Blogocentric Formulations

Time Travel

Prompt ▼

We’re all curious about how past events could have played out, or we wish we could have witnessed a specific time in history. Write a blog post about what events you’d visit with your own time machine. Would you change a series of events?

If I had access to a time machine, I'd divide up my travels into two components. The non-interventionist "just visiting" component, and the "meddle with the timeline" component. For the first component, the tricky part would be narrowing the list of times and places to see. I suppose my top five list of historical places to visit in my time machine would include, in no particular order:

          Prehistoric times - gotta see a living dinosaur!
          Italy during the Renaissance
          Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, and Egypt during the time of Jesus
          Ancient Rome and/or Greece
          The Roaring 20s (before the Great Depression)

If I were going into "meddle with the timeline" mode that's a little tougher because (a) there's so much I'd want to change, and (b) I generally subscribe to the butterfly effect theory of time travel, and often think that if massive changes were made to pivotal events in history (the "kill Hitler so WWII never happened" type of things), it would have unintended consequences that we can't predict. So my meddling would probably be relegated to things designed to get us to the familiar present with just enough different to put our modern world in a better place.

For example, if I went back in time with $10,000 and systematically bought stock, jumped forward in time, sold that stock to have even more to buy stock in the next big company (i.e., IBM or GE to Microsoft to Apple to Tesla, etc.), you could have literally hundreds of billions of dollars. Maybe trillions. Now as much fun as it would be to imagine having astronomical personal wealth like that... imagine if that wealth was concentrated into a private firm that was designed to use its wealth and power to influence the shaping of economic policy for the better? It could be run by a board of progressive interests: pro democracy, pro equality, pro labor, etc. With that kind of money they could afford just as many (if not more) lobbyists as the special interests.

They could fund social programs designed to help the lower and middle classes. They could lobby for regulations on industries and special interests that otherwise could use their own power to circumvent accountability. They could invest in new technologies to fight climate change, or stabilize our crumbling educational system to make the next generation's outcomes that much better.

I'm a progressive at heart. I believe in change and pushing things forward to try and make the world a better place. If I had a time machine and used it to go back and meddle in the least invasive way possible, it would be to help the progressive interests of today build as strong of a foundation as possible so that the scales aren't quite as tipped against them as they currently are.