Bad idea. Last time someone did this we ended up with this timeline.
The comedy of errors that resulted in World War 1 seems to indicate that there is a group of time travelers trying to make sure this time line happens.
I would go back in time and meet the people who wrote the first ever USB standard. Then I would convince them that all USB connectors have to be reversible from day one so that nobody will ever need to struggle with the 20/80 odds of getting it right on the first try. Come on, it’s two possibilities and the probability of the wrong one is at least 80%. What’s the deal with a connector like that?
Accordingly to the USB inventor, he didn’t make it reversible right off the bat because it would need 2x more wires, circuits, and cost 2x more. So you probably [won’t be | weren’t]* able to convince him.
Perhaps a better approach is to tell him that they should be clearly asymmetric, to both touch and sight. Like HDMI connectors are.
*tense marking is fun in time travel.
You can even make the connector look like a B with a larger loop on one side, that when people were like why is it shaped like that you could just say that’s the b in the USB
This guy drives the bus!
Paging Dr. Streetmentioner
You don’t need double the wires if you change the recepticle so that you can plug it in both ways, and the recepticle would just have those wires connected on the board.
*tense marking is fun in time travel.
One of the major problems encountered in time travel is not that of becoming your own father or mother. There is no problem in becoming your own father or mother that a broad-minded and well-adjusted family can’t cope with. There is no problem with changing the course of history—the course of history does not change because it all fits together like a jigsaw. All the important changes have happened before the things they were supposed to change and it all sorts itself out in the end.
The major problem is simply one of grammar, and the main work to consult in this matter is Dr. Dan Streetmentioner’s Time Traveler’s Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations. It will tell you, for instance, how to describe something that was about to happen to you in the past before you avoided it by time-jumping forward two days in order to avoid it. The event will be descibed differently according to whether you are talking about it from the standpoint of your own natural time, from a time in the further future, or a time in the further past and is futher complicated by the possibility of conducting conversations while you are actually traveling from one time to another with the intention of becoming your own mother or father.
Most readers get as far as the Future Semiconditionally Modified Subinverted Plagal Past Subjunctive Intentional before giving up; and in fact in later aditions of the book all pages beyond this point have been left blank to save on printing costs.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy skips lightly over this tangle of academic abstraction, pausing only to note that the term “Future Perfect” has been abandoned since it was discovered not to be.
This is the sort of thing that I love reading on the internet.
From a conlanger perspective I feel like the time reference could be split into four, to account time travel. For example: let’s say that both of us travelled to 3100, I remained there and you came back to 2024. Then you write me a letter, that I’m going to read as soon as we arrive in 3100, telling me about your experiences. You could use:
- your current date as reference - 3100 comes after 2024, so it’s future
- your personal experiences - you already experienced it, so it’s past
- my current date as reference - as I’m in 3100, it’s present
- my personal experiences - as I’m watching you experience it, it’s present
Any given language could pick any of those references to model their tense around, or many of them, or even none (plenty languages IRL lack grammatical tense). If only doing things from the PoV of the speaker (you), that means 6~9 tenses for what most languages have 2 (past and non-past) or 3 (past, present, future).
This is the sort of thing that I love reading on the internet.
Sorry to disappoint you, but most of that text is found offline — as it’s an excerpt from Douglas Adam’s “The Restaurant at the End of the Universe” (sequel to “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”). I probably should’ve attributed it.
If only doing things from the PoV of the speaker (you), that means 6~9 tenses for what most languages have 2 (past and non-past) or 3 (past, present, future).
And then you’d have to account who knows what, which version of a person you’re talking to. Say you’re having a conversation with someone before traveling in time to a time in which they’ve not timetraveled, so it’s either their subjective past or future, but then you continue the conversation, so you’d have to account for both the speakers perspective and the person being spoken to, who would then be subject to two different tense “totalities” since the conversation with them would have been taking place in two different times at the same time.
I seriously suggest reading Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett for that sort of thing. I used to use Pratchett books as a substitute for weed when I was a bit over twenty.
Shine rhrough holes going upwards? That’s working at least often when it’s on a panel…
While you’re there make damn sure they create a coherent naming scheme that allows upgrade paths/versioning.
Sincerely,
USB 3.2 Gen 1×1
USB 3.2 Gen 2×1
USB 3.2 Gen 1×2
USB 3.2 Gen 2×2I would go back and introduce semantic versioning in the 60s.
Go back to 1911 and convince Taft to concede the Republican nomination to Roosevelt. That allows Roosevelt to stomp Wilson, get the US into the war before Russia left, and get the war over with years earlier.
This prevents both Stalin and Hitler from rising to power, and prevents most of the European theater of WW2, as well as a host of other knock-on effects.
In this scenario Lenin does not manage to take over Russia and the warning to the world by the real life examples of Germany and Italy about the dangers of fashism does not happen either. Authoritarianism raises its ugly head later in a world with better weapons and more destructive potential for humanity.
Would that prevent the space race?
I doubt it. The Russians are still gonna want to try to beat the US at anything they can, and prove themselves on the global stage, but it may have been a cooperative venture, instead of competitive.
Interesting take.
I’d stop the guy who went back in time to stop the first guy from smoking stuff.
Hey hey, edibles are a thing. Ain’t gotta damage your lungs to get a buzz…
True.
And you could always go back in time to stop me from stopping you from stopping the guy.
That’s why I think time travel will never allow history to be changed, and I think Rick and Morty may have done a bit about that.
Indeed. Even the late Stephen Hawking arranged his own experiment to prove/disprove the possibility.
Apparently it was disproven…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking’s_time_traveller_party
Alternatively, Hawking proved that he was unpopular and nobody wanted to go to his party.
Exactly. Maybe Steven Hawking is just really bad at throwing parties!
I think not entirely - the experiment did not seem to rule out the case where traveling backwards in time is possible, but only up to the point when the time machine was built.
I.e. in 3012 Dwayne George successfully creates the first functional time machine, and moments later is slain at the hand of a time traveller who went back to prevent the invention of the time machine.
Stop that kid from falling into Harambe’s enclosure by any means necessary.
🫡
I’d like to say something noble like warn Amelia Earhart, or hookup Adolph with some Bob Ross videos. But if I’m being honest, I would probably be selfish. I would tell past me to not fuck up quite a few things that past me royally fucked up.
I’d go back and convince that art school to accept a certain art student…
I did nazi that one
I’d have Al Gore win.
Well… He did.
Turns out it didn’t matter.
deleted by creator
My net worth.
Think of all the good I could do with a trillion dollars. I’d have to create a lot of destruction of other people’s wealth to get there but they will understand. I really need a trillion dollars!
Got to do it in stages so it doesn’t look too premeditated.
Start a online auction site where people can sell their stuff and you get a small cut of the profit.
Then to help people on board start a payment processor company to ensure that the sellers ship their goods and that buyers pay.
Once that has established, go public with it so that your stock sales can support the existence of your current portfolio while you dabble in other things that you know are very profitable.
Once you have that going, which will take a few years. You can take a victory lap or two and maybe pay some PR firms to make you look like the cool rich kid on the internet that everyone wants to hang out with.
Then you can do stuff like starting a spaceship company and helping to bring about the end of the internal combustion engine by starting an electric car company and doing some solar panel stuff.
Eventually you’ll be the richest person on the planet and then you can get to doing the really fun stuff assuming you don’t like tank all of your personal reputation by blowing 20% of your net worth on a microblogging website or something while disavowing your trans daughter.
I mean, if you’re smart enough to do all the other things surely you wouldn’t blow it at the five yard line like that.
Save the gorilla, save the world
I’ve a tattoo based on that show
Nissan Versa?
Save the cheerleader, save the world. It was a quote from a show
Warn about how plastic (especially single-use) is a major pollutant, with microplastics managing to get into our organs with long term consequences we are yet to grasp.
It did push our technology and way of living forward, but at what cost?
You’d be the crazy manbearpig dude. Nobody would listen to you. How would anyone be able to persuade the people?
That wouldn’t work because you’re a single person fighting against the same companies that finance climate change denialism. Hell, between understanding that leaded gasoline was harmful and banning it were at least 20 years
Yeah but the OP question isn’t asking what you would do, but rather what you’d change. If the question was about what people would do, half these answers have a lot of explaining to do.
I would make sure my parents never met.
But then you couldn’t go back and make sure they never met
So are they saying they’re trying to crash this simulation once and for all??
I would’ve gone to bed earlier tonight
I’d go hunt down Ronald Regan at about age 30 and empty an entire magazine of .45s into his dome while he slept.
Oooooh I like this one! Please do humanity the favor!
Was looking for Regan.
i would not eat the kiosk chili dogs i ate earlier—they were pretty fucking bad.
Instead you got the hot pockets and are now on the toilet.
I would accept that trade.
