point on would ever know and the problem would have never existed in the first place.
Nip the problem directly at the source ya know. Guess you’re not all that good with these sort of hypothetical time travel thoughts…
Guess not. Colonizer.
Smoking was discovered independently in many cultures with different substances used by different cultures. In the Americas, it was tobacco, while the Scythians of Central Asia used cannabis in ritualistic hotboxes, as evidenced by archaeological finds of smoking tools in kurgans. Other regions, like India and Southeast Asia, saw the smoking of opium and herbs.
I would try to save the roman republic and prevent the roman kindgom. It would also be interesting to see what would have happend if they never switched to christianity.
To prevent the empire would be more complicated than it looks like, since you got multiple rebellions and civil wars popping up as early as 135 BCE. They ultimately boiled down to
- plebeians and/or slaves pissed due to poor living conditions
- local peoples rebelling against Roman oppression
- some patrician family wanting a larger slice of the pie
And those are all problems that are damn hard to address without leading to plebeians being manipulated, local peoples being suppressed, and cutting down the power of the patricians by a central, strong government. That’s basically what Caesar tried to do, and Octavian achieved.
The kingdom was before the republic. I assume you want to prevent the empire?
yes ofc you are right
But the Roman Republic (509 BC–27 BC) happened after the Roman Kingdom (753 BC–509 BC).
Well that first guy smoking stuff will have enough to deal with so probably something else.
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IMO everyone has the right to live a healthy and happy life
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yeahh :/
not wanting to be born due to our current and future dystopian outlook is unfortunately totally understandable
I would go back in time and meet the people who wrote the first ever USB standard. Then I would convince them that all USB connectors have to be reversible from day one so that nobody will ever need to struggle with the 20/80 odds of getting it right on the first try. Come on, it’s two possibilities and the probability of the wrong one is at least 80%. What’s the deal with a connector like that?
While you’re there make damn sure they create a coherent naming scheme that allows upgrade paths/versioning.
Sincerely,
USB 3.2 Gen 1×1
USB 3.2 Gen 2×1
USB 3.2 Gen 1×2
USB 3.2 Gen 2×2I would go back and introduce semantic versioning in the 60s.
Accordingly to the USB inventor, he didn’t make it reversible right off the bat because it would need 2x more wires, circuits, and cost 2x more. So you probably [won’t be | weren’t]* able to convince him.
Perhaps a better approach is to tell him that they should be clearly asymmetric, to both touch and sight. Like HDMI connectors are.
*tense marking is fun in time travel.
You can even make the connector look like a B with a larger loop on one side, that when people were like why is it shaped like that you could just say that’s the b in the USB
This guy drives the bus!
You don’t need double the wires if you change the recepticle so that you can plug it in both ways, and the recepticle would just have those wires connected on the board.
Shine rhrough holes going upwards? That’s working at least often when it’s on a panel…
Paging Dr. Streetmentioner
*tense marking is fun in time travel.
One of the major problems encountered in time travel is not that of becoming your own father or mother. There is no problem in becoming your own father or mother that a broad-minded and well-adjusted family can’t cope with. There is no problem with changing the course of history—the course of history does not change because it all fits together like a jigsaw. All the important changes have happened before the things they were supposed to change and it all sorts itself out in the end.
The major problem is simply one of grammar, and the main work to consult in this matter is Dr. Dan Streetmentioner’s Time Traveler’s Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations. It will tell you, for instance, how to describe something that was about to happen to you in the past before you avoided it by time-jumping forward two days in order to avoid it. The event will be descibed differently according to whether you are talking about it from the standpoint of your own natural time, from a time in the further future, or a time in the further past and is futher complicated by the possibility of conducting conversations while you are actually traveling from one time to another with the intention of becoming your own mother or father.
Most readers get as far as the Future Semiconditionally Modified Subinverted Plagal Past Subjunctive Intentional before giving up; and in fact in later aditions of the book all pages beyond this point have been left blank to save on printing costs.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy skips lightly over this tangle of academic abstraction, pausing only to note that the term “Future Perfect” has been abandoned since it was discovered not to be.
This is the sort of thing that I love reading on the internet.
From a conlanger perspective I feel like the time reference could be split into four, to account time travel. For example: let’s say that both of us travelled to 3100, I remained there and you came back to 2024. Then you write me a letter, that I’m going to read as soon as we arrive in 3100, telling me about your experiences. You could use:
- your current date as reference - 3100 comes after 2024, so it’s future
- your personal experiences - you already experienced it, so it’s past
- my current date as reference - as I’m in 3100, it’s present
- my personal experiences - as I’m watching you experience it, it’s present
Any given language could pick any of those references to model their tense around, or many of them, or even none (plenty languages IRL lack grammatical tense). If only doing things from the PoV of the speaker (you), that means 6~9 tenses for what most languages have 2 (past and non-past) or 3 (past, present, future).
This is the sort of thing that I love reading on the internet.
Sorry to disappoint you, but most of that text is found offline — as it’s an excerpt from Douglas Adam’s “The Restaurant at the End of the Universe” (sequel to “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”). I probably should’ve attributed it.
If only doing things from the PoV of the speaker (you), that means 6~9 tenses for what most languages have 2 (past and non-past) or 3 (past, present, future).
And then you’d have to account who knows what, which version of a person you’re talking to. Say you’re having a conversation with someone before traveling in time to a time in which they’ve not timetraveled, so it’s either their subjective past or future, but then you continue the conversation, so you’d have to account for both the speakers perspective and the person being spoken to, who would then be subject to two different tense “totalities” since the conversation with them would have been taking place in two different times at the same time.
I seriously suggest reading Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett for that sort of thing. I used to use Pratchett books as a substitute for weed when I was a bit over twenty.
Stop that kid from falling into Harambe’s enclosure by any means necessary.
🫡
i would not eat the kiosk chili dogs i ate earlier—they were pretty fucking bad.
Instead you got the hot pockets and are now on the toilet.
I would accept that trade.
I’d go back and write a book with just enough truths to cement myself as a soothsayer. I’d then warn of wars, eco disasters, pandemics, natural disasters. Then I’d invest some money in some good places and make sure it made it to my kids after I’m gone.
I guess I would try to warn people that the tsunami was coming.
Everyone treated you like a loony idiot before the tsunami, and now you are in a NSA basement getting tortured for “future information”.
I’d go back and convince that art school to accept a certain art student…
I did nazi that one
As we learned from the Butterfly Effect, changing the past only results in Ashton Kutcher getting more power.
I would’ve gone to bed earlier tonight
I think saving JFK would really alter the timeline. I doubt Nixon would have ever been president.
Preventing the Iranian hostage crisis might also have had a huge impact.
Have your read 11/22/63? It’s Stephen King 's take on what would happen if a time traveler tries to stop the JFK assassination.
Great book, in my opinion.
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After the bitcoin shortage oroviked by a by of 1.000.000 coins, its already low value plummeted and all the crypto bros started to use bitcoin2 instead effectively killing off the original bitcoin.
