Ask Lemmy

A lot of things I didn't mean to, most likely.

I guess I would try to warn people that the tsunami was coming.

I'd invent the printing press during the classical era and watch what happens from there. I guess the folks at Carthage would also enjoy knowing about paper making, better wind-powered sails for ships and to be on the lookout for those "Romanes"

Well that first guy smoking stuff will have enough to deal with so probably something else.

Get rid of Ronald Reagan.

i would find the first guy that started smoking stuff and congratulate them for inventing fire

I prefer to rewind time with me along, be young again, that kind of time travel. Of course with my knowledge and memories of up to before my "time travel", be retained. I could only remember what I could any way. The future would surely not happen exactly as the same before. Live a new younger life, a seemingly fresh restart at an early point in my life.

I'd find the guy who became the first guy to smoke stuff after the original first guy got stopped.

Changes could have so many repercussions even well meaning actions could make things worse. The safer bet would be to collect lost books and art.

That said, stopping the Lincoln assassination is tempting. I'd hope to change reconstruction to better wipe out the confederacy, prevent lost cause doctrine, and better integrate former slaves into full citizenship and society.

time to kick that fish back into the water where it belonged. Stay in your lane, ancient precursor animals.

I would get a bunch of party hats in RuneScape.

Depends on time travel method and how would it affect reality (would it create a new timeline or replace the one we currently live in?).

That first guy smoking stuff is gonna get rekt

I would try to match Genghis Khan up with a proper dad.

Bring back Sodium batteries and how to make them as well as solar panel production. Probably to Nikola Tesla.

To be a bit more precise whatever the easiest to produce versions of each are not the best ones so they could actually be produced at the tech level at the time.

I'm sure they would still end up creating equivalents of oil Barons etc. but at least it would be based on a cleaner tech and more able to improve from there.

Nothing just incase.

Well, I don't think anyone is really sure just how exactly time travel can mess with stuff. I would probably take a page from some time travel movie I saw. I would want to avoid any sort of temporal paradox and avoid too many changes.

So, I would probably remove myself from the equation as much as possible. Go to a hotel or somewhere where I can avoid accidentally running into anyone I might know. Leave all electronics behind, but take a book or something. Spend the whole day avoiding TV/News/People and just reading or work on perfecting a skill. At the end of the day I would call up a broker from the hotel room and find out which stock had the greatest percentage gain that day. Just enough information for one good trade.

Then I would go back to that morning, buy up a ton of that stock, live out life normally, then sell the stock at the end of the day.

Rinse and repeat for a short time.

I would absolutely avoid something like winning the lottery, but for those of you who would use time travel to win the lottery, you might want to follow the advice from this comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/24vo34/whats_the_happiest_5word_sentence_you_could_hear/chb38xf/

My own birth, I guess.

Maybe go back in time and punch my dad in the balls about 9 months before I was born.

Then all that would remain of me would be a weird story where my dad got socked in the nuts by a ghost that looked just like him.