JCC If you had a Time Machine, where/when would you travel to?

1982, yeah that was a great year.

 

I loved one short story where a hit squad is sent back to 1937. They get caught and interrogated.
Hitler walks in. "I've been reading all these things you've been saying about me. This is very disturbing. Are you sure?"
One of them had a suicide bomb inside them and set it off, killing the Hit Squad and Hitler. The guards look on. Three of the higher ranking officers in the Reich look at each other.
"Now what do we do?"
"Well, there is the clone..."
"I don't know. He always struck me as a little unstable."

 

So, Hitler is totally rational, but his clone is a genocidal lunatic?

 

Seriously?

I'd like to travel back to the first time I was in love with someone. When I'd see some
piece of jewelry and think, "I bet she'll like that," and buy it for absolutely no reason
at all. To always have fresh flowers in the flat. When laughter ment something.

Before responsibilities and obligations and, "Hold that thought, I have to take this call."

I'd throw away every stock and bond and property and dubious award to go back in time and
fall in love like that again.

 

- Go back to my parent's childhood, see how they lived, have a drink at my grandfather's bar (whom I've never met but I'm supposed to look alike), and wander around the area I lived in since I was born. I'd be really interested to know who lived in our house prior to us. It was built in the 19th century and we discovered some artifacts in the ground.

- Go back to my own childhood years, at the risk of shattering the nostalgia and melancholic feelings, to check out if the "atmosphere" was anything like I originally experienced it.

- Travel back to when I got into high school to teach my childhood self to fight back both vocally and physically before it's too late (it was a horrible school on every level).

- Travel far into the future, check the date engraved on my gravestone (not that I would want to be burried, hmmm...), then travel back a day prior to the day I die and check out how I spent it and return to the present and make sure I'll make the best of it.

- Go to 2015 to buy a Sports Almanac.

 

I'd love to see Ancient Egypt at its height.

The pyramids were once white, with gold caps... they must have been quite a sight back then!

 

I'd like to go back far enough to see if Atlantis actually existed, and to see if the Sumerian "gods " were aliens or just really good con artists

 

1974

 

Would I be a bad Christian if I brought a digital camera with me to Jerusalem in 33AD, videotaping the crucifixion/death (and whatever the deal is with the empty tomb) to settle the debate once and for all, instead of helping the poor guy escape the mob?

 

Considering how many people think the crucifixion was necessary you'd probably be a worse Christian if you helped than if you didn't. There might not have even been a Christianity.

I have a comment about people saying how they would go to the future: I don't like it. The problem with going to see how things are in the future is that it implies that it WILL happen, which implies a deterministic world without free-will. If you're just seeing a POSSIBLE future, that's okay, but that would also negate the purpose of going forward to predict things and see how they are, so I'm not certain why anyone would do that.

I like what Grimby said before about going back in time to show past figures how things are now. I've never seen Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, but I have had many fantasies about showing Tolkien the published Silmarillion and the PJ films, and of telling the Founding Fathers (or even showing them directly) what the U.S. is like now. I'd love to meet FDR and just pick his brain, and so on. And if I had a translation cxonvention a la TARDIS or Babel Fish (that also let me speak in any tongue) then I'd be able to speak to many other non-English speaking people as well. I could talk to Buddha, and to Confucius, and Muhammed and Charlemagne. It would be glorious.

 

Two things I've always wanted to do: meet Marie Curie and bring her a hazmat suit, and spend a day hanging out with the Bronte sisters.

 

I can't remember the title, but there's a cool (short) story in which a time traveller goes back to see Jesus. He finds himself in the crowd presented with the options of Jesus and Barabas. Naturally, he calls for Barabas -- because that's what's supposed to happen -- only to realise as he looks around that everyone in the crowd is a time traveller, following the same logic.

Okay... but if you're going to object on such grounds, you should feel exactly the same about your fantasies of travelling to the past to visit historical figures. After all, from their perspective, your showing them how things are in the future implies that such a future WILL happen, which implies a deterministic world without free-will.

Unless, as you say, you're only from a possible future. But then you're not really talking to the figures from your past, but those of a parallel universe.

Unless parallel universes aren't engendered by time travel, in which case you've probably just gone and ruined the timeline and destroyed the future you came from.

 

That would be pretty cool to see. I think that I'd like to visit Rome at it's height and then do a tour of the Mediterranean.

 

Nowhere. Time travel could be hazardous to your health.

Remember Back to the Future? When Marty went to 1955, he crashed the DeLorean into a barn. When he got back to 1985, he crashed the DeLorean into a movie theater. In part 2, Doc Brown travels to the future and nearly crashes into a hover taxi. In part 3, Marty nearly crashed the DeLorean into a tribe of natives.

Or The Time Machine....when Rod Taylor went into the future and wound up being smack dab in front of a Morlock temple. And the Morlocks tried to eat him.

So yeah...unless you are taking micro-jumps 1-2 years ahead or behind at a place you already know (jumping a year ahead to experience the new roller coaster currently being constructed at an established amusement park, jumping to the past to see your house under construction, etc..), nobody knows what's going to be there. It's still risky of course (you might wind up with your machine crashing on top of someone)....but there's much less risk than wanting jumping back to 1863 Gettysburg and winding up taking a stray bullet through your skull that would have passed through empty air before you were there.


EDIT -- To better illustrate my point:

 

You can also stop watching that History Channel series about UFOs. No need to get a time machine for that.

 

I'd travel to Mars.

 

Well, these are just fantasies. I'd love to travel back in time and simply observe without interacting, but I'd never carry out these whims of talking to famous figures.

Unless, of course, it's as you said and it's a parallel universe that doesn't affect our own. If that's the case then I'd see it as a branching off point. Everything would be the same until I interact with them, and so while it may not happen to them in my universe, it would elicit the exact same reactions and for all intents and purposes would be the same. The trick then isn't risking changing history, but in getting back to my own universe.

Another issue with time travel that none of us has really touched on is planetary movement. If I time travel to say July 4, 1776, the Earth won't be in the same place it is now. In all likelihood I'd end up in the cold vacuum of space. And how would I guarantee that I end up where I would want to be? We really need a Space/Time Machine, and not a simply Time Machine, to travel through time with any accuracy.

Of course, if you already have the technology to actually travel back in time, moving about through space ought to be simple to figure out.

 

-Hendrix at Woodstock
-May '77 for two reasons: 1. Grateful Dead tour for that month and 2. to see SW duh.
-August 19, 2012 Phish in SanFran + all three shows this past weekend in CO.

 

I'd go back about 20 minutes ago and tell myself that eating 10 Oreos is a super bad idea. So stuffed.

 

Don't tell me this is the first time you are learning that lesson.

 

The milk is what did it.

 

^

 

I would take a VCR or DVR or some such with me, and the best signal receiving equipment I could buy. I would go to England in October (one month early, just in case of technical glitches) of 1963, and rent a flat for the next 8 years, with a TV license. I would set it to record all of the lost stories of Doctor Who, and a few other shows too. Then I would go to Dallas, stand on the grassy knoll, jump up and down and yell "Duck", just to prove all the conspiracy nuts wrong. Or I'd be throwing off the aim of a future imperfect JFK...

 

To yo momma's house on the night you were conceived.