If you could go back in time and do, or bring, one thing to mess up the timeline what would it be?
If you could go back in time and do, or bring, one thing to mess up the timeline what would it be?
If you could go back in time and do, or bring, one thing to mess up the timeline what would it be?
Introduce Shakespeare to D&D, and encourage him to popularize it.
Not only would the campaigns he ran be amazing, but goooodlord imagine the subversive effect it would have socially. Unpinning good/evil from lawful/chaotic in the public perception that early on would be a Big Deal; bringing the idea of consumer-generated content would shift attitudes to art and literature away from a purely top-down concept, and the resulting rise of Victorian fan-fiction would be so amazingly terrible it would rip its own hole in the spacetime continuum.
is it confirmed that shakespear was a real guy and not a pen name?
Yes. The idea that he wasn't real is frankly laughable. We know where he lived, we know who his wife was and what she was left in his will (their second best bed!), he met the queen for crap's sake!
Id show up at the time travelers convention.
force Florida to count the ballots in 2000 in favor of Al Gore. People want to talk about stolen elections? They literally wouldn't count all the ballots because of a technology flaw.
It's Florida how do you expect to be able to force them to do anything?
I'm dumb, thought it was about stealing something from the past to the present. So these answers do fit the prompt
My first reaction was "bring a T-Rex to the year 2000 and threaten them with it". Ended up pestering AI till it agreed to answer a similar question, here's a summary of those answers:
Advanced Surveillance Technology: Bringing back highly advanced surveillance technology from a more technologically developed era could be a game-changer.
This one makes some sense. You go back to 1999 (or future if possible) and bring equipment that can detect and prove the fact beyond reasonable doubt. Enough to cause the count.
Influential Evidence from the Future: Bringing back concrete evidence from the future, such as detailed records of the government's planned election fraud, could be used to expose and prevent these actions. This could include documents, videos, or other irrefutable proof of planned malpractices in the election.
Now this one goes against the prompt somewhat, but it would be the most effective. Although the butterfly effects from proving time travel may cause new issues...
give my bro harambe a bullet proof vest
In before it's a self correcting timeline, and now it's the best that gets him killed
The first time Heinrich Kramer tries to show someone the Malleus Maleficarum, I appear directly in front of him and set the book on fire. Not only is the book destroyed, but a clearly supernatural event took place to put the fear of god into him. Bam. No witch trials.
More likely outcome: he takes a person in strange clothing appearing from thin air only to set his book on fire with a magical implement as clear proof of witchcraft existing and posing a huge danger. Get ready for turbo witch hunts on crack
He wasn't going to be any MORE nuts. Everyone knew he was a crackpot who hated women, and it was heretical for him to claim anyone but God could grant anyone powers. I make sure to do it in front of people and there's suddenly an audience to see him be condemned by a divine agent. If they try to say it was anything else, they're heretical too.
At the very least, it can't get WORSE.
Or, the first time he steps foot in Innsbruck, he slips on a banana skin and slides down the street, much to the comedic delight of the locals. Helena Scheuberin even giggles and praises him for his comedic wit and skill. With high praise from an affluent local, and a natural penchant for comedy, Kramer leads a cult following in banana-skin comedic antics, and kick starts surrealist humour centuries before Monty Python.
I'd prevent the Challenger launch. Manned spaceflight doesn't get shelved for an entire generation, and a young me doesn't lose hope for the future at such an early age.
Through a bizarre series of butterfly effects, the successful launch and its international attention gives bureaucrats in Pripyat an extra nudge to encourage cooperation amongst their engineers and nuclear scientists, and a critical flaw in the operation of the plant at Chernobyl is caught before it causes a catastrophic meltdown.
The cumulative effect is a continued culture of progressive technological expansion into the 90s, and the fading of the anti-intellectualism that threatened to overtake the world during the Reagan and Thatcher administrations. Hand in hand with this is a decreased militarism, as technology is increasingly seen as a tool for the betterment of humanity, and less as a means of building better weapons.
One other immediate result is in the US presidential election of 1988. A lack of meaningful engagement with the public (no "skipped the surly bonds of earth" speech) led to increasing apathy toward the outgoing Reagan administration, giving G.H.W. Bush a tougher hill to climb, and less solid footing on the issue of defense. Dukakis doesn't feel the need to do a silly photo op in a tank, but instead campaigns partly on an expansion of the space program and educational outreach programs similar to the one that brought in Christa McAuliffe.
Neoconservatism and neoliberalism wither together on the vine. Permanent human presence in space continues uninterrupted for the next two decades, with a base on the moon by the end of the century and a manned mission to Mars planned for a decade after that.
No Bushes, no rise of Al-Qaeda in 1988, no Gulf War, no Rush Limbaugh, no Clinton's, and no 9/11.
TIME TRAVELER STOPS NASA LAUNCH
Administrators considering stopping entire space program.
“It must be some kind of message”, said Jerry Jenkins, head of NASA’s department of deciding whether to continue with space exploration whatsoever. “The time traveler knows something we don’t, and if he’s back here stopping launches it must mean there’s bad outcomes from space stuff.”
Not per se necessary to prevent it - either listen to the on-site rep from MT, who raised concerns in OTL that were disregarded, or make that day warmer. All other things being equal, without the crisis, we would have learned a great deal - but not at the cost of several lives.
It haunts me to this day that an improved version of STS would likely still be an option for launches, if only McDonald had been listened to.
I can fault the company, but he made a good faith effort to stop it because testing hadn't been done at the current temperatures, AIUI.
On the ohter hand, those lives vs [GHWB | Dukakis | anyone else] directly impacts OTL - Arguably, we'd never have a Trump presidency, but Duke is simply a gentler, faster version of the same.
Not sure we wouldn't still get Bushes, or Gulf War, but certainly what we ended up with would be more tempered, and there's a real benefit to that. All these years on, perhaps we'd still have the 'old school' Republican party instead of the "I'm not a fascist, I swear!" Republican party.
I'd go back and prevent the 11th Sept attacks.
The world would be a different place because so much happened as a knock on of that but at the same time it's hard to imagine what the world would be like. Probably very similar but also different in substantial ways.
Like obvious things like no war in Iraq or Afghanistan (at least not those wars), and less obvious things like how the attacks have reshaped liberal democracies like the US and Europe (for the worse imo), and how they empowered right wing politics in many countries (also bad imo).
Yeah and also no more TSA (at least the one we know). Fuck TSA all my homies hate the TSA.
The TSA is just a federal jobs program. They don't actually provide any value; it's been demonstrated that they miss the vast majority of contraband. The most notable function of the TSA is the temporary imposition of an authoritarian-esque environment of suspicion and control on innocent civilians, reminding us to follow the rules, or else.
Next time you want to prevent 9/11, you probably have to prevent all the reasons they had to hate us.
From ChatGPT-4:
The history of Western involvement in the Middle East before the September 11, 2001 attacks is extensive and complex, involving a range of diplomatic, economic, military, and political actions. Some key instances include:
This list is not exhaustive and simplifies a complex history. Each of these events has a nuanced background, and their impacts are still felt in the region's contemporary politics.
To be fair, it's easier to stop 1 of the planes that crashed into the towers than to stop stuff that had a LOT of powerful people making decisions.
No damn tiny bottles and metal detectors before flights. But I dont fly anymore lol
I'd save RFK and give him a full two-term presidency. Just because I've always wondered how much a difference it would have made in the course of American history. It definitely seems like things took a severe turn for the worse in the late 60s and the American political system has never recovered.
I personally believe there were conspiracies to assassinate both him and JFK because they were not susceptible to being controlled by their donors or political mentors, as is the case with the vast majority of politicians. They were rogue elements with a strong potential to disrupt the status quo (i.e. gravy train) for the rest of the oligarchy, so they got taken out.
Reagan is where things got fucked. Give Carter two mandates instead.
Por que no los dos
Carter?
I wasn't alive for these events and I am possibly missing context. But I just see an inflection point in the 60s and I don't know if another term from Carter in 1980 would have been enough to turn things around. I also feel like he was a less impactful character than RFK
A highschool physics book translated in ancient Greek/linear B to mass copy and distribute to everyone. Maybe it'll give the advantage to stop the Bronze Age Collapse.
@JeffKerman1999 bring some plans for the printing press and some plans to mass produce paper too. Back in the ancient times one sheet of paper was about $30 in todays money. A whole book would be the equivalant of tens of thousands of dollars.
Without digisation possibilities, limited oil usage, and an ever-increasing demand for paraphanalia, there will be no trees left.
I think hygiene and modern concepts of medicine and transmittable diseases would more likely prevent that collapse
Introduce radio to the Romans. They had the metallurgy to create coils. Even a simple Morse code system would easily keep their empire going. Probably end up like that Star Trek TOS where Centurions are carrying sub-machine guns, though. If want to read what a great SF writer did with this (guy from 1938 ends up in 535AD), read "Lest Darkness Fall"
Something that would do that neoliberism in the 80's with Reagan and Thatcher would not become the dominating political and economic theory it has been since that time.
I was going to post something like this. Thank you for your service
Nuclear war in 1993
Idk sneeze on a dinosaur or something.
Dinosaur: "bruh? 🤨"
hands you a tissue
So that's why they all died out...
I often wonder how people would react if you showed up to a concert hall in, say, classical music era Europe or something and performed modern music. Assuming you could kit it to provide infrastructure for whatever your performance required, and the acoustics of the venue were idealized.
Would attendees hate it? Would the unfamiliar musical styles be repulsive to them? Would the sounds and textures of modern instrumentation like electric guitar and synthesizer upset or even frighten them? Or would they find something to appreciate about it? Would the music be copied and spread, becoming a time worn classic folk tune in an alternate future? Or would it be rebuked and suppressed, condemned for all time as evil influence? Which genres would have the best acceptance chances in which cultures, and which eras?
In my mind in particular, I think about this with the niche realm of video game soundtracks. If not just the music played as-is through some playback device (which would probably be rather boring, but who knows, maybe the novelty of recorded music alone would be fascinating enough) then perhaps arranged for live performance, like the orchestral performance of Undertale, or the Sinnohvation big band album. Or, of course, if the soundtrack was itself a recorded live performance, just perform it. These collections of compositions often outline rich adventures, communicated by a wide range of musical styles. I wonder if they are strong enough to stand alone, and if audiences would respond to them without the context that they were written to accompany.
Failing live performance (which would be trickier than one would think--to sound good, live music has to be written with its venue in mind, and I'd assume most modern music would sound like garbage when performed in victorian era concert halls or ancient ampitheaters), I'd also consider putting them to vinyl LPs and dumping them in old record shops in any era that had phonograph or turntable technology and see if they get discovered.
Why not just send back the video games themselves? I dunno. I guess I'm less interested in wowing them with futuristic technology and more interested in how they'd react to something they already have (music), but in a strange, new context.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
orchestral performance of Undertale
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
The temptation would be to play "Raining Blood" and get extremely excommunicated. "South of Heaven" you could argue is a musical Hieronymus Bosch painting. "Disciple," less so. For apostasy that cheeky locals could reproduce on a lute, do "The God That Failed."
Probably the least riot-inducing song that'd still leave the aristocracy struggling to deal with the experience is Anamanaguchi's "Endless Fantasy." To people intimately familiar with wind and string instruments, and for a song that Jackson Parodi managed to decently reproduce on a goddamn accordion, it's juuust enough to leave everyone wondering how the hell humans made those noises. It's also obscenely energetic. Nevermind concert halls, play this at cafe that's just imported tobacco and watch some men in hosiery get off their asses. All of that goes double for "Prom Night." None of these people have ever heard a square wave.
Somewhere in-between, I'd suggest any Flaming Lips album. At War With The Mystics might go over quite well, at first.
If you're fine with utterly erasing pretty much every human being conceived after that point in favor of new human beings (or other creatures entirely) may as well go big or go home and start here.
You'd have to kill every single salamander-like though, in order to find the true "first eggs on land" that spawned us all. Or maybe it was a group effort, and you really will have to kill them all.
Start flamewars on robotic astroturf accounts about how dumb Donald Trump is until Instagram starts and people try to prove he's not an idiot, but in protesting they protest too much and nobody believes them by 2016.
So, I need a robot chatbot algorithm cookbook for the naughties and beyond.
ChatGPT with an unlimited account from several proxy IPs in 2016 could have changed the world.
Allegedly, when William the Conqueror first landed in England he tripped in the sand.
I'd've left a land mine where he was going to fall, turning the future king of England into a fine mist and a scattering of viscera.
Probably Sound of Thunder meself out of existence, but it'd be worth for the immediate chaos it would cause.
That would probably snuff me out. I have a tenuous family link to him through a bastard somewhere along the line.
Then again he was in his late 30s by the time he invaded England, so he'd probably done most of his seed-sewing already.
That’s a sacrifice we’re just going to have to accept. I’m sure it’ll be painless.
Id go back and push a kid into the gorilla enclosure at Cincinnati zoo, just for a laugh.
If I went back in time, between stoping hitler or stopping you the choice is clear.
NYT: Adolf Hitler somehow killed by gorilla, onlookers horrified but supportive.
Take the current highest-yield nuclear bomb and destroy England right before the begin of their collonial era.
Generally speaking, I believe removing a global superpower just before they do their world-changing thing is probably going to have the biggest effect on the timeline.
Everyone was building empires at the time and fighting over who got what. All that nuking England would do is to mean France, the netherlands, germany, spain etc would get more bits
Of course it wouldn't stop colonialization, but it would change the future quite a lot.
I think that should shake up the timeline quite a bit.
It would only be a deterrent for empire building if there's a pattern (probably 3 or 4 similar events), otherwise people would consider it a random hateful act of god, of which there are many, and of which have been interpreted many different ways
I was focussing on changing the timeline, not on deterring nations from doing something. Without English colonializers, there would have certainly been other colonizers, but e.g. the whole China situation would have likely been very different. There would not be a dominant anglo culture right now. No English-speaking USA, no English-speaking Australia, no large countries with an anglo common law-based legal system.
It would change the timeline quite a bit.
I would bring a sandwich for Gavrilo Princip.
This remains my favorite answer.
I'd swap some of the first clay documents around until I ended up with a timeline where we live modern life with a gift economy rather than a money economy. We'd all have a lot more options to pay off our debt rather than the streamlined ridgid money system.
You wanna fuck up the timeline? Somehow mess something up so plastic was never, and never will be invented. That would change sooooo many things.
It would also stop much of the progress humanity made. Unfortunately, plastic is pretty much the cheapest and easiest solution for a lot of problems, specifically for packaging food and stuff like that.
You may very well travel back to a world that no longer can build that time machine.
When the fork I use for lunch and throw away will outlast my civilization, I'm very much ok with destroying that technology.
Killing Bill Gates. It would be a weird timeline, maybe Microsoft would still exist, but in a different shape.
Microsemi. A slightly more over-medium version of our operating systems.
XerOS
I have some suggestions: http://toastytech.com/evil/killbill.html
Here's a darkly hilarious one, because you could do it by accident: give smallpox to the native Americans a few hundred years early. Right around 1000 AD, show up to shake hands and teach metallurgy or whatever, maybe planning to jump-start their resistance to colonization... and their resistance to slaughterhouse-borne diseases, the hard way.
This would of course completely fuck up their population numbers, much the same as would happen in Europe in the 1300s. But by the time Columbus showed up to be the absolute worst person who could possibly discover a new continent, they'd be largely recovered, and they'd get to trade whole new strains with the seasick lemon-sucking weirdos who kept asking where the spices were. The returning ships would offer tomatoes and potatoes and another Black Death. Hopefully preventing Malthus from being such an influential bastard, and causing the first engineered famine in Ireland, whose population did not recover from the potato famine until this century.
New England colonies would presumably still take hold, but wouldn't steamroll all the way to the west coast. Hopefully they'd be limited and northern enough that slavery is less prevalent, less absolute, and - ironically - still a matter of trade. Because what ended the triangle trade to America was the treatment of African captives as livestock to be bred. The politics of this alternate timeline would be hilariously complex compared to now, and probably result in more and stranger wars than we can imagine, but there would be so many averted times where atrocities happened, effectively unopposed.
Just take them a couple horses and some cattle. That would mess with the Europeans when they show up.
Grays. Sports. Almanac.
I would go back in time and arrange Genghis Khan to have a better father.
Phonographic recording would be incredible to introduce very early on. Basically as soon as the pottery wheel, you could have recorded and played back audio. They'd have to do some fractions-and-guesswork materials science to get anything properly reusable, let alone the ability to press new copies of a recording. But it would get done. Every ruler would want their voice carried to all corners of the territory. Musicians would be known to people who'd never see them in-person. We'd have so much more evidence of how languages were spoken.
But specifically - in the spirit of the question - I'd do this by taking back a crank-operated player and a whole stack of bagpipe albums. Just completely fuck up what ancient peoples think music is supposed to be. Accordions would also work, but I'm not sure I could construct one for demonstration purposes. I could build a hurdy-gurdy, at best. And nobody has a shelf full of vinyl for insufferable droning hurdy-gurdy music.
And nobody has a shelf full of vinyl for insufferable droning hurdy-gurdy music.
You underestimate my power
I wanna go back and be part of the Fallador massacre!
i'd write everything shakespeare did before he did
maybe Shakespeare did that to you
I've always wondered about this kind of theory. If I stole and published Harry Potter before JK Rowling will it be as successful? If I do the beatles' songs before them will they be a hit?
I want to say leave a modern computer or some other piece of technology at some point in time (maybe 50's) but I'm not sure if it could be reversed engineered
Even if it had infinite power and was unbreakable, it would end up being fought over and coveted as holy relic, instead of being played with and studied
Hardly. The miniaturization required to make modern chips is ages ahead of anything possible in the 50s or 60s. Hell, them even getting some x-ray microscope to see the stupidly small transistors we have today would be a challenge in itself!
Bring a time machine with you and teach ancient Egyptians how to use it
Go back and destroy religion.
So you'd take like 1 Jesus or what?
Well you can't go back in time and delete "someone" that never existed in the first place. There is no historical evidence anywhere that "jesus" ever lived. He's a myth.
I meant remove religion, from everywhere.
id give the taino a flak cannon to shoot at colombus
Ending the first living cell on earth. If we are alone in the universe, preventing life from forming would do the most to change the timeline.
By doing that you would leave behind so many new and much more complex cells (modern bacteria, yeas, maybe even spores) You would probably boost evolution by millions of years!
I'd bring a universal encyclopedia to the mesopotamians.
I'd love to see Socrates as modern day politician
You should hitch a ride with Bill and Ted
Avoid cocaine Limit my drinking Focus in school better instead of partying Go therapy Been patient enough to grow a meaningful relationship with someone special but I was too egoistical to see it then Learn music Workout and not gain weight from excessive drinking and eating
Indeed. That way you could be more useful for the capitalist machine.
i'd go kill all the tiktaalik or maybe whatever the first common ancestor eukaryotes were
Teaching Abraham Lincoln how to do egirl makeup and being a femboy.
Jesus. Not white, on Drugs, probably a mushroom
I wonder how much difference one Stinger SAM would have made at Blair Mountain in 1921.
Isreal
It would be fascinating to go back and prevent monotheism from taking off. See what happens.
At the very least, find whichever guy had a stick up his ass about people sticking things up asses, and get that poor schmuck laid.
Back in 1948
"So we're all agreed, we give the jewish people this land over here and we force the people who live there to go live over there!
::Touching grass busts down the door::
"NO! Thats a stupid idea!!"
"Arrest the anti-semite!"
And the time traveller spends the rest of his life in jail while people slowly realise he was right.
Bring the secrets of caravel making to the Phoenicians/Carthaginians some 50 years before the first Punic wars. Maybe also some scribbles of the coast of Africa and the best winds to reach America.