When would you go?

I would like to travel to Gibraltar about 28,000 years ago to see the last of the Neanderthals. How human were they? Did they interbreed with our ancestors, or simply come to an end? What where their dreams, the stories they told over campfires? Did the last Neanderthal die alone, or might he have found some comfort in a camp of the people who had displaced his own? I think its tragic that there was no place on this earth where the Neanderthals could have held on.

If I were to travel back in time to when my home was built, I'd find my self floating in a hard vacuum between stars. In the thirty seconds that my lungs were being forced out of my mouth and my blood was boiling I would realize that the Earth wouldn't get here for another sixty two years.

Hi,

All these ideas are cool but in fact a device like this would be used viewing the very recent past almost all of the time.

Which hill did those troops hide behind yesterday?

Who was my wife with last night?

Was the fool banging on my door a cop one second ago?

BTW, I didn't make this up. I read a sf story years ago.

Thanks,

Hairy Larry

...where my father's dad and maternal grandparents settled after emigrating from Norway. I wish I knew more about them; Dad had many aunts and uncles, especially on the maternal side, that I only knew slightly. I also grew up just assuming they moved to the U.S., pulled themselves up by their proverbial bootstraps, and set about making it in the new world; lately I learned that there was actually quite a bit of travel to and from Norway, and that maybe I have very little idea of what these people's lives were like.

My mother's family were settled farmers in southeastern Minnesota, and they lived the hard, untraveled lives of small farmers. I wouldn't be so thrilled to go back and watch their misery.

I would definitely want to visit the 19th Century; I'd visit the USA first, to listen to Robert Green Ingersoll speak live and in person. Then I'd probably spend the rest of my time in the Cafes of Vienna, capital of the then Austro-Hungarian Empire, around the years leading up to the Fin de Ciecle, and eavesdrop on the conversations of all the great artists, psychoanalysts, political radicals, etc.

I'd hang out in Zuerich, Switzerland with the DADA movement during World War I, and maybe look up Vladimir Lenin's address, away from the bombs, gas and guns, then after the war make my way to Berlin, Germany for the Roaring 20s, then back to the USA, probably NYC, in 1932 for Roosevelt's reelection, and stay until 1946.

Then I'd jump forward to 1960-1963 and plant myself in Dealey Plaza on the morning of Nov 22, 1963, then fast forward to 1967-1968-1969, dividing my time between the USA, Canada, France, Germany, and Great Britain.

I was technically alive during Watergate (born 1971), but I'd probably like to watch it unfold as an adult.

That's about it for my historical jaunts.

look into the eyes of Lucy and to 'connect'.

I would like to watch the Venus of Willendorf be carved and to understand 'why?'.

I would like to watch the final stone be placed at Stonehenge.

Finally, I would love to see the capstone placed on Khufu's pyramid and understand 'how?'.

Top Choice - but completely selfish - a trip to the Jazz Age. I would need to participate though. Hang out with the Fitzgeralds (especially Zelda)and become an expat in Paris. Seeing a flapper would be great. Being a flapper would be excellent!

Also on the list - visit the Library of Alexandria...although again, I would need to have the power to act and save the books from burning.

See Crete way back when it might have been a society based on true cooperation. When men and women weren't trying to be "equal" but each person was recognized for their own individual talents. I'd like to think it was a gender blind civilization (as opposed to gender neutral which I think is a bit limiting.

Mandy U

I would like to watch the voyages of Ulysses and Gulliver, and then see Jesus rising to heaven and Muhammad riding his flying horse Burak around the desert and then to heaven. All those things must have been impressive.

Lessee...

I'd love to witness my grandfather's reaction when the Germans surrendered while he was fighting in Holland.
I'd like to see if Jesus actually was a living person who got wrapped up in legends, or if he was a complete fabrication.
I've always wanted to see certain cultures when they were in their heyday - the Inca empire, the pyramids at Giza, the temples at Luxor, the Parthenon, Stonehenge, etc.
I'd also like to jump another 2000 years into the future, just to see which religion actually WAS right... :P
I'm also curious to see what happens to our little solar system when the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies collide.

I'd wanna be there when Columbus first set eyes on the New World. Because, well, boats are cool, and I think that must have been an amazing group of men to be able to leave everything behind that they knew to tackle the seas day after day. And just imagine how humbling it must have been for them to at first think they were in a completely new place that no other human had seen before, and then encounter the endogenous peoples.

Its a time period I find incredibly intriguing, because it was a true adventure that led to the discovery of a new place, but only from one side's perspective. I'd love to witness that other perspective. And I wonder if I would be brave enough or willing to take on such an endeavor if I were given the opportunity today.

I'd like to go back and hover over the Bering Straights the last time it was, for a moment in time, high and dry. I would really like to see the first ones who came across and stayed.

I'd like to follow them as they trod the estuaries and the glaciers, seeking sources of food and raw materials and good water and medicine and a dream.

If I could follow the story of these pioneers for a hundred generations I could not only write the book of the human settlement of North America (with an expert ghost writer), but I could show where to look for archaeological clues that would flesh out the story for others.

I also think that I would be quite changed, having seen first hand the actual trials and challenges that were the daily concern for those who first walked upon this continent (I realize that they may not have been first). There have been many very well done simulations of prehistoric man and creatures interacting but I suspect that witnessing in person a few dozen people stampede a herd of mammoths over a cliff would cause those other scenes to fade to grey.

Historically, 1877 was a violent year in the US, starting with the seating of a president, Rutherford B. Hayes, who lost in the popular vote and won the electoral college vote through a deal that removed Union troops from the south and eliminate the last obstacle to the reassertion of white supremacy. The country was in a depression, and strikes by railroad workers in a dozen cities were put down with lethal attacks from the National Guard.

Personally, it was the year in which my great-grandfather Thomas H. Barry graduated from West Point in the first class to graduate a black cadet, Henry Ossian Flipper, to whom no classmate, including my great-grandfather, spoke except for official business or secretly from behind bushes for four years. It was also the year in which Frank Moorman, my grandfather was born in Greenville, Michigan, the first of what would be six children.

While we have lots of pictures of my great-grandfather, who rose to become major-general at a time when there were only about a dozen such officers in the whole country, I knew very little about grandfather Moorman. My father didn't talk about his childhood much, though there were a few tidbits. Lately, with the help of the internet, I've been able to piece together a bit more of a picture.

His father, Enos, abandoned his family in 1898 and signed up under an assumed name to fight in the Spanish-American War. In 1899, Frank, who had probably not finished high school, enlisted in the army as a private and served as an enlisted man for five years, ultimately rising to the rank of batallion sergeant-major. He was commissioned as a second lieutenant in 1904, the same year that my mother's father, William Bryden, graduated from West Point. So both grandfathers became second lieutenants in the same year, though by different paths.

I know that both of them served in the Philippines at various times, and my father was born there in 1912. In 1915, Lt. Moorman graduated first in his class from the Army Signal School, then at Fort Leavenworth, where I would be born in 1949. He was making himself known as a cryptographer, a fact I discovered the first time I googled my name and came across this reference: "Colonel Parker Hitt describes Lieutenant Frank Moorman's approach to solving the Playfair which addresses the keyword recovery logically."

When I asked my oldest brother from my father's first marriage if he knew about this, he replied, "No, but I do know that he solved a calculus problem every day of his life to keep his mind sharp."

During the first world war, he headed the Radio Intelligence Section in France, responsible for intercepting and decoding German messages and for writing code books for the US forces, ultimately at the rate of one every two weeks. At the end of the war, he wrote a detailed analysis of the importance of maintaining a significant code-breaking capability within the army. One of the people working under him was William Friedman, who is kind of a founding figure in the National Security Administration. This part of grandfather's story is told in the book The Codebreakers by David Kahn.

Toward the end of his career, while stationed in Washington, DC, he founded Boy Scout Troop 33 in Takoma Park. He was twice scoutmaster, during which time my father became an Eagle Scout. The troop is still in existence, and I gave a short talk about my grandfather a year or so ago, after more internet research.

As I learned more, I was more and more intrigued by this story. I grew up with pictures of my great-grandfather, maternal grandfather, and father as West Point graduates and major-generals. My great-grandfather was friends with Theodore Roosevelt and one of the leading officers of his day; my grandfather was deputy chief of staff to General Marshall at the start of the second world war; and my father was signal officer and later staff officer for the 82d Airborne Division and XVIII Airborne Corps, as well as confidant to General Matthew Ridgway, who created and commanded them both. My father prized learning, language, good food and wine, loved his family, and had a wry sense of humor about life and pomposity. Yet I would like to travel back to learn more about my other namesake, his father, of whom I know so little, yet who reached remarkable heights in his own way.

Frank Moorman, skeptic

That reminds me of a short story called "Wikihistory" by Desmond Warzel.

http://www.abyssandapex.com/200710-wikihistory.html

Ciao!

I'd like to have a good time-line to follow the beginnings of speech and how it developed to the earliest languages. I'd probably have to understand a lot more than I do now to get much out of it, though, so maybe I'd just want to be able to trace certain words and phrases back through the past. Who wouldn't want to know the true origins of words like "fuck", for instance.

I know Jesus was just a man, and probably not all that remarkable for his time. It seems to me he just had good PR. I'd like to be able to follow him through his birth, life, and eventual death, however that came about.

Like some others have mentioned, I'd like to see my parents, especially my mother, as a younger child. I've seen pictures of her in her early teens, smiling and laughing with her friends, and that's an image that is almost foreign to me. She'd lived a lot harder by the time I came around, and I'd love to watch her in a happier age.

There's a lot about my wife's childhood I'd like to witness. She's told me things, and there's nothing earth-shattering there, but I'd just like to get a better feel for how her childhood with 4 brothers and 4 sisters really was (in Germany, no less.)

I whined a lot as a kid about how hard I had it, and I still have little pity parties about the way I remember certain things happening. I'd like to watch some of the events with the wisdom (?) of my current age, and see just how much my memory coincides with the truth. I bet I'd be surprised, and a little ashamed.

Rob Miles
--
There are only 10 types of people in the world;
those who understand binary and those who don't.

I think it would be really cool to see our house being built. I also would like to just see what it was like to live in, say, a Welsh castle in 1200, or a New England village in 1750.

In world events, I'd like to see slavery as it was practiced in the Deep South. Witness Abraham Lincoln signing the Emancipation Proclamation. Watch the Civil War unfold ... and end. Stand in the crowd and listen to Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

Visit Scotland in its historic heyday. See Athens and Rome in theirs. Just for a bit of perspective, I'd like to peek in on the lives of royalty in previous eras – that of King John, for instance, or Nefertiti, and compare the privileges their wealth allowed them with the wealth that ordinary people of today enjoy.

I'd like to see an actual cattle drive, and a real wagon train. Visit Virginia City at its rip-roaring peak, and drop in on Mark Twain to see what he was writing that day. Tag along with Lewis and Clarke. Meet Balto.

Spend the night in a Lakota Sioux camp. Visit an Anasazi village.

See Nijinski dance, Scott Joplin play, and hear Billie Holliday sing. Visit the labs of Charles Proteus Steinmetz, Thomas Edison, and Nikola Tesla.

Watch a early performance by Blaze Starr. Lenny Bruce. The young Frank Sinatra. Beethoven. Houdini. Lotta Crabtree!

See Babe Didriksen win a race. See Jim Thorpe play football. See Secretariat run. Hang out at Marvel Comics through a few of Stan Lee’s early days.

Watch Wilbur and Orville Wright in their workshop, building the first flying machine, and then flying it. Stand in the crowd for Amelia Earhart’s glorious departure. Stand in the crowd for Charles Lindbergh’s glorious arrival.

Hear a Saturn V rocket roar at the sky.

Stand on the moon and watch Neil Armstrong step out onto it. Watch Lucy and her family as they took their own first steps into the humanity that would one day produce Armstrong.

See opening day, the first opening day, at Disneyland.

Spy on The Colonel, and find out which “eleven secret herbs and spices” are in Kentucky Fried Chicken. Look over the shoulder of John Pemberton and find out what’s REALLY in Coca-Cola.

I’d like to see the world before man. Stand under a passenger pigeon migration – with an umbrella – and watch them fly over for hours. Hover over the ocean and watch whales migrate. See wooly mammoths plodding over ice age tundra. Witness saber-toothed cats in their moment of glory. Take a picture of an Irish elk. See a pterodactyl fly!

I'd like to be able to hopscotch through my parents' lives, to know what made them the people they were. I’d also like to take in the highlights of the life of George W. Bush, in hopes of understanding what made him the stupid, lying, arrogant turd he became.

My life? Eh. I’ve lived it. I know all the important stuff. Although I am curious as hell about the mysterious “Betty Lou” mentioned in the heart tattoo on my left bicep.

My first thought was the Big Bang, just to know for sure what happened, if it was possible. But your talking about the house being built made me think... I think I would want to see what my parents were like when they were my age or younger.

1670 something.

That's when the first 'Dunbar' in our line stepped off the ship and into indentured servitude.

I want to know what made him take such a great leap - Scotland to Mass in those days was a one-way no-return deal.

Then - if I could - I'd fast forward a decade or two and see what happened to him: all we know about him is where he started and that he had kids. We don't know his wife's name, where he went after his debt was paid off, what he did for a living.

He's just a name and a set of bare facts. I'd like to flesh it out.

Oh, and I'd tell him one of his ancestors (my dad) is going to marry the ancestor (my mom) of those snooty Puritans in Plymouth that came over on the Mayflower: watch his eyes bulge out.