h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

If you had a time machine which could only work once (important), would you set it to go forward into the future or back into the past?

What is the single most useful thing you could do with it to benefit mankind?

Hmmmmm.

Bring a recording device to a piano concerto by Mozart?
Warn Captain Smith of the iceberg that the Titanic is approaching?
Teach Julius Caesar to play computer solitaire?
Demonstrate to Sir Walter Raleigh that tobacco smoking causes lung cancer?
Bring a rocket with enough explosives to destroy the asteroid that extinguished the dinosaurs?

Try to have lunch with the local city authorities and advise them that those tremors are something to worry about.

And after Pompeii, try the same with the folks in Herculaneum ...

Presumably, I'd be stuck wherever I went with my once only jump?

I'm staying here then.

PP.

Traveller in Time watching Terra Nova (Television series)
"Making some more limiting assumptions;
--Not more things with you then you can carry
--The time machine is a once only

Meet Da Vinci, Archimedes or some other out of the box thinkers. Would like to have a chat with one of those guys (Perhaps first kick start their language). (Edison, Faraday, Volta . . . )

With some primitive survival skills any modern human should be able to play 'magician' in most of the more primitive cultures.

Or as a last thing to do in your life,
Go to the Cambrian era, help the life kick start with some complex DNA. "

Trouble is, even if you went to a luxurious place/time like Louis XIV's Versailles, chances are you'd be one of the peasants or servants. You'd find out pretty quickly that the King ate with his fingers, bathed maybe once a year, and smelled just as bad as everyone else...

Travel to far back could be a problem, I don't think we could communicate in english much further back than 1500. That would pose about the biggest problem, the next is religion and the proper observance, they burnt heretics

Talk about stick out like a sore thumb

I know enough basic Latin to get by, but no one nowadays is sure how it was pronounced. You'd be sure to stick out as an outsider as soon as you opened your mouth.

No need. Just speak loudly in English. They are bound to understand!

PP.

Won't you change history by introducing English words and phrases into their vernacular?

Since the "machine" will only work once, you're where-ever for the rest of your time. So would you be much worried about change past or future history?

If that's the case, why bother doing anything for the next generation?

Because you can?

This isn't a well-considered answer or anything, but at this moment, having recently seen Black Sails, which is an awesome show, I would totally go back to the Caribbean in 1710 and become a pirate!

The next generation will get along just fine without me. What with their replicators, and their tricorders, and their transporters, and their Heisenberg Compensators, and their positronic androidators...

Remember to take a supply of penicillin with you Mr X.

PP.

"The next generation will get along just fine without me. What with their replicators, and their tricorders, and their transporters, and their Heisenberg Compensators, and their positronic androidators..." [Mr X]

They will reject much of what we believe in, then, when intimations of mortality start appearing to them, they will start to realize that our generation maybe had some things worth preserving or even listening to.

Of course, no generation is monolithic [cue "Also Sprach Zarathustra"}

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9iCHKhBU5s

I'd invent Mayonnaise.

A2043398

http://h2g2.com/entry/A2043398

Grab some relatively cheap objects, go forward 300 years, then sell your priceless antiques (and all in their original packaging! Wow!) to a few private collectors, and live like a king!