Your Time Machine (war, Washington, Hitler, Lincoln)

[jtur88]

Let's say you can go back and spend 24 hours at any time and place in the past of your choosing. You'd have the access and power do whatever one strategically-placed person could do, to change the course of history. Of course, you would have no assurance that your deed would turn out the way you hope it would, you'd just have to take your chances on that one.
Where would you go and what would you do?

[ulnevrwalkalone]

I would have to say under the circumstances that I am only one person and I only have 24 hours I think the most affective time and place I could be is at the JFK assassination. not sure if I could actually save him but I would at least stop lee harvey, and maybe set up enough cover to stop any possible other shooters. I would be very interested to see if the world would be all that different if JFK survived.

[jtur88]

Originally Posted by ulnevrwalkalone

I would have to say under the circumstances that I am only one person and I only have 24 hours I think the most affective time and place I could be is at the JFK assassination. not sure if I could actually save him but I would at least stop lee harvey, and maybe set up enough cover to stop any possible other shooters. I would be very interested to see if the world would be all that different if JFK survived.

Just addressing your particular comment, I believe JFK had the potential to be an even more dangerous president than GWB, and we may all be lucky that he was stopped. It is highly likely that there would have been a later conspiracy, if there was not one then, for the world was fraught with danger at the time, and he would nave gone down anyway.

One of my first thoughts was to maybe stop 9/11. The worst aspect of 9/11 was that it unleashed a reign of terror in the White House. But Bush would have gone into Iraq anyway, under some guise or another, and the Patriot Act was already official national policy, so 9/11 was nothing but a lubricant.

[thelogannator123]

i dont know, i think i would say that i would probably stop henry ford from mass producing cars that today use gas and pollute the air.

[majoun]

I would try to persuade the professors on the admitting board of the Vienna Academy of Art in 1909, who were mostly Jewish, to accept a certain prospective student named Adolf Hitler.

If they listened to me, than Hitler would spend the rest of his life as an obscure, mediocre painter, wouldn't be any more anti-Semitic than was typical for that place and time (it was his resentment towards the professors who refused to let him in that caused him to want to exterminate Jews), and would not get involved in politics. Thus there would have been no Nazism and no Holocaust (although there probably would have been a World War II).

[Grandstander]

My time machine would malfunction, first hurling myself and the stunningly beautiful 22 year old world's leading anthropologist who is accompanying me, back to the age of dinosaurs where Dr. Bambi and I would have one cinematic style narrow escape after another and avoid getting munched at the last second by fixing the time machine...only it malfunctions again and hurls Dr. Bambi and I into a a bleak future world a thousand years ahead where everyone has been bio engineered to be super cyborgs who serve an evil machine which has taken over the planet and we have one cinematic style narrow escape after another and avoid getting turned into cyborgs by fixing the time machine at the last second ..only it malfunctions again and......

[Compression]

I'm one of those that believes even the slightest change in the course of history would spin us off into such totally unknown tangents, that nothing on the human level would be recognizable within a year or so after the change occured. (i.e. people would have the same identity, and the basic structure would be there, but what they were doing, politics, commerce, national borders, etc could change significantly).

That being said, dont think I'd want to change anything....But it would be interesting to observe what was going on in the conning tower of the SMS Seydlitz on May 31/ June 1, 1916.

[Grandstander]

Originally Posted by thelogannator123

i dont know, i think i would say that i would probably stop henry ford from mass producing cars that today use gas and pollute the air.

Really? And what would you have suggested as an alternative for rapid transportation? No rapid transportation?

Is it your notion that when cities were chockablock with horses as the major means of locomotion, there wasn't any polution? When cities were full of livestock, when people tended to just toss their human waste out the window each morning, when bathing was a weekly or monthly practice and when everyone was sweating profusely in the absense of air conditioning and underarm deoderants....do you think it would have been great to step outside and get a whiff of that great, gasoline pollution free air?

[jtur88]

Originally Posted by yachtcare

I'm one of those that believes even the slightest change in the course of history would spin us off into such totally unknown tangents, that nothing on the human level would be recognizable within a year or so after the change occured.

I think your error is to say "within a year or so". Yes, everything that is different would ripple down into a different history. But not that fast.

Human nature is fairly immutable, and would offer a great deal of inertial resistant to most change. Like, the slaves would have been freed anyway, regardless of what altered events would have sent Lincoln down different paths. Had Lincoln not been assassinated, it is unlikely that the human culture would have traced a significantly different trajectory.

[chilaili]

I think I would go back to September 10 2001 and find some way to ground all flights leaving airports on the Eastern Seaboard, but especially Boston Logan and Washington Dulles Airports, for the next 24 hours