Make it a good one.
I’d sink Cortez’s ship.
Well current events lead me to believe that allowing the orange turd to live would do the job nicely so in the spirit of laziness I’d do absolutely nothing.
Go back from 2026 to 2024. Report a pet has gone missing and you heard that an immigrant neighbor ate it. Come back to 2026. Book your dream vacation at the Trump Gaza resort.
Life will find a way. Going back can be used to create nuclear winter but even then, life will go on.
To completely screw over the world, I would go into the future and acquire the source code for a general AI.
Then the world can be locked down and robots can be built to abuse every human and sentinent being individually, for a very long time.
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.
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
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
You could also flip the switch that was literally the only thing keeping the nuke from exploding over North Carolina in the Goldsboro incident.
Nuke going off over US soil at the height of the cold war could very well have started everyone firing.
Procrastinate, the world is going down the drain just fine without my help.
Go to back to the big bang. You presence alone will butterfly effect the earth out of existence.
I legit popped this thread open to type
ohhh I wish I wish I hadn’t killed that fish…
You’re going to pretend we’re not on that timeline right now? I see your play, time traveller.
He did it.
The crazy son of a bitch did it.
Go back to before life formed on earth, and shit in the ocean.
It’s possible someone did, and that’s where we all come from
it would explain a lot
“Hey look! It’s the first fish to walk on land”
*stomps
“You saw it, it was coming right at us”
You would immediately die in agony. No oxygen and a lot more CO2 in the atmosphere
Also a climate so scorching hot we won’t ever see anything like it again before 2030.
And upon said death he would immediately shit himself. Mission accomplished!
And release an incredible cocktail of gut and other bacteria on the world to entirely change the course of history.
This was my first thought, too 😂
Who pissed in your gene pool? ^it <sup>was</sup> <sup><sup>me</sup></sup>^
Buy a cheap pistol, go back in time, and shoot Gutenberg.
We’d still be living in medieval times.
I support this one.
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.
CrowRaven tech rulesCorvids, in general, but ravens seem to be the most intelligent of the bunch.
Crows are really communal though so might be a better bet for human like intelligence in the long run. Magpies too, not because they’d help but because they are both intelligent and total jerks so even the eventual crow people wouldn’t get to be happy thus maximizing the chaos.
That’s a really good point; social animals will get farther.
Crows, then.
My name is Friedrich Trump (aka Frederick Trump) and I already did that and even had a nice hump.
