Fascinating also is the idea of a time-machine: what uses it could be put to, and what the effects would be on the individual travelling back in time. If I you went back to 1600, for example, would you still be you, or would you on arrival be a bit of every one of your n thousand ancestors and the animals and plants they had eaten?
Interesting.
As to the uses time travel could be put to, I am in no doubt as to what I would do (stepping into fantasy land here, but why not?).
Armed Rambo-like with fearsome knives and firearms, and carrying a large supply of nuclear weapons on my Good Timeship Rectifier, I would head first for 5th century B.C. Persia and nuke it. Periclean Athens would have been saved.
Babylon before the Jewish captivity - flat, black, and glowing in the dark, ditto Egypt of the Pharaohs, Rome in the days of its empire, the Anglo-Saxon homeland (keeping Britain Celtic) and the Vikings, who were a European plague and, as Normans, invaded Britain in 1066.
The Arabs would never have got to Spain, nor the Saracens to the Middle East. 18th Century Barbary pirates? Kaboom!
"Reformation"? Armed to the teeth, Rambo-footer would take care of Wycliffe, Luther, Huss, Henry VIII and succeeding Tudors.
Cromwell probably would have remained a nobody, but if not, Zapp - he's gone.
London and Liverpool nuked, probably several times to put and end to the slave trade, and Germany in 1800, so Napoleon could win and liberate Ireland, Scotland, and Poland.
Prussia nuked in 1869 (no Franco-Prussian war) and again in 1880 to get rid of the whole vile racist apparatus of Bismark and Falk.
Depending on the results of the previous actions, I might need to take out Marx, Engels, and a bunch of dingy fin-de-siecle anarchists.
Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, the Frankfurt School, Beria, and a few others whose names escape me, impaled on the Kremlin spires. No 1917 revolution. Hitler, or Germany, or both, rubbed out before they started killing anybody.
Have I missed anyone?
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And on my return to Now, what would I find? Everyone speaking Gaelic, Greek, or Slavonic? No Latinate languages? No English? No Gothic architecture?
As I said, interesting.
And what would you do with your time-machine?
