Make it a good one.
Go back in time and do something to prevent Vasily Aleksandrovich Arkhipov from becoming the Executive Officer on the B-59 Soviet nuclear sub in October 1962. He’s the guy who talked the Captain and the Political Officer out of launching the nukes when they thought they were being attacked by the US Navy during the Cuban Missile Crisis. His persuasiveness is generally considered to have avoided WWIII from starting then.
He probably literally saved the world, he should really be talked about more
The scary part is, he’s not the only one
Shoot Arch Duke Ferdinand. Few people even now about it today, but he was subject to a horribly mangled assassination attempt that many scholars belive would have set off a major war in Europe had he died.
Holy crap it took way too long for me to realise what you’re doing
Procrastinate, the world is going down the drain just fine without my help.
I hate the ‘hate’ part (pardon the pun) of the question.
I’d rather go back in time and get Jesus and bring him back here so that he can go all ‘temple money changers’ on today’s MAGA Christians asses, give them a proper yelling to.
Can I appear anywhere? Pop into white house or Kremlin during the Cuban missile crisis and say: I’m from the future, you must attack, or… Then travel back to the future without finishing the sentence.
Go to back to the big bang. You presence alone will butterfly effect the earth out of existence.
Wait until I’m about to die, then go back to when the first land-dwelling animals first started coming ashore. I’d bring a bunch of cockroaches with me and then I’d die there. Either the roaches or my decaying corpse will hopefully cause enough change to the timeline that humanity never develops in the first place.
I think that’s the most I could screw over the (human) world.
I legit popped this thread open to type
ohhh I wish I wish I hadn’t killed that fish…
Go back to 2011ish and unleash WanaCry on a world that is not ready for for a global crypto locker.
How much power do I have?
If I could divert the asteroid that resulted in the K-T event, that’d drastically change history. It may not have stopped dinosaurs from eventually going extinct, but it’d have given them 33 million more years more to evolve, and would certainly have affected mammalian evolutionary history. Maybe, just maybe, raptors would have gotten smart enough.
Ooh! Take back a lot of ravens. They’re almost smart enough already. Heck, I wonder if taking ravens back even earlier would be enough for them to evolve into something dominant. Problem is, they’re not particularly social, and I think that’s been our greatest advantage.
Or: introduce modern octopus to ancient oceans.
Stopping the K-T event is my favorite, though. It would absolutely have changed how life on Earth has evolved since.
30M years between extinction events is about all you get, though.
Those are great ideas but miss thr mark on the second part. They all require a lot of work and we’re lazy.
Maybe? Like, how hard is it to put a Tsar Bomba on the asteroid when it’s a light-year away? Or, if it came from the Oort cloud, a thousand years before whatever nudged it in, nudged it in?
I don’t know. Putting a bomb on a timer on an asteroid seems pretty simple. If we’re time traveling, we’re also space traveling, because the solar system was about a third of the way around the galaxy at the K.T. event. In comparison, the shift to the impactor 1ly away would be margin-of-error stuff.
There were no constraints posted; no “you can only take a truckload of stuff”, or, “you appear on the Earth where that point was at that point in time”. I mean, if all you do is travel back in time 1 year without also traveling in space, you’re going to be breathing hard vacuum when you come out.
So: I’m assuming:
- I can choose where I come out
- I can take anything I want with my - I’m not traveling Terminator-style
- I can get my hands on a working Tsar Bomba before I go (that’d probably be the hardest, aside from violating the laws of physics)
However, for the other ideas? What’s hard about transporting a murder of crows to the Triassic? I don’t even have to go myself.
Bring knowledge of CFCs to a time when we’re able to make them but not able to detect the ozone problems they cause.
I’m heading far into the future - say 1000 years or perhaps 100 if communication would be an issue. I’m going to grab all sorts of portable devices and tools to take back with me, and I will maintain the remainder of my life without sharing my goodies. The world is screwed because they get no fruits of my intense labor, but that is fine since I hate them anyway. For that afternoon of work, I get to live a great life while everyone else must suffer in modernity.
At current pace, I wonder what you could do with a spear and a club from the future
My name is Friedrich Trump (aka Frederick Trump) and I already did that and even had a nice hump.
I really like this question. So: rather than killing Hitler, what if, instead, you killed Stalin? Was it inevitable that a strongman dictator would have taken over, and ruined the potential of communism? I guess we have evidence that the answer is “yes,” in the form of Mao, but weren’t the Chinese communist party(s) greatly influenced by the Soviet model? What if Russia had, instead, developed a more democratic system of government - was it possible, and couldn’t it have affected how China’s developed? But, maybe it is always inevitable that dictators emerge from internal revolutions like this.
Here’s another scenario: what if you stopped Oswald, and prevented Kennedy from being assassinated? He was popular, and likely to win a second term. What would 4 (~5) more years of Kennedy look like?
My favorite version of “killing Hitler” is instead of murder, blackmail the school dean so Hitler gets admitted to art school. Goodbye genocidal tyrant, hello moderately successful landscape painter!
Check out the show 11.22.63 on Hulu. Exactly about preventing the Kennedy assassination and the fallout from that choice. Seriously good!
Thanks for the suggestion! I’ll watch it.
Bring COVID and HIV to the USA in 1929.
Maybe Zika as well.
