Id show up at the time travelers convention.
The first time Heinrich Kramer tries to show someone the Malleus Maleficarum, I appear directly in front of him and set the book on fire. Not only is the book destroyed, but a clearly supernatural event took place to put the fear of god into him. Bam. No witch trials.
More likely outcome: he takes a person in strange clothing appearing from thin air only to set his book on fire with a magical implement as clear proof of witchcraft existing and posing a huge danger. Get ready for turbo witch hunts on crack
He wasn’t going to be any MORE nuts. Everyone knew he was a crackpot who hated women, and it was heretical for him to claim anyone but God could grant anyone powers. I make sure to do it in front of people and there’s suddenly an audience to see him be condemned by a divine agent. If they try to say it was anything else, they’re heretical too.
At the very least, it can’t get WORSE.
Or, the first time he steps foot in Innsbruck, he slips on a banana skin and slides down the street, much to the comedic delight of the locals. Helena Scheuberin even giggles and praises him for his comedic wit and skill. With high praise from an affluent local, and a natural penchant for comedy, Kramer leads a cult following in banana-skin comedic antics, and kick starts surrealist humour centuries before Monty Python.
I’d prevent the Challenger launch. Manned spaceflight doesn’t get shelved for an entire generation, and a young me doesn’t lose hope for the future at such an early age.
Through a bizarre series of butterfly effects, the successful launch and its international attention gives bureaucrats in Pripyat an extra nudge to encourage cooperation amongst their engineers and nuclear scientists, and a critical flaw in the operation of the plant at Chernobyl is caught before it causes a catastrophic meltdown.
The cumulative effect is a continued culture of progressive technological expansion into the 90s, and the fading of the anti-intellectualism that threatened to overtake the world during the Reagan and Thatcher administrations. Hand in hand with this is a decreased militarism, as technology is increasingly seen as a tool for the betterment of humanity, and less as a means of building better weapons.
One other immediate result is in the US presidential election of 1988. A lack of meaningful engagement with the public (no “skipped the surly bonds of earth” speech) led to increasing apathy toward the outgoing Reagan administration, giving G.H.W. Bush a tougher hill to climb, and less solid footing on the issue of defense. Dukakis doesn’t feel the need to do a silly photo op in a tank, but instead campaigns partly on an expansion of the space program and educational outreach programs similar to the one that brought in Christa McAuliffe.
Neoconservatism and neoliberalism wither together on the vine. Permanent human presence in space continues uninterrupted for the next two decades, with a base on the moon by the end of the century and a manned mission to Mars planned for a decade after that.
No Bushes, no rise of Al-Qaeda in 1988, no Gulf War, no Rush Limbaugh, no Clinton’s, and no 9/11.
TIME TRAVELER STOPS NASA LAUNCH
Administrators considering stopping entire space program.
“It must be some kind of message”, said Jerry Jenkins, head of NASA’s department of deciding whether to continue with space exploration whatsoever. “The time traveler knows something we don’t, and if he’s back here stopping launches it must mean there’s bad outcomes from space stuff.”
Not per se necessary to prevent it - either listen to the on-site rep from MT, who raised concerns in OTL that were disregarded, or make that day warmer. All other things being equal, without the crisis, we would have learned a great deal - but not at the cost of several lives.
It haunts me to this day that an improved version of STS would likely still be an option for launches, if only McDonald had been listened to.
I can fault the company, but he made a good faith effort to stop it because testing hadn’t been done at the current temperatures, AIUI.
On the ohter hand, those lives vs [GHWB | Dukakis | anyone else] directly impacts OTL - Arguably, we’d never have a Trump presidency, but Duke is simply a gentler, faster version of the same.
Not sure we wouldn’t still get Bushes, or Gulf War, but certainly what we ended up with would be more tempered, and there’s a real benefit to that. All these years on, perhaps we’d still have the ‘old school’ Republican party instead of the “I’m not a fascist, I swear!” Republican party.
I’d go back and prevent the 11th Sept attacks.
The world would be a different place because so much happened as a knock on of that but at the same time it’s hard to imagine what the world would be like. Probably very similar but also different in substantial ways.
Like obvious things like no war in Iraq or Afghanistan (at least not those wars), and less obvious things like how the attacks have reshaped liberal democracies like the US and Europe (for the worse imo), and how they empowered right wing politics in many countries (also bad imo).
No damn tiny bottles and metal detectors before flights. But I dont fly anymore lol
give my bro harambe a bullet proof vest
In before it’s a self correcting timeline, and now it’s the best that gets him killed
Something that would do that neoliberism in the 80’s with Reagan and Thatcher would not become the dominating political and economic theory it has been since that time.
Nuclear war in 1993
Take the current highest-yield nuclear bomb and destroy England right before the begin of their collonial era.
Generally speaking, I believe removing a global superpower just before they do their world-changing thing is probably going to have the biggest effect on the timeline.
Everyone was building empires at the time and fighting over who got what. All that nuking England would do is to mean France, the netherlands, germany, spain etc would get more bits
Of course it wouldn’t stop colonialization, but it would change the future quite a lot.
- No English-speaking superpowers/English as lingua franca
- No Commonwealth
- No wide-spread anglo common law based legal systems
- Superpowers/alliances would be totally mixed up up to now.
- China could have developed totally different due to them not constantly losing against the English.
- No colonialization of the Welsh, Scots, Irish by the English
I think that should shake up the timeline quite a bit.
No, you’d just have the exact same thing but with another nationality. France had like half of Africa so they’d definitely be bigger.
And wouldn’t that completely shift worldwide powerbalanes for centuries to come?
For example, would WW2 have happened if France had been a global superpower instead of a pushover?
Would the american revolution have happened with another colonial ruler?
Without that example, would the french revolution have happened?
Without both revolutions, would democracy be a thing by now, or would we still have totalitarian monarchies?
You know the butterfly effect? It’s the same except we aren’t killing a butterfly but instead one of the superpower nations of that time.
France wasn’t a pushover around WW2. They had enough manpower to fight nazi Germany toe to toe. What they did, however, was underestimate how fast they could advance. France also ignored a warning that the germans were amassing to push through the Ardennes, which allowed the nazis to face little resistance on that front. Apparently, if they took immediate action, they could’ve mobilized an air raid to completely destroy that nazi battalion, which would royally fuck up the rest of Hitler’s plans
France was never a pushover. The idea that being invaded by a bigger stronger army was their fault is weird and one I’ve only heard in the US.
Most countries that are colonies eventually seek independence, including most that France had.
It would only be a deterrent for empire building if there’s a pattern (probably 3 or 4 similar events), otherwise people would consider it a random hateful act of god, of which there are many, and of which have been interpreted many different ways
I was focussing on changing the timeline, not on deterring nations from doing something. Without English colonializers, there would have certainly been other colonizers, but e.g. the whole China situation would have likely been very different. There would not be a dominant anglo culture right now. No English-speaking USA, no English-speaking Australia, no large countries with an anglo common law-based legal system.
It would change the timeline quite a bit.
A highschool physics book translated in ancient Greek/linear B to mass copy and distribute to everyone. Maybe it’ll give the advantage to stop the Bronze Age Collapse.
I think hygiene and modern concepts of medicine and transmittable diseases would more likely prevent that collapse
@JeffKerman1999 bring some plans for the printing press and some plans to mass produce paper too. Back in the ancient times one sheet of paper was about $30 in todays money. A whole book would be the equivalant of tens of thousands of dollars.
Without digisation possibilities, limited oil usage, and an ever-increasing demand for paraphanalia, there will be no trees left.
Start flamewars on robotic astroturf accounts about how dumb Donald Trump is until Instagram starts and people try to prove he’s not an idiot, but in protesting they protest too much and nobody believes them by 2016.
So, I need a robot chatbot algorithm cookbook for the naughties and beyond.
ChatGPT with an unlimited account from several proxy IPs in 2016 could have changed the world.
Go back and destroy religion.
I often wonder how people would react if you showed up to a concert hall in, say, classical music era Europe or something and performed modern music. Assuming you could kit it to provide infrastructure for whatever your performance required, and the acoustics of the venue were idealized.
Would attendees hate it? Would the unfamiliar musical styles be repulsive to them? Would the sounds and textures of modern instrumentation like electric guitar and synthesizer upset or even frighten them? Or would they find something to appreciate about it? Would the music be copied and spread, becoming a time worn classic folk tune in an alternate future? Or would it be rebuked and suppressed, condemned for all time as evil influence? Which genres would have the best acceptance chances in which cultures, and which eras?
In my mind in particular, I think about this with the niche realm of video game soundtracks. If not just the music played as-is through some playback device (which would probably be rather boring, but who knows, maybe the novelty of recorded music alone would be fascinating enough) then perhaps arranged for live performance, like the orchestral performance of Undertale, or the Sinnohvation big band album. Or, of course, if the soundtrack was itself a recorded live performance, just perform it. These collections of compositions often outline rich adventures, communicated by a wide range of musical styles. I wonder if they are strong enough to stand alone, and if audiences would respond to them without the context that they were written to accompany.
Failing live performance (which would be trickier than one would think–to sound good, live music has to be written with its venue in mind, and I’d assume most modern music would sound like garbage when performed in victorian era concert halls or ancient ampitheaters), I’d also consider putting them to vinyl LPs and dumping them in old record shops in any era that had phonograph or turntable technology and see if they get discovered.
Why not just send back the video games themselves? I dunno. I guess I’m less interested in wowing them with futuristic technology and more interested in how they’d react to something they already have (music), but in a strange, new context.
Grays. Sports. Almanac.
Ending the first living cell on earth. If we are alone in the universe, preventing life from forming would do the most to change the timeline.
I’d love to see Socrates as modern day politician
- shiveyarbles ( @shiveyarbles@beehaw.org ) 2•8 months ago
You should hitch a ride with Bill and Ted
I want to say leave a modern computer or some other piece of technology at some point in time (maybe 50’s) but I’m not sure if it could be reversed engineered
Even if it had infinite power and was unbreakable, it would end up being fought over and coveted as holy relic, instead of being played with and studied
Hardly. The miniaturization required to make modern chips is ages ahead of anything possible in the 50s or 60s. Hell, them even getting some x-ray microscope to see the stupidly small transistors we have today would be a challenge in itself!