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I used to think going into the future would be interesting but with the way technology is changing everything i'd probably not understand what the heck was going on.
Be nice to go back and see them finish off the big pyramid,
Or go hang around with L Da'Vinci.
Give Wilbur and Orville some tech tips.
Check out some dinosaurs.
ha ha you would fail ... at least according to a great many of the conspiracy monkeys!
Not necessarily.
It depends on whether time is linear or fluid (as in M-theory). If time is linear, then you have all kinds of paradoxes to deal with. If time is fluid, then there are no paradoxes. A fluid time travel theorizes that just arriving back in time alters the future from that point forward. In other words, if someone travels back in time, even if they did nothing, they could never return to the present they once knew. They would be in an alternate universe with a completely different future. Therefore, no paradoxes.
In theory, there is a universe that exists where JFK was not assassinated, or not even in Dallas on that fateful day. M-theory posits that there is an infinite number of universes that covers every possibility.
1. Sometime in the 40s or 50s, so I could have met my grandfather. I've heard so much about him, but never knew the man.
2. Sometime in the late teens or early 20s of the life of Jesus. I'm not even a Christian, but you can't deny the influence the man had on the spiritual evolution of the entire human race. I'd like to know where and how the 12-year old prodigy of the temple became the 30-year old man who (more than almost any other human being) shaped the philosophical destiny of humankind. Where was he during those 18 years? Who was he listening to, and what questions did he ask of them?
3. The late 80s or early 90s. I'd have liked to have met my wife as a teenager. It would be fascinating to have known the girl who would someday become the woman I love more than anything in the universe.
4. Late 60s or early 70s. I'd like to meet my father, and tell him it was all going to be OK. Let him know that he didn't need to worry so much about where we were going to get the money we always didn't seem to have, or whether he was doing a good enough job of looking out for his family, or whether he was someday going to find the strength to quit drinking, or whether he was raising me right, or... any of the other stuff that kept him up nights. Just put my arm around his shoulder for a minute and say, "Hey. Dad. It's gonna be fine. You're doing great. When I'm many years older than you are now, I'll look back every single day and count myself lucky that I had you to learn from. I'm going to be happy, and have an incredible life, and it will all be because of you and what you're teaching me. So don't worry about it. Just relax, and enjoy this time - because it will never be better, and you've damned well earned it." I'd have liked to have mad it a little easier for him to smile; he didn't do much of that for most of the middle of his life.
There are a lot of interesting perspectives in this thread, and some very different motivations. Various posters basically wish to:
1. Travel forward to see what will have happened in the future.
2. Travel back a short way in time in order to enrich them selves (buy the right stock, etc.).
3. Travel back in time to influence events - talk Stalin out of his horrible mass killings, for example.
4. Travel back in time out of curiosity to experience things that history can only summarize (and we're not too sure about the summaries either), such as the life of Jesus.
My greatest curiosity (and therefore my choice) would be along the lines of #4 above, but much further back than anyone has mentioned so far. I would want to observe something that the best-informed scientists, in this case paleoanthropologists, can only speculate about, namely the interactions between two species, our own and the Neanderthals. (Most present-day human groups do have small amounts of Neanderthal DNA). Also, there is speculation that we contributed to the extinction of the Neanderthals, who had a brain size slightly larger than our own. Now if I only have a four-year window back then, the timing would be pretty tricky; I would guess it would have to be about 40,000 years ago, give or take. And the location would have to locations where bones of Neanderthals were found. Spain? Southern France? I would have to do more reading to decide where to set down.
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For me, 40,000 years ago.
