Make it a good one.

  • esc27@lemmy.world
    28·
    2 months ago

    Shoot Arch Duke Ferdinand. Few people even now about it today, but he was subject to a horribly mangled assassination attempt that many scholars belive would have set off a major war in Europe had he died.

  • ThePowerOfGeek@lemmy.worldEnglish
    19·
    2 months ago

    Go back in time and do something to prevent Vasily Aleksandrovich Arkhipov from becoming the Executive Officer on the B-59 Soviet nuclear sub in October 1962. He’s the guy who talked the Captain and the Political Officer out of launching the nukes when they thought they were being attacked by the US Navy during the Cuban Missile Crisis. His persuasiveness is generally considered to have avoided WWIII from starting then.

  • MudMan@fedia.io
    12·
    2 months ago

    You’re going to pretend we’re not on that timeline right now? I see your play, time traveller.

  • zxqwas@lemmy.world
    7·
    2 months ago

    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.

  • LouNeko@lemmy.world
    6·
    2 months ago

    Go to back to the big bang. You presence alone will butterfly effect the earth out of existence.

      • GoodLuckToFriends@lemmy.todayEnglish
        3·
        2 months ago

        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.

        • xmunk@sh.itjust.works
          3·
          2 months ago

          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.

        • pandapoo@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          11·
          2 months ago

          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.

  • the_riviera_kid@lemmy.world
    3·
    2 months ago

    Well current events lead me to believe that allowing the orange turd to live would do the job nicely so in the spirit of laziness I’d do absolutely nothing.

  • froh42@lemmy.world
    41·
    2 months ago

    My name is Friedrich Trump (aka Frederick Trump) and I already did that and even had a nice hump.

  • pageturner@lemmy.world
    2·
    2 months ago

    Land the time machine on top of the first animal to walk on land. Don’t even have to get out of the machine.

  • Miles O'Brien@startrek.websiteEnglish
    2·
    2 months ago

    Go punt kick the first fish back into the ocean as it tries to waddle it’s fat ass out of the water.

    I know that’s not how evolution works but I can dream… Life would likely be vastly different given such a long period of time with something like that changing either way.

  • CarbonatedPastaSauce@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    2 months ago

    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.

    • chaosCruiser@futurology.todayEnglish
      4·
      2 months ago

      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.

  • 𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍@midwest.social
    2·
    2 months ago

    I really like this question. So: rather than killing Hitler, what if, instead, you killed Stalin? Was it inevitable that a strongman dictator would have taken over, and ruined the potential of communism? I guess we have evidence that the answer is “yes,” in the form of Mao, but weren’t the Chinese communist party(s) greatly influenced by the Soviet model? What if Russia had, instead, developed a more democratic system of government - was it possible, and couldn’t it have affected how China’s developed? But, maybe it is always inevitable that dictators emerge from internal revolutions like this.

    Here’s another scenario: what if you stopped Oswald, and prevented Kennedy from being assassinated? He was popular, and likely to win a second term. What would 4 (~5) more years of Kennedy look like?