If you could go back in time for 24h, no consequence on the timeline, what would you do?
If you could go back in time for 24h, no consequence on the timeline, what would you do?
I'll go first.
3 options
- Going back to 1964 to watch the Duke Ellington's Montreal show. Try to meet the man and the musicians. Hang around my city.
- Go in the end of the 70s to meet my parents before they had kids. Grab a couple of beers and party with my young adults parents. See my uncles, etc. in their young time
- Going to 1881 during the couple of days when Nietzsche wrote Zarathoustra. I want to discuss with guy even if he is supposed to be writing all day long. No consequence right.
What are yours?
EDIT: I'll clarify: You can't affect the timeline. It means you cant go back to try to get rich with stocks, lottery, etc. It's like going to see a movie, when you come back the world will be exactly the same. You can interact with people, but in the end, the day you spend in the past will not have existed for anyone but you, in your memories.
Go back in time and stop diddy from diddling so bad.
Visit the library of Alexandria before it burned, just to see the insane amount of books.
As someone else commented, see how stonehenge was built/used.
Find out how the Antikythera mechanism worked and how it was used.
Witness the construction of the pyramids.
Experience the telling of the norse mythology.
Probably see the dinosaurs in the late Cretaceous. Just before the KT extinction. I want to know how accurate we are about what dinosaurs looked like. All we know are from the bones and some fossilized skin and feathers here and there. I bet there are a TON of animals we don't even know about because they were never fossilized. What did the T-Rex use their little arms for? Were dinosaurs covered with waddles, weird skin flaps, some hairy stuff, and what color were they? For comparison, if we drew modern animals like we draw dinosaurs from just their skeletons:
Option 1: Attend Stewen Hawking's time traveller party - he likely won't expect someone so dumb though
Option 2: Watch and experience Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia - I often hear our conservatives argue this was actually friendlyI'd definitely try to record everything in both cases.
I'd love to get the chance to talk to Isaac Asimov and talk to him about the future and how he decided to start releasing his stories. Probably around 1972 because I liked bicentennial man a lot.
Other than that:
- go back to see socialist radical anti-authoritarian Jesus do his real protesting instead of the biblical king washed stories.
- or go back to the fall of Amen to see the end and beginning of monotheism of the modern day and understand the actual departure of the worker force
- see if I can find the actual great flood that all the myths seem to talk about and see if the conspiracy of it being about the Mediterranean basin is true. So probably Mesopotamia time and hope it's recent enough memory to hear actual stories.
Camera in hand, time to visit Chavín lands! They're one of the earliest recognizable societies of the Peruvian Andes. Given that a language barrier would be true for pretty much any "too far back" visits, might as well go with one that I'm really damn curious about!
Initially I read that as “you can go back in time for 24 hours” and thought why would 24 hours ago be that interesting? :)
So my initial answer is: Not eating the late night burger I had last night.
My final answer is: San Francisco in the 60s/70s to hang out with the Dead and all the other amazing artists of that time. Maybe see a show at the Fillmore.
Assuming no consequences means I won't die, or catch a disease or something, I'd go back like a hundred million years or so to look at dinosaurs.
I would go back to ancient Rome, Athens, or somewhere similar and just do turism.
It would be incredibly cool to just look around and feel it how the world has back then. Video games like Assassins creed Odyssey scratch that itch but it would obviously be cooler in real life.
I'd like to go back many times to earlier in my life and try different dialogue options.
Like that time you thought of the perfect comeback two days later?
Or just learn how people act and react. If I say this, they react that way. Now if I say that how do they react?
(Assuming that "no consequence" also means that I won't die on the trip...)
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Witness the Tunguska impact.
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See a Beatles show when they were just some small time dudes playing in a crummy club.
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Visit the Great Exhibition of 1851 and go inside the Crystal Palace
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I'd go back to fuck at a Roman bath house in ancient times. Fuck it, no regrets.
- Kill as many communist leaders as possible
edit: FUUUUUCK NO CONSEQUENCES HOW DARE YOU
My two choices:
- Pontic Steppe, around 3000 BCE. Likely region where Late Proto-Indo-European was spoken.
- northern Lazio, around 650 BCE. If possible/reasonable I want to spend a bit of time in an Etruscan city, then in a Faliscan city, then in a Sabine one. I'm OK travelling by foot if necessary, as long as there's always people talking around me.
In both cases I want to be able to record everything people say. Preferably video, but audio is good enough. I just want to know better about languages of the past.
It's kind of tempting to include 1450 Uruguay as a choice, since we barely know anything about the Charrúa language. However the Charrúa weren't exactly friendly to outsiders, so this option would be only if neither side can interact with each other.
- Going back to slavery and beat some slave masters
- Meet my mom when she was younger, maybe in high school. Tell her that she seems like a lovely young lady and very smart. I don't think she heard that enough.
- Go back to the first day I got my first cat.
- I would like to see a royal party of some kind.
- Go to a Shakespeare play while he was still alive.
- Go back to where my grandma alleges she met Bill Cosby to confirm if it's true, and, if so, punch him because apperently he was rude as hell.
I'd try to meet the Buddha, and see if he could shed some of that instant enlightenment on me. In the stories, he seemed to be able to say just the right thing to people to wake them up out of the matrix.
My first answer was "buy Apple stock" but no effect on the time line probably means I don't make any money. (well wait, what about enlightenment then, does that come with me?)
Find out a burning question that paleontologists have but can't find an answer to and tell them where to look.
If there were no consequences, I can think of a few different things I'd wanna see.
- Just out of morbid curiosity, what an atomic bomb dropping looks like when it explodes, being there in person rather than just seeing footage (from a safe distance with protective equipment, just in case I can still get hurt, otherwise get as close as possible if there are absolutely zero consequences to my actions, as if I'm a spectator in minecr*ft).
- Probably just go back in time and watch as many cartoons as I could back in the early netflix streaming era because I absolutely love cartoons.
- Definitely go back in time and watch either An American Tail or Fivel Goes West in theaters because I really like both movies.
I wanna see Carthage
So many bands I'd love to see! But that's somewhat small fry, so to speak, so ancient history, if I could travel to a different location also instantaneously (guess that'dhave to be possible or else it'dbe pretty boring or hard work!). Ancient Egypt, Greece, Central America Mayans... but then, are WE immune from consequences also?! Free from contracting diseases, free from being sacrficed to a god or getting enslaved?! Can we communicate with them?! Dinosaurs would also be awesome, if immunity was guaranteed....chomp!
Or perhaps just see my dad again :)
Go back to the moment when the current highest level administrator of Twitter set the password. Then when I come back with the password. Now in the present, I log in and delete the entire twitter server.
History didn't change, I just went back to retreive some information to be used in the present.
😈
See Jimi Hendrix live.
I'll have to think of a scheme to extort some rich guy's Bitcoin wallet.
Oh, not back to yesterday? Back to any time/place for a day?
I think it would be too hard to access any of these events or people - you'd go back then just end up in jail or something. I would like to see the moon though, so if it's a literal anything is possible situation I'll hitch along with those guys, on the first moon landing.
I think it'd be neat to go to like 10,000 BC and just live a day in the life of some tribe/ancient city.
If I can transport things back and forth, I would probably go and max out a credit card and buy all of the gold that I can to bring with me for trade.
Then I would go to the library of Alexandria and use my cell phone to get photocopies of as many books as I possibly can, and in the downtime I would go to any open Street markets and purchase any cool relics that I can find.
Then I could come back and share some of the Lost books of Alexandria with the world and also have period correct relics that have somehow magically not been exposed to a thousand years of environmental corrosion.
Then again, that would probably also mess up their radioisotope dating but I don't know if it's specific enough to only cover a thousand ish years.
Maybe if I have a little more time to prep I can find some place that I know hasn't been Disturbed and like put them in an airtight safe and store them for me to go back and ReDiscover now.
All good answers, but the simple fact you were not self centered but curious and asked what OP would do back, made your answer great. Thank you. Up vote freely given.
Attend the 1934 Nuremberg rally.
Not keen on the politics of it obviously but you can't deny the nazis knew how to put on one hell of a spectacle.
Choose the last non winning lottery numbers. It’s currently at 130 million. There was no winner. So it shouldn’t affect the time line. If op thinks it does I will revise my choice.
I would [REDACTED] so that no one has to deal with this shit.
Killjoy: If there are no consequences there can be no memory of the event either. Our own future (from the time of returning from the past) would almost certainly diverge from the path of no knowledge otherwise, and that would be a consequence.
As such, every one of us might already have this ability, we just don't remember doing it.
Ops mom.