21h ago

If you could change three small historical events by going back in time, what would they be and why?

The act has to be small(ish). You can't say "Make everyone vote a certain way!" As an example I'll give mine.

Take all of the money I currently have in savings and invest in Nikola Tesla and attempt to slander Edison.
Ride the train with Edgar Allen Poe and make sure that he made it to wherever he was going safely and keep an eye on him for a few days to make sure he was ok.
Sit on top of the library of Alexandria with a SOPMOD and several hundred magazines worth of ammo.

Update: gotta say, there's a lot less "save my favorite musician from death" or some such than I thought there'd be.

28 comments

I'd keep Sirhan Sirhan from assassinating Robert F Kennedy That's where the timeline split, and sent us down the timeline where Conservatives dominate and brought us to where we are now.
Had RFK lived, he would have ended the Vietnam war years earlier, saving thousands of lives. With Vietnam out of the way, he would have focused on strengthening America, making it less dependent on foreign oil, making the 70s a boom period, instead of a decade of poor Republican governance.
Nixon wouldnt have resigned, inspiring Ailes and Cheney to establish the Conservative Propaganda Machine, which began the Conservative brainwashing of America, helped elect Newt Gingrich elected, and controlled the political rhetoric until the present day.
The Conservative dominance of America started with the assassination of RFK.

PARIS COMMUNE YOU NEED SOMEONE WATCHING THE GATES!! PUT SOMEONE OUT AND HAVE THEM WATCH THE FUCKING GATES! OH GOD THEY'VE REDISTRIBUTED THE AIRPODS THEY CAN'T HEAR ME

Okay, I have a wife and kids, and can't do anything that risks their existences, so how far back I go is limited.
The earliest I can safely go back is mid-2010, so that's when I start.
For my first wish, I'm going to give the DA in New York incontrovertible evidence of the size and value of various properties in and around NYC as reported to banks for the purpose of securing loans, and as reported to state tax authorities for the purpose of determining taxation.
That should be enough to get Donald Trump indicted for tax fraud at a time when we still had a functioning judiciary, and before the red wave election in November.
For my next wish, I'm going to Twitter and giving them the easy ability to identify and block foreign disinformation agents on the platform. This is well before Twitter decided it liked the clicks Russian trolls bring. End result: The most widely used platform by Russian trolls is cut off to them, and Twitter execs have evidence of foreign interference efforts to give the feds early.
Finally, I'm zipping forward to 2012 and giving the two guys who tried to assassinate Putin some better planning, opsec, and training. Couldn't hurt.
You're welcome, everyone!

I'd assassinate Robert Owen. He's the man that proposed the 8-hour a day labor idea that we're all enslaved to, today. If you got rid of him, Henry Ford wouldn't make the 9-5 bullshit.
I'd also assassinate Abraham from going to Egypt. My details are vague but I think if you prevented that from happening, Christianity wouldn't ever have much of an iron grip in regards to influence that it has today.
Prevent the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. I think we need someone like him more than ever today.
- I'd argue against the first one. As prior it was work any hours asked and the only day off was Sunday. But I see what you're going for.

I'd take John Hinckley Jr. to the shooting range
- That sounds nice too
- Mail him a better scope while you're at it, you still get 1 wish after that.
- Someone did a facial tracking of the event and the only thing that saved him is he turned his head at the exact moment.

No one answered why, not even OP.
- Felt mine were a little self explanatory. But 1. Because Tesla wanted to make electrical power a human right and was arguably the better inventor and thinker. 2. Because Poe was one of my favorite authors and he was on the way to fixing his life. And 3. Because it was the loss of so much knowledge.
  
  and was inarguably the better inventor and thinker, since Edison was a plagiarist and marketer who made incremental changes to the designs of other people, and nothing more
  FTFY

Imma poop in the primordial ooze.
- For all we know, that's exactly what happened.
- Might as well add actual shit the the shit were going through.

Event 1: I'd seduce OP's mom before she meets his dad.
Event 2: I'd seduce OP's grandma before she meets his grandfather
Event 3: I'd step on the first organism to develop lungs and legs that crawled onto land from the ocean
- You wouldn't need to. She wasn't of much repute.
  That one would be hard. She loved the hell out of my grandfather.
  That'll show 'em.

Wasn't the burning of the Library of Alexandria actually possitive, as all the clay tomes there burned and got presserved till today?
I would be too scared of changing too much of history, so I'd just go back in time and keep epstein alive and see that he can actually give a detailed lists of the people on his island.
- No, because the burning of the library of alexandria is a fictional event that did not actually happen.
  About the clay tablets, you're thinking of the library of ashurbanipal
  
  OP actually did it, they saved the library!

It might be difficult.
Step 1. Suffer some unpleasantness resulting from an event in the past.
Step 2. Identify the event that was source of this problem.
Step 3. Travel back in time to just before event occurs.
Step 4. Prevent event from occurring.
Step 5. The change at Step 3 has prevented Step 1 from occurring. You have altered history to avoid unpleasantness.
Step 6. Step 2 depended upon Step 1 occurring and also does not happen. This prevents Step 3 and thus Step 4 from occurring. Now the event and the resulting unpleasantness occurs again.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temporal_paradox
Consistency paradox
The consistency paradox or grandfather paradox occurs when the past is changed in any way that directly negates the conditions required for the time travel to occur in the first place, thus creating a contradiction. A common example given is traveling to the past and preventing the conception of one's ancestors (such as causing the death of the ancestor's parent beforehand), thus preventing the conception of oneself. If the traveler were not born, then it would not be possible to undertake such an act in the first place; therefore, the ancestor proceeds to beget the traveler's next-generation ancestor and secure the line to the traveler. There is no predicted outcome to this scenario.[8] Consistency paradoxes occur whenever changing the past is possible.[9] A possible resolution is that a time traveller can do anything that did happen, but cannot do anything that did not happen. Doing something that did not happen results in a contradiction.[8] This is referred to as the Novikov self-consistency principle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_baby_Hitler
The question of killing baby Hitler contains a version of the grandfather paradox,[20] also known as the "Hitler's Murder Paradox".[21] According to the B-theory of time,[22] if someone travelled back in time with the intention of killing baby Hitler, then their reason for travelling back in time would be eliminated. It is often concluded that as the past has already happened, alteration of the past is a logical impossibility.[23] As Hitler killed himself in 1945, it can also be inferred that no time traveler has killed baby Hitler.[24]
In contrast to the B-theory, models that adopt the A-theory of time avoid logical contradictions in the killing of baby Hitler by considering time to be two-dimensional, where the first dimension is standard time (tx) and the second dimension is known as hyper-time (Htx).[25] Theories that leave room for the past to be changed include hyper-eternalism, two-dimensional presentism and hyper-presentism, which each demonstrate the possibility of killing baby Hitler in two-dimensional time.[26] In these temporal models, both the past and the future are held to be mutable; in changing the past by killing baby Hitler, the time traveller also changes the future.[27] Although it can also be debated whether such temporal models genuinely change the past, or if killing baby Hitler simply affects the past by causing a variation in hyper-time.[28]
If time travel caused creation of a parallel universe, killing baby Hitler would only create a parallel universe without Hitler in it, and the original universe would continue existing and thus the suffering he caused in that timeline would not be alleviated by the time-traveling assassin. From this perspective, astrophysicist Brian Koberlein concluded that killing baby Hitler would be "inconsequential at best, and could be downright harmful", recommending that time travelers avoid such an activity and instead visit the 1980s.[29]

What is "small"?
Does placing a banana peel on a certain path that will cause a historical person to trip and injure themselves count as "small"?
What if I carefully place a banana peel on the path that Stannislav Petrov walks on and he end up having to go to the hospital on September 26, 1983?
🤔
🌎💥❓️
Okay so:
On the eve of May 7, 2012 (putin takes office as president): Place a small piece of paper inside Putin's food saying "Next time it'd be poison" (in Russian, of course). So he'd start speculating if someone is plotting against him and drive him mad. Maybe cause him to shuffle all his security and chefs.
Then after he makes changes to his security, on his birthday, place a dead rat inside his birthday cake (he does have birthday cakes, right?).
Might not change history at all, but good enough to fuck with a dictator.
Add a few bits of code to the Great Firewall of China that would make it malfuction and start letting all traffic through on February 4, 2022, right before the Winter Olympics begin.
Butterfly Effect 😉
- Sir a respect.and commend your clever trolling of a dictators paranoia.

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