Make it a good one.
Can I appear anywhere? Pop into white house or Kremlin during the Cuban missile crisis and say: I’m from the future, you must attack, or… Then travel back to the future without finishing the sentence.
How much power do I have?
If I could divert the asteroid that resulted in the K-T event, that’d drastically change history. It may not have stopped dinosaurs from eventually going extinct, but it’d have given them 33 million more years more to evolve, and would certainly have affected mammalian evolutionary history. Maybe, just maybe, raptors would have gotten smart enough.
Ooh! Take back a lot of ravens. They’re almost smart enough already. Heck, I wonder if taking ravens back even earlier would be enough for them to evolve into something dominant. Problem is, they’re not particularly social, and I think that’s been our greatest advantage.
Or: introduce modern octopus to ancient oceans.
Stopping the K-T event is my favorite, though. It would absolutely have changed how life on Earth has evolved since.
30M years between extinction events is about all you get, though.
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Corvids, in general, but ravens seem to be the most intelligent of the bunch.
Crows are really communal though so might be a better bet for human like intelligence in the long run. Magpies too, not because they’d help but because they are both intelligent and total jerks so even the eventual crow people wouldn’t get to be happy thus maximizing the chaos.
That’s a really good point; social animals will get farther.
Crows, then.
Those are great ideas but miss thr mark on the second part. They all require a lot of work and we’re lazy.
Maybe? Like, how hard is it to put a Tsar Bomba on the asteroid when it’s a light-year away? Or, if it came from the Oort cloud, a thousand years before whatever nudged it in, nudged it in?
I don’t know. Putting a bomb on a timer on an asteroid seems pretty simple. If we’re time traveling, we’re also space traveling, because the solar system was about a third of the way around the galaxy at the K.T. event. In comparison, the shift to the impactor 1ly away would be margin-of-error stuff.
There were no constraints posted; no “you can only take a truckload of stuff”, or, “you appear on the Earth where that point was at that point in time”. I mean, if all you do is travel back in time 1 year without also traveling in space, you’re going to be breathing hard vacuum when you come out.
So: I’m assuming:
- I can choose where I come out
- I can take anything I want with my - I’m not traveling Terminator-style
- I can get my hands on a working Tsar Bomba before I go (that’d probably be the hardest, aside from violating the laws of physics)
However, for the other ideas? What’s hard about transporting a murder of crows to the Triassic? I don’t even have to go myself.
My name is Friedrich Trump (aka Frederick Trump) and I already did that and even had a nice hump.
Go to back to the big bang. You presence alone will butterfly effect the earth out of existence.
I hate the ‘hate’ part (pardon the pun) of the question.
I’d rather go back in time and get Jesus and bring him back here so that he can go all ‘temple money changers’ on today’s MAGA Christians asses, give them a proper yelling to.
I want to watch this series.
Jesus the time traveler tells off assholes.
The comedy series “Black Jesus” has some of that vibe, if I recall.
And yeah, it’s great.
You think they’d listen to a random brown dude who couldn’t speak English?
Something tells me that if Jesus was ‘Jesussy’ enough, that they’d listen to him, regardless of skin color.
I genuinely doubt it. And if he was proven to be truly Jesus and kept saying that then US Christians would either say “He doesn’t understand the modern world” or reject him for some other contrived reason (i.e. he was corrupted by modernity, the machine caused him to lose his connection to God, etc…)
Christians are full of hate because they love hate.
Jesus-y? Or Jesussy? Those seem different.
Yeah, no way the majority of Christians would instead opt to form schismatic sects, or simply adopt church doctrine decrying the false prophet of Brown Jesus.
If there’s a jesus with powers in the first place, he could do the holy spirit thing that happened after his death where the apostles proselytized by speaking in languages they (previously) couldn’t to people who couldn’t understand the native tongue.
I’m sure he’d be deported and ignored if not put into an asylum.
Nah, when he uses his Jesussy powers he’d stare them down quick like, and they’d beg for forgiveness.
All hail…the Jesussy
Procrastinate, the world is going down the drain just fine without my help.
I’d kill my parents before I was born.
Easy now. You only have to kill one of them.
Where’s the fun in that?
Wait until I’m about to die, then go back to when the first land-dwelling animals first started coming ashore. I’d bring a bunch of cockroaches with me and then I’d die there. Either the roaches or my decaying corpse will hopefully cause enough change to the timeline that humanity never develops in the first place.
I think that’s the most I could screw over the (human) world.
Life will find a way. Going back can be used to create nuclear winter but even then, life will go on.
To completely screw over the world, I would go into the future and acquire the source code for a general AI.
Then the world can be locked down and robots can be built to abuse every human and sentinent being individually, for a very long time.
I read about a study that said Homo sapiens may have been down to as few as 40 breeding pairs at one point.
I’ve got way more ammo than that in my closet.
By eradicating one species, you’re probably going to save the entire planet. I guess in 500 million years the descendants of modern crows could become the new dominant species and they’ll end up nuking the planet sooner or later. You win some, you loose some.
Land octopus ftw
Squid. They’re much more social than octopodes. I for one welcome our new TEN tentacled overlords. Everyone knows ten tentacles is better than eight.
Hmm I don’t know. Probably go back to Germany 1940 and give them all the information needed to develop nuclear weapons first. You just know that Hitler would’ve pushed the red button a hundred times over if he had the chance.
The TV serie “The Man in the High Castle” interestingly explores how would be the world if the nazis would have won the war.
Give the ancient civilization ruled by the most evil ruler modern weaponry and explain how it works
Your plan fails and the proletariat rise up and seize the weapos. You return back to a world of gay space communism.
The biggest killer for indigenous people is said to be infections - bacteria and viruses. Collect some in this time - maybe a cold - and go back and presence will be enough.
It depends on how you interpret “screw over the world”, but I guess “you hate everyone” implies humans. If you go back to the first humans from Africa, before spreading out, that may have the biggest impact - significant delay or suppression in development and spread, or eradication.
If I ever got sick from something like COVID, I’d just go back to medieval Europe and let it spread like wildfire. I guarantee this modern disease would absolutely wipe out a large majority of Europe and everywhere else it spreads in the world. And little to no effort besides waiting for if I ever get it (which I thankfully never have had and hope I never will).
I’m not sure if it would. Travel was awfully slow back then.
Fair enough, but I’d at least end a good amount of family trees if I’m lucky.
Much more virulent diseases didn’t wipe out Humanity I don’t know why that one would.
The thing here is that I have zero desire to screw people over.
Come on, little roleplay here
