Skip Navigation
72 comments
  • I'd go back to February of 2016, to a town in California, at the banks of the river that my friend decided he wanted to "take a swim" in, and try to stop him. I'd bring with me copies of all the news articles reporting about how he drowned in that river and that someone found his body and called the authorities. I'd show him a copy of my text messages back and forth with his sister when she told me what happened to him. She claimed that he went swimming in the river often and that he was unaware that the current that day was really strong. I wanted to believe her, but I knew he was troubled, that he ad psychosis and PTSD, and that he didn't want to live past 40. And who the fuck swims in a river in February!? I would do my best to try and save his life.

    • A fire extinguisher to the library of Alexandria.
    • A small pox variolation kit to ~13thC somewhere in the Americas. Probably the PNW to preserve the linguistic diversity there, maybe the amazon river, the Tlaxcala or the groups who would go on the confederate into the Haudenosaunee.
    • Vials of horse-plague to the cucteni trypillians, see if we can't blunt that Indo-European expansion somewhat. If it's virulent enough, maybe we get lucky and weaken the power of aristocrats across Eurasia for millenia to come. (Sorry horses!).
    • Just for me, some magic mushrooms to shangqiu, henan ~325 BCE ish. See if I can't convince Zhuang Zhou to trip with me.
    • It's not so much the fire in Alexandria that you have to worry about although that is what is remembered, it's the people who are setting fire to the library of Alexandria that you have to worry about. A single fire extinguisher won't necessarily stop people from killing you and then burning everything down anyway.

      My suggestion would be to also include a machine gun and a couple of hundred rounds of ammo so that you can kill them first and stop the fire from ever being started in the first place.

  • I take an entire renewable energy system and a team of people both to set it up and to prepare a settlement. I want to be placed in America in prehistory. We're getting in there and starting over before the capitalists ruin everything. We're going resource based babyyy

    • Renewables require industry and high tech to produce and maintain. If you go far enough back to establish a foothold, your renewables will most likely not be functioning by the time colonists arrive. If you settle just before they do, you won't be able to have much advantage. In either case, unless you go really far back, you're still settling and taking land from indigenous people.

      What are you hoping to achieve?

      • Hey they said I could take anything. That includes whatever is needed to keep them functioning. I'm trying to buy us more time before environmental collapse. Cause at this rate we aren't solving shit. There isn't a single place you can go back to where someone or something isn't harmed or changed in the process.

  • If I could transport my mind into my childhood body with a fedora, I would go back to about three when I could say weird shit without drawing too much attention.

    Then it's just a matter of time to build my brand on the internet. I'll start in yahoo chat rooms, responding to anyone who types 16/F/Cali, I will call them females and tell them about my sword collection. I will claim to be a ninja.

    As I grow older, my methods will become more sophisticated, cell phones will open up dating apps to my awkward and slightly offensive communication. I'll be the first to post unironic pictures of myself with a trenchcoat and swords to MySpace, thereby preventing columbine through the power of cringe.

    I'll start the incel movement a decade ahead, only to be revealed as a ten year old kid, shaming everyone involved. Then I'll get a youtube channel and be the first gamer, playing and reviewing games while alluding to controversial opinions on immigrants and the gays, growing so big in an empty market and crashing so hard it'll never start again, when it comes out that I roleplay as a gay femboy on tumblr.

    I will take the cringe upon myself to save the world from its sins. I will be the Edgelord and savior.

  • I probably go to the late 1400s American east coast, wherever it was that Columbus landed and bring a couple of machine guns and a few grenades and claymores alongside an electric ATV and tow cart filled with a solar power recharging station, a shit ton of medical equipment, food, and hardy seeds.

    That bastard Columbus would not survive setting foot on this soil, and his failure to return from his world-changing exploration mission would delay European expansion at least for the remainder of my life likely.

    I would then make the mid country journey to my home tribe and use the information and technology that I brought with me to accelerate their advancement and development so that whenever the Europeans finally made landfall, assuming I didn't break down or get killed in the process they would encounter a developed society fully prepared to fight a home team advantage war against them.

72 comments