You have the ability to travel through time. What do you do?

Visit Jurassic. Get a look at dinosaurs. Try to avoid becoming lunch in the process.

Visit Library of Alexandria. Engage in massive theft.

Visit Mt Calvary in AD 33. Wait and watch.

Travel to Philadelphia circa 1787, try to explain to the framers of the constitution how their document will be twisted, ignored, and subverted from their intended desires in the 21st century without being put in stocks and flogged for being a witch.

Go to Atlantis. Hail Atlantis!

i would like to see old places from my childhood that don't exist. same with places that used to exist before i was born.
maybe attend the signing of the Declaration of Independence. not sure what i would do after that. maybe see some of the FUTURE!

I'm with Maryn, I'd go into the future and grab stock quotes from one year from now. Then I'd come back to current day and look up penny stocks today that are high on next year's sheet. After one year and cashing in my new fortune, I'd go back in the past and visit the times I'm most interested in. Also, I'd make sure not to step on a bug, because you know....

Meet my grandparents. The men died long before I was born. One grandmother died when I was 6, and the other developed dementia not long after.

Probably my great-grands, too.

And I like the money schemes.

Forget stock quotes. I'm getting lotto numbers.

That or just skipping forward until we can live in space and stay there.

No past though. Nothing back there I care enough to see to risk screwing up the timeline.

Lotto numbers are definitely a safer bet than stock quotes. They pay off quicker, and you can get a guaranteed 20+ year income, if you don't take the upfront payment.

The market can fluctuate based on too many factors, including someone suddenly cleaning up on stocks. Plus a suddenly effective new investor can trigger concerns of inside trading.

Multiple lotto wins are a fluke; multiple stock hits are a potential crime.


Of course, if you're a total jerk-face you could also go back in time and post books 2-7 of Harry Potter as fanfiction before they're published or make a "blog book" out of Twilight a year before it drops.

SteinbeckisGod said:

Here's what I'd do: I'd go to Lascaux France circa 17,000 years ago, find a cave, and paint a life-size, photorealistic painting of Richard Nixon riding a horse...naked.

That'd blow a few fuses.

Click to expand...

you win! hahahahahahahahaha

Smash the patriarchy, warn other nations about white explorers and smash colonialism, introduce vaccines/science/basic hygiene, hide the Library of Alexandria, smack a couple old dead white guy philosophers, invest in Microsoft and Apple before they get big.

Get rich and save the world, that's my motto XD

WOW!

thereeness: What about Psychologists, like Freud?

Go back to when Egypt was/had a great empire!
Help Spartacus running quicker from the Roman Empire
Help the town of salem by preventing all those women's deaths.
Prevent D. Sebastião from going to a fight and disappear.

I don't know, so many things really I would do!

@Enlightened - I'd probably smack him too and tell him to get over his own issues before he goes around diagnosing others >.>

Hmmm, yah, definitely gotta include, "Smack old, dead, white guy psychologists/psychiatrists" to my list, too.

Well, what I did was went back to just after the second world war ended. Bought this guy George a drink and began telling him all about how in the future government has found a way to police our thinking, began a war that will never end in order to control the populace. Explained how our abilities to read and speak well have degraded into a sort of newspeak that, when written often resemble hieroglyphics, not to mention everything ever written can be changed on a whim to correct the past, so nobody knows what the truth actually is. Those who get close to lifting the veil and seeing society for what it has become are brought back into line through fear.

I think that kid wrote a book about our discussion, predicting the future in fifty years as a warning. I hate to think that I am responsible for creating the guidebook that caused all this mess.

You're all so ambitious! I'd just go back and buy mint-condition vinyl copies of my favorite albums.

After a while of doing that, I might remember to buy some Apple stock (sorry, Maryn and David, investing into future wins now is just too complicated) and maybe visit some of the periods I'm having a hard time picturing.

Go back and tell myself everything I now know.

Be careful going too far forward - 'This content is no longer available'.

Watch a beach full of screaming, spike-haired, naked (and possibly blue) Celtic Britons scare off the boatloads upon boatloads of Julius Caesar's invading Roman army in 55 BC.

Presuming the time machine can also deal with geographic in addition to time shift -

I'd visit the top of Mt. Everest @ every 100 years since the year 0 through 2000 and then post a timelapse online

Mothman. Sasquatch. Roswell. Any number of alien sightings. Fatima. Roanoke. Bermuda Triangle.

So many unanswered questions.

I have no desire to change the timeline (I might end up never being born ). Roanoke, Jack the Ripper, Judge Crater....

MM

February 1, 1959, Mt. Kholat Syakhl, the Ural Mountains. I'd bring an arctic tent, my warmest flannel PJs, an Eddie Bauer sleeping bag and 6 or 7 digital cameras and then I would wow the world with a best seller solving the mystery of the Dyatlov Pass once and for all. I'd be the star of Where Did the Road Go?; Sasquatch Central and Paranormal Radio! --s6