I’d find the first motherfucker that started smoking stuff, whether it was first tobacco or whatever, and get rid of him/her before anyone else ever learned of the practice/habit.
Would have been better health for countless people afterwards, if simply nobody ever knew…
Smoking was discovered independently in many cultures with different substances used by different cultures. In the Americas, it was tobacco, while the Scythians of Central Asia used cannabis in ritualistic hotboxes, as evidenced by archaeological finds of smoking tools in kurgans. Other regions, like India and Southeast Asia, saw the smoking of opium and herbs.
Eliminate tobacco smokers? US Govt. tried, however American Indians are still with us today.
No, eliminate the single individual that originally invented tobacco smoking. Then nobody from that point on would ever know and the problem would have never existed in the first place.
Nip the problem directly at the source ya know. Guess you’re not all that good with these sort of hypothetical time travel thoughts…
Guess not. Colonizer.
I’d have Al Gore win.
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Well… He did.
Turns out it didn’t matter.
I’d go back and write a book with just enough truths to cement myself as a soothsayer. I’d then warn of wars, eco disasters, pandemics, natural disasters. Then I’d invest some money in some good places and make sure it made it to my kids after I’m gone.
There would be a rather catastrophic malfunction of a certain golden escalator in 2015.
As I wouldn’t like to change something and go fully dystopian when I return to present, I just go back and buy 1 million bitcoins, then return to present and influence present things just using big amounts of money.
After the bitcoin shortage oroviked by a by of 1.000.000 coins, its already low value plummeted and all the crypto bros started to use bitcoin2 instead effectively killing off the original bitcoin.
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/
I’d go hunt down Ronald Regan at about age 30 and empty an entire magazine of .45s into his dome while he slept.
Was looking for Regan.
Oooooh I like this one! Please do humanity the favor!
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.
That first guy smoking stuff is gonna get rekt
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.
Have you learned nothing from science fiction stories? I would not change anything.
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.
I’d go back and convince that art school to accept a certain art student…
I did nazi that one
I think saving JFK would really alter the timeline. I doubt Nixon would have ever been president.
Preventing the Iranian hostage crisis might also have had a huge impact.
Have your read 11/22/63? It’s Stephen King 's take on what would happen if a time traveler tries to stop the JFK assassination.
Great book, in my opinion.
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.
