If you could travel in time and reshape history after your will, would you do it?

If you could travel in time and reshape history after your will, would you do it?


  • Total voters
    109
Given that I know what the butterfly effect is, unlike Ashton Kucher's character in the film The Butterfly Effect, I might be able to do a better job of planning for unforeseen consequences.

(such as, for example, jumping forward a year after my initial change to see what happens and try to "contain" any negative changes)
 
I'd prevent the French Enlightenment thinkers from ever publishing their works. Without that as a foundation, no French Revolution, no Napoleonic Wars, no Communist Manifesto (Marx just read Plato's, The Republic through the lens of the French Enlightenment), no WWI (as we know it), no Nazi Germany, no Soviet Union, no Communist dictatorships in Southeast Asia.

No United States?
 

Blackwood

Banned
The butterflies for any kind of time travel over more than a few days can be massive, though. For that reason alone, I wouldn't go, unless I had some kind of "sandbox" universe, separate from this one, where I could act without disturbing this time line.

Anyway, running with the "clean slate" sandbox idea - I would probably go dropping miscellaneous modern-day objects around in the past, seeing how they affect the world, then go back and start again.
 
Time Travel--Changing events

I believe in the multiverse theory, so I definitely wouldn't hestitate to intervene in historic events ala Turtledove. The question is: Would I be able to bring the resources to effect the desired change or just my self with whatever knowledge I possess and have the power to enforce my will upon the persons determining the course of events then? (Modern artillery to Constantinople, posing as a messenger of God, etc).
 

Pkmatrix

Monthly Donor
No, I wouldn't do it. I happen to like the Present, despite all of the problems we have. I can easily imagine a world much MUCH worse if some of the things I'd LOVE to change didn't happen or happened differently.
 
Well...

I generally believe that the butterfly effect could screw things over, especially the further you go back. I mean, sure, maybe you stopped the holocaust, but perhaps you in the proccess set us up for a nuclear war.

Beyond that, I believe time is immutable, and even if time travel is possible you couldn't actually change anything.

But if I really wanted to change something, I'd go back a thousand years and either stop the Byzantine Empire from collasping or stop the Crusades from happening, just to see how different the world turned out...though I've always thought it'd be interesting to see a sort of Guns of the South type deal...perhaps even giving guns to the Roman Republic!
 

Goldstein

Banned
Hmmm, I would have no problem in reshaping my own life (I.E. travelling back to 2006 and giving myself some advices), but I would not reshape history. Sure, OTL isn't all flowers and rainbows, but my corner of the world, as many others, is a very livable place, and my actions could result in a very worse reality overall by accident. As long as I have EUII and HOI2, I don't need to play god.
 
There's a bunch of timelines I'd try and create. The first I think was one in which the American colonies are given representation in London, thereby hopefully insuring Anglo-American hegemony for centuries to come.

EDIT: I didn't actually read the original post. So I answered under the assumption that I'd be creating new timelines not changing the original TL.
 
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