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If you could travel back in time without worrying what your changes would cause, how could you improve the world?


  • The rules of our discussion
    • Let’s presume that time travel is possible
    • Your time machine takes you to the past and you get stuck
    • You don’t care about changing the future
    • You are somehow able to very quickly pick up the language
    • You’re able to get some people to listen to your ideas
      • Maybe something you can predict? Maybe you flatter the king.
  • How good of a time traveler would you be?
    • What are your goals?
    • Experience and observe the past? Document that?
    • Bend the curve of the future?
      • Introduce ideas in ethics and philosophy before their time?
      • Speed up the progression of technology?
    • Being comfortable
    • Do you know enough?
  • 100ish years ago
    • Maybe you could make a good deal during the roaring 20’s and take your money out before the crash
    • You could help improve the state of the art with cars?
    • Earlier electric or hybrid cars?
    • Stopping WW1 from starting would be pretty easy if you know some basic history about how it started
    • Computer Science
  • 150ish years ago
    • Speed up the development of the internal combustion engine
    • Environmental improvements
    • Suffrage movement
    • Relativity
    • Computer science
  • 250-300 years ago
    • Improve knowledge of electricity
    • Be a writer on the ideas and ideals of democracy
    • Invent the bicycle early
    • Radio & Telephone
    • Photography
  • 300-400 years ago
    • Great advances in the concepts of electricity and magnetism
      • Radio, maybe
    • The bicycle could be early
    • Flip books/motion picture ideas
  • 1000 years ago
    • Scientific method
    • Ethical philosophy
    • Modern theory of state
    • Recording audio
    • Exercise and nutrition
    • Germ theory of medicine
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