If I Had a Time Machine...

[wandjina]

finish the following sentence, providing a maximum of three 'destinations'...

If I Had A Time Machine...

[indigo264nm]

...I'd go right back to the very beginning and see what REALLY happened.

[Torsten]

1 - I don't think I'd go anywhere in human past, but certainly the big bang would be interesting.

2 - I'd go sometime very far into the future to see if there is one and how it pans out. Maybe 10,000 years...

3 - My third destination would be based on what I saw on my first trip into the future. It may be even further into the future, but more likely it will be to make sense of something I experience in 10,000 years by popping in somewhere along the way.

I think the future trips are more important than the past, so I'd probably save the trip to the big bang and only do it if there was no more pressing need arising from my future travels. I figure that most of the questions about the past will be answered in the future anyway.

[indigo264nm]

I figure that most of the questions about the past will be answered in the future anyway.

Good point, but still I kinda believe we all have set paths so looking into the future would merely be spoiling it, and I'm sure that we'll find out in another couple of lifetimes anyway.

Besides I really would love to find out (but more importantly watch) the universe and how it all begun. For some reason a part of me doesn't agree with the big bang theory as I feel that life and the universe is infinite and has always been infinite, and if you take into consideration the concepts of different planes of existance, multi-dimensions etc, the big bang theory is somewhat limited.

Also, I love the quote:

"No vestige of beginning, no prospect of an end."

---Hutton

[Qhorakuna tantani]

1. Probably the big bang although even if I had a spaceship and a time machine I don't think I'd be all that safe somehow.

2. A few thousand years into the future.

3. Go back to some point in time and try to find some extinct plants / practices I could bring back with me. Don't think I can do that though.

Sidenote

life and the universe is infinite and has always been infinite, and if you take into consideration the concepts of different planes of existance, multi-dimensions etc, the big bang theory is somewhat limited.

You might be interested in some concepts of string theory. Some people believe that the big bang and the (IMO somewhat inevitable) big crunch happen/have happened more than once and that the creation/destruction of the entire universe oscillates. Some believe that the big bang(s) are caused by two different 'string dimentions' colliding. Sorry bout that

[wandjina]

well, there's no point us all going back and checking out the/a singularity...but my choices are also curiosity driven...no interest in altering history:

1. Go back a few billion years with a microscope and examine some 'primordial soup' in an attempt to establish the origins of life on Earth (spontaneous?, or did precursors arrive on a comet?)....I may need a crack team of specialised biologists and a sophisticated lab for this one....assuming I select the 'right' date. This may require several return trips....maybe not such a brilliant choice.

2. Go back approx 500 million years to the Cambrian period, and check out the fauna. Dinosaurs are cool...but IMO the invertebrate critters of this period surpass them in terms of diversity and sheer 'bizarreness'. Life at this time was predominantly confined to the sea...early land plants were mostly moss/lichen type organisms....a stroll in the Permian would provide more of botanical interest...and giant insects too!

3.After learning Greek, Latin and Ancient Egyptian, I'd go to the library of Alexandria in Ptolemaic Egypt. They had everything....all the classics

[Legba]

1.) It always amuses me when new remains are found that date human civilisations back to 100 000+ years and the suggestion that these were the first people. i believe civilisations existed millions of years ago. if they did, what would be left? no physical traces i suspect. id like to go back and see the people that knew who they were; that didnt need any religion to help them get back on track because they were already there.

2.) id go back with info for myself when i was young. info to provide financial independance and direction for growth. of course, getting anything thru my thick head back then may would require a baseball bat. i could only hope after trip 1.) i would have a better idea as to what i should tell myself.

3.) finally, id go 20 years ahead to find out see my kids all grow up, and to get advise from myself as to where i go wrong in the previous 20 years. it would be nice to bring back any patented cures for illnesses that the pharmecutical companies have spent there billions to find, then patent them myself before them. watch em cringe as i give cures away for free. maybe grab some info to topple a government or two.

[indigo264nm]

Qhorakuna tantani, don't be sorry as I appreciate your correction .

I've worked out my #2 & #3....

#2) Go back to Ancient Egypt and check out the temples, whilst also finding out how the pyramids were built.

#3) Go back a hundred or so years with money, buy a small island not too far away from our waters and cover it with a huge Sally D, Kratom, Trich and Loph plantation...Pay some people to take care of it for a couple of generations and then come back with a ton of awesome huge Lophs, and with enough raw materials of Sally and Kratom to sell over here before they were made illegal (and even some afterwards ) or be legit and support half of the worlds consumption at a lower cost...perhaps start up a fresh Catha charter to Australia running a couple of days per week so that people can buy at the docks in bulk in the early mornings and sell at their local markets later that day.

...Now that last one is just pure and utter fantasy, I know. But imagine how beautiful it would be to own a huge collection of 100+ y\o Lophs!!! Hell, with several hundred huge specimens cultivated (and imagine all the pups as well), you could also take a stab at trying to regenerate the falling population of Peyote around the boarder of Texas and throughout Mexico due to westerners digging the roots out.

[botanika]

I'd go back to 1982 and catch all those fall guy, battlestar galactica and buck rogers tv episodes I missed

[Gollum]

Hi all

1. I must say i would go back about 650million years to Gondwanaland, imagine all the unusual animals you would see not to mention the wicked plants and trees.

2. Go to when Stonehenge was being built and hang with some Druids.

3. Go and see how the Pyramids of Giza were built.

And maybe stop off between Stonehenge and the Pyramids to visit the Viking era. :D

[occidentalis]

I can't decide between:

The origin of life on earth

Was it nucleic acid based replication, iron sulfur metabolism, or something entirely different? Photosynthetic or chemoautotrophic? In which order did the different components of the cell find each other and enter into symbiosis?

And I think i'd have to spend all three trips trying to find the right date

Go back to 3 BYA and then use the other two trips to fine tune the date.

Edit, just noticed that wandjina said the same thing above... great minds think alike ;)

OR

1. go back to pre human Australasia and check out the megafauna

2. go back to pre european Australia and learn a few things from the locals

3. visit an ancient mesoamerican civilisation at the height of their prosperity

[Rev]

1. Id like a representaive cupful of the primordial soup i could use to seed other early earth planets - i figure if we can move in time then space would require merely a tweaking within any given time. It would be feasible then that i could either seed other planets then so they are ready now, or now so they are ready by the time any of our descendents get there.

2. Id like to travel the andes and mesoamerica around 10 000 years ago and see what the trichocereus and brug flora looked like before the advent of human usage. Id also get to see the progentors of spuds, tomatos, corn and other plants that have changed us so much. I suppose while there in my craft i could also check out the old neolithic world state of affairs.

3. Fast forward to about 1000 AD. Another world voyage bearing blessing and bane.

A reshuffle and backburn to attempt to prevent the excesses of the next millenium

id predate european contact with several peoples bringing both food technology and disease. yes disease.

Influenza, smallpox and measles decimated in the true sense of the word the world as we may have known it.

and introduction well preceeeding invasion would have allowed society tim eto adjust immunity and restructure to resist

in a better world the maoris would have had the potato, oca and quinoa not the Kumara from precolumbian contact. Id also take them some chickens and ducks in the hope i could convince them of a taboo on eating moa

likewise id present a gift to an australian aborigibal tribe of plants, animals and knowledge of an assembly of widely adapted species and cultivation of post contact domesticates like macadamias and bunya nuts.

plants like millet, sorghum, sweet potato, pumpkin, hemp, tsamma melon and various pulses, animals like jungle fowl, and camels (transport). they already had the dog and with a shift to any cultivation i think they would have easily found some marsupial domesticates drawn to the village- so many critical weight range animals seemed pre-adapted to domestication, tamars, potoroos, pademelons,quokkas, whitetail rats etc.. likewise the native cats/quolls soon adapted to european settlements with the abundance of rodent food just like cats did in egypt

with any luck they would have adopted cultivation by the time of european contact and be better positioned to negoiate the pattern of settlment. Of course id put in an hallucinogen like trichocereus or syrian rue in the hope of its influence

same time different place id like a shipment of horses delivered to north america 500 years in advance of columbus. With a beast of burden comes the wheel and greater flow of people and ideas

in fact if i could convince a contemporary mongol horseman with knowledge of bone composite compound bows and japanese swordsmith to come with me the americas might look very different indeed by the time cortes landed

and then so would the world today.

Edited January 18, 2006 by Rev

[Torsten]

a large number of proposed trips suggest that people want to go and change things. Have we not learnt enough about meddling and influencing systems to know that it almost always ends up going wrong? Like, protect the Moa and you might be responsible for the extinction of several plant species. Surely we have all watched enough star treck to know that you don't mess with timelines

Making small changes in the past will not change the understanding people gain. If there is no extinct Moa, then maybe NZ will never have as great a population of environment crusaders that give the rest of the world a hard time! Or maybe the latest Inca god would be burning the rainforest and drilling for oil wherever he can so as to amass more gold treasures. Personally I think it is much more important to have a peek in the future to see if we will ever learn or if we will really keep going until we have ruined our society and the planet. If we are a peaceful and civilised society with a clean environment in 1000 years, then the difficult learning path was maybe worth it.

[Qhorakuna tantani]

If you could take people and things with you into the future, would you stay for a long period of time?

Hate to ruin the notion of being able to change things in the past and hence present, but there is something called the 'Grandfather Effect.' It states that if you were ever to go back in time with the intent of changing something so as to cause a consequence to the present, you would be caught in a 'time loop' that would cycle an indefinite amount of times per second. This happens because if one were to go back in time with the intent of changing the present, then after the past event was 'corrected', there would be no need to go back into time to correct it and therefore the person would never go back in time to correct it therefore allowing it to happen and allowing the need to go back in time to correct it. Yea it's confusing.

Take the example that names the effect. If I were to go back in time and accidently squish my grandfather with my time machine, it would mean that I would never be born and hence couldn't possibly have gone back in time to do it. Therefore my grandfather lives, allowing me to be born and to go on to squish him with my time machine. The loop continues.

Anyways... rant end. I think I may take things too seriously sometimes lol.

[occidentalis]

in a better world the maoris would have had the potato, oca and quinoa not the Kumara from precolumbian contact. Id also take them some chickens and ducks in the hope i could convince them of a taboo on eating moa

Nice idea but AFAIK they did have chickens - in fact moa means chicken - it's just that the big moas were less work for more meat and were seen as an inexhaustible supply until they were nearly gone.

[gomaos]

unnnhhh....

1..... at first I'd go "slowly" forward into the future until I find the technology available to rejuvenate my body to a comfortable 25-year-old. The same technology should provide freedom from aging, so I'd be 25 years old-forever...

2. Then I'd continue to go into the future until I find my "utopian" society:

A society where the desire for more money and power does not exist

A society that does not hold false ideals on how someone should look etc

A society that does not dictate one's frame of mind

A society where not 10 per cent of the population grab 90 per cent of the income/profits as for example most societies today.

A society where sex is freely available at any time to anyone and where no-one needs to be lonely in his bed (How that is supposed to work? don't know)

3. Every now and then, just for leisure, I'd go back in time and history and kill one of the great dictators and murderers of history (like Hitler, Stalin, Napoleon and whatever their names may have been) even before they could come to power...

that would be great fun....

I'd leave all the scientific stuff to you folks...

sorry don't care about the why and how of the big bang etc....

[spiders]

Id go back to 1966 and then start releasing every one else's music before they have time to think of it.

Id go back to the early 90s and convince John Howard to quit politics because he would never have a chance to actually be elected prime minister

Id go forward in time 500 years or so because id worry that with the pace of change in the last century or so, if i went forward any further the massive changes would freak me the fuck out...

'2. Go to when Stonehenge was being built and hang with some Druids.'

I was thinking along those lines, but the druids did weird things like killing horses and then having sex with their bloody corpus in front of people - im sure there is a valid reason for doing this given their unique world-view and all but maybe that isnt my scene...

Id also like to go and do my four years of uni again because i had a ball and didnt work a day

:saufen2:

[Rev]

Surely we have all watched enough star treck to know that you don't mess with timelines

sure but if you have a time machine the whole of time becomes one great experiment

the world as it has happenned has already hapenned

going back and changing it creates an alternate paralell version

i can make 2 assumptions

1 is that time is progressing towards an end point and that its all predetermined and everything is part of a great pattern unfolding in a fractalicious pattern

in this instance a time machine would be an impossibility

this is the world of the optimist- who say we live in the best of all possible worlds (at any given time)

however if a time machine were possible then it would imply time moves in all directions and has an infiniite number of permutations with everypoint in time saturated with the possibility of divergent histories

This is the world of the anarchist who says there is no divine plan but the one we choose

in the latter no time or history is sacred and all possible modes of existence exist simultaneously side by side

have u seen the movie -'the One' with jet li? like that

If i were to accept the latter then id have no sentimentality for times past. Horrible shit happens in any age, and so does much good.

To a degree we already know the world we live in but we do lack undertsanding of how it might have been or might be. there are conceptual gaps in what humanity can make of itself

if i had the power of a god, to alter history, id make full use of it if only to learn 'what happens when i do this..."

[simon_marklar]

i'd meet up with leonardo and get him to paint my picture. then i'd go to all the other famous painters throughout the centurys and get them to paint my portrait, all the time telling them my name is marklar.

when i get back to the twentieth century i will walk in to the 'marklar' exhibition about this mysterious man who all the great masters painted (wearing the exact clothes that i wore when leonardo painted me), and see if i get recognised. i'd also talk about the paintings, about what they mean (after talking to the painter about it, ofcourse) and see how many art 'critics' pan what i say.

i'd then spend the rest of my time looking for other opportunities for practical jokes that only i get.

[indigo264nm]

likewise id present a gift to an australian aborigibal tribe of plants, animals and knowledge of an assembly of widely adapted species and cultivation of post contact domesticates like macadamias and bunya nuts.

plants like millet, sorghum, sweet potato, pumpkin, hemp, tsamma melon and various pulses, animals like jungle fowl, and camels (transport). they already had the dog and with a shift to any cultivation i think they would have easily found some marsupial domesticates drawn to the village- so many critical weight range animals seemed pre-adapted to domestication, tamars, potoroos, pademelons,quokkas, whitetail rats etc.. likewise the native cats/quolls soon adapted to european settlements with the abundance of rodent food just like cats did in egypt

with any luck they would have adopted cultivation by the time of european contact and be better positioned to negoiate the pattern of settlment. Of course id put in an hallucinogen like trichocereus or syrian rue in the hope of its influence.

And then we'd all learn in anthropology that the native Australian tribes had extremely developed skills in macadamia farming, and used Trichocereus as a sacrament, due to Rev going back in time and teaching them ;).

On that note though, and in relation to the current A. phlebophylla discussions, go back in time to Mt Buffalo and teach them all how to boil in vessles well before the invasion.

[Rev]

now ive thought about it more i reckon cape barren geese, brush turkeys and magpie geese might be better than chickens

i cant think of any beast of burden better than a camel tho - the soft feet make them lkess damaging to the arid ecology

im no expert but my logic makes me think the reason aboriginals never got serious about cultivation and material culture is that theyd have had to carry it all on their backs

take the berbers and tuareg for example

very harsh and fully or partly nomadic existence

yet they have horses and camels to carry their encampments

so they put more effort into manufacturing durable artefacts

the only thing wrong with stone age culture is the disadvantage it puts you in when invaded by an industrial age coloniser

i like the phlebo idea

maybe by the time the nmachine is built well have found the indigenous MAOi

if there was transcontinental trade in pituri then why not phyllodes and bark

why do i want this? easy

id like to 'come home' to an australia well under the influence of the hallucinogens i know and love..

if aboriginal australia even partly converted to diff modes of life by 1700 then our ethnic and lifetyle makeup might be more like south africa or NZ than what it is today

Edited January 19, 2006 by Rev

[Gollum]

a large number of proposed trips suggest that people want to go and change things. Have we not learnt enough about meddling and influencing systems to know that it almost always ends up going wrong?

I was just thinking today at work about this whole time machine thing. And the amount of possibilities it would have. What about going back to warn people in Thailand about the Tsunami that was going to hit them about a month before it happened.

Same goes for 911.

I know its not as glamorous as going back to the begining of earth or tripping to the future but imagine the feeling you would get knowing that you have saved thousands of people from death.

I suppose another issue would be to get them to believe you before the guys in white coats rocked up to take you to your padded cell.

[Torsten]

What about going back to warn people in Thailand about the Tsunami that was going to hit them about a month before it happened.

Then the tsunami would be a minor event which would not galvanise governments into cretaing the regional tsunami warning system. Thus, as population density increases in decades to come, the next tsunami would probably kill even more people.

I know its not as glamorous as going back to the begining of earth or tripping to the future but imagine the feeling you would get knowing that you have saved thousands of people from death.

It can only make you feel good for a moment. Suddenly all of history has changed and you will see just how many people died due to your changes (eg maybe there is a Hitler or Osama among the tsunami dead).

[Hagakure]

i would love to give rise to new civilisations just to see what other posibilities there were for mankinds history.

if you look at jared diamonds theories for why some civilisations rise and others remain in stoneage, domesticated beasts and crops seem to play a huge part. what if instead of wiping out all the large marsupials the ancestors of the aboriginals domesticated some. (yeah i know its in contention if it was environmental or the result of man but im gonna lean iwth jarad diamond)

we then may have had a new civilisation rise from the aboriginals. they may have gone and invaded the surrounding islads, wiped out a few cultures, and our entire region would look vastly different.

the problem with any of these changes is that you will blink yourself out of existance.

i also think it would be cool to prevent christianity and islam aking power.

would be good to sow some seeds for a loose nature worshipping religion.

but yeah whatever happens you may save millions of lives but condemn millions of others.

[chief23]

No one mentioned Jesus. I think checking out his story would be cool.

Chief