While I'm typing this...you know,me thinking about the past and everything,too much doctor who bla bla. Anyway, this is just one of the many threads with a little different perspection or how do you say? Another angle is it? Yea,that's the one, another angle of your and other people's life and what would you say,change and so on.

I would go back to the early 90's and marry Kurt Cobain, I would also make cranky, blonde babies with him.

This is my world, my earth. Do you have a better suggestion of what to do?

Beautiful! :lovestruc I would go back in the Medieval times so I can make a gothic cathedral in France and oh, I would love to go back in Egypt to visit the pyramids in their shine and maybe I meet the aliens,who knows? But that's just me a history lover. :lovestruc

I like stuff like that, I really hope this thread catches on. I would also like to assassinate Hitler and meet Jesus just to have a chat, but that's not nearly as urgent as Kurt.

I like history and hearing people talk about it but I'm simply not smart enough to speak of it myself.

Assassination of Hitler,well yes or atleast ask him why did he do all those terrible crimes. I would like to change the person I am for Neil Armstrong and go to the moon. Yay! Or instead of Mars I would create a planet called Unicorn Shores. :lovestruc

If I could go back in time I would prevent myself from ruining one of the best friendships I've ever had.

If I could go back in time I think I'd go back to last night and get twice as much sleep each night, then maybe again so I could read a book or two I've been meaning to, and I'd check out having conversations with myself - I've got a feeling it's probably not any better than talking with the rest of you, but I'm betting it's slightly better even IF I can't strangle Past Me just because he's being a dumbass sometimes.

Honestly, the past was kind of shit though. The only way this really works is if I wait long enough to go back into the past that I can give myself a proper time machine so I can go into the future. On the other hand, if I were god I suspect I'd do the usual sorts of god things eventually - amuse myself by torturing mortals, occasionally changing myself into an unlikely animal to go molest women doing their laundry, start wars, and kill and eat my parents. Maybe I could establish some arbitrary rules no one could abide by and punish people for disobeying? "YOU THOUGHT ABOUT CORN! TO THE NOOGIES WITH YOU FOREVER!"

And with any of this? Cackling. I think cackling comes with any of this.

Remember, that if you go back in time and change things, you can never go home again.

Make my mother wait until she was done school to have me so she wouldn't blame me for ruining her life Then maybe she wouldn't be such a bitter bitch all the time.

Everything is possible! This the alice thread!

I would love to go back in my own life and do some things differently - try to be a better person with my current level of knowledge.
Another thing I'd like to do would be try to save my friend from dying in a construction accident when he was 19 years old. Would have to plan it out in advance and give it my best shot. Also try to save people from serial killers.

I think I would like to go check out some of the mysteries that are still unsolved nowadays, you know. Like, as someone said above, know more about lost cultures like the Egyptians or the Mayans or see extinct species such as dinosaurs, the dodo, stuff like that.
Besides that, I think traveling to the past would be boring as hell. Not that I would like to go to the future either. I'm exactly where I need to be People complain about everything - and I'm one of them, of course! - but I firmly think the world is changing for the better. Sometimes the changes are more blatant, sometimes more subtle and slow but we are always going somewhere better. People who say that "life was better back then" simply forgot what they were complaining about "back then".

This thread is not just about travelling to the past,it's also about what changes would you make,because in this thread we're playing ''god''. The posibilities are endless.

If I went back into time I would find a way to scare my dad into leaving my mom wile she was pregnant so neither of us would have to put up with his shit. Yeah, I wouldn't have a father in my life and things may be a bit difficult, but at least neither of us would have to be his emotional punching bags.

Also, I would avoid becoming a fatass. Yeah, that would be amazing.

I would change my school choice because I was in a terrible school in 6th grade and half of 7th grade. I won't say the name of this school, or what kind of school it was, I'll just say I hated it. Too much homework, too small of a building, a uniform (ugh)…

I could go on, but I'm too lazy. Tell me if you want to know more.

If there was an event that was going to bring me into the past then I would watch the next three big Lottos and print the numbers using, of course, a nice font. Then I would win and never have to go into that crummy t-shirt business that my lousy graphic design is headed. I would buy Adobe and the rights to package 500 or so really good typefaces so consumers would be licensed to use them. Then buy iStockPhoto, Getty Images, and Corbis and convert them into fair-priced, on-demand stock photography sites. Oh, forgot political spin. I mean when you're that wealthy it would go that way, right? The forums would promote an environment to edit Fox News anchors, reporters, and their guest "experts" *cough, hipster racists, cough* into humorous spin art. Is there such a term? "Spin Art" it is! It's not slander, it's fictional comedy that only an unreasonable person would take seriously, right? I'm going to need a really good attorney.

I'd be too terrified to change anything because I've read too many time travel books. So I'd just go and be a dorky tourist in a bunch of cool historical eras and probably die of smallpox or something. Or get burned as a witch.

And assuming I can change things and not have everything backfire and be horrible (like, assassinating Hitler prevents WWII instead of making a giant power vacuum that triggers a worse war) I'd go back and kill a bunch of megalomaniac dickhead genocide people. Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin, just to start with. And again, assuming I can literally do no wrong and am incapable of just ruining everything forever, I'd also try to do stuff like brokering peace between warring ethnic groups and try to prevent stuff like the Rwandan and Armenian genocides. If I can't do any of that, I'd settle for traveling through time and kicking terrible people in the balls, because in the grand scheme of things "got nut-shotted by a gibbering hysterical witch woman" isn't going to make enough of an impact on people to actually change the course of history, but it would make me feel better.

Ooo! I might try and take vaccines back in time, as well, try to prevent epidemics. Or just teach people about hand-washing.

EDIT: oh MAN what if the only way to do a non-disastrous historical intervention/assassination was to kill the person as a baby/young child??? Like, the only way to kill Hitler without creating a disastrous power vacuum is to strangle him as a baby? I don't know if I could stomach being a time traveling baby murderer. Gosh, I'm glad time travel is probably not possible.

Also, preventing World War I might be, in the grand scheme of things, the "best" thing you could do from a modern viewpoint. Prevents World War II, which prevents the Cold War, which prevents Soviet/American meddling across the globe, which prevents a lot of smaller wars, conflicts, and genocides over the course of the century. Although the downside is that you'd render the present virtually unrecognizable. I'd also be really worried about all of the empires that existed at the start of the 20th century. Most of them were toppled in the aftermath of WWI, so preventing that war might just be extending the shelf-life of colonization, which would be capital-b Bad.

THIS IS WHY I WOULDN'T CHANGE ANYTHING.

You know, this might turn into a history nerd-fest... but all this murdering Hitler talk is kind of irrelevant. If you want to stop the Second World War and all the ensuing atrocities and clusterfuckery, you need to stop the First World War from happening.

First destination: Travel back in time with the best oncology team I can find, and cure Kaiser Frederick III of throat cancer. Germany reforms into a liberal constitutional monarchy.

Second destination: Travel to 1907 Vienna and bribe the Academy of Fine Arts into letting Adolf Hitler become an art student there.

Third destination: Travel to 1914 Belgrade and convince the Serbian Army to recruit Gavrilo Princip into their ranks, as he initially attempted. He never assassinates Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

There. No killing necessary.

Honesly, I think the safest (and most fun) thing you could without irrevocably changing the course of everything would be to go all the way back and frolic with dinosaurs. Worst possible outcome is that you die in the past and your preserved skeleton confuses the shit out of some scientists.

On an unrelated note, I think it's hysterical that someone clicked 'helpful' on your step-by-step guide to preventing WWI and WWII.

Go back and wipe myself out of the world..I am a waste of air!!

I'd assassinate Christopher Columbus before he even sailed off.

It would be fascinating to see whether, given more time, my ancestors could ever have come up with some things on their own that instead they had to learn from yours. Like, say, personal hygiene. I don't know that it would be that much fun to go back and visit people who were essentially living in a sewer.

What I always wonder about as far as "changing-history-with-a-time-machine" goes (even setting aside all the science-fiction issues and just looking at the impact on history) is how monumental the two World Wars were on human history- think about it.

WWI, in addition to setting up WWII, really started to bring an end to the politics that had often dominated Europe for the preceding few centuries. It established the United States as a world power to be reckoned with, laid the building blocks for international organizations like the UN, thanks to the experiment of the League of Nations, helped push Communism into being an effective power on the world stage, and really brought attention to the rising cost of warfare in an increasingly modernized and mechanized world.

World War Two did all this and more. It pulled the entire world (through a wide variety of approaches, but still) out of the Great Depression, laid the foundations for the world political dynamic of the entire second half of the 20th Century, and really, consider any other ten-year period you want to- can you think of any time where politics, science, technology, and even sociology took such strides as they did in the period from 1935-1945? And then after the war, it launched the bipolar world of the Cold War, which drove most of the technological and political changes for the next 50 years...

Obviously there's plenty of stuff here that is unquestionably negative, but I just have to wonder- if these wars hadn't happened, where would we be today? Would we still have a world dominated by Great Game-style politics and the "entangling alliances" that sparked the Great War? Would air travel (or even space travel) have ever become considered practical without the push that wartime development gave it? What would the world look like with such a inconceivably large shift in its fortunes?

Yeah, even without concern for time-travel paradoxes in-and-of-themselves, I'm gonna have to agree with @Mammal on this one- I'd opt for going back before humanity was really at a stage where IDEAS could be such a corrupting influence- I think I can keep myself from screwing up the NATURAL world too much.

I'm gonna spend a few years sitting on the edge of a pristine, Pleistocene-era Grand Canyon myself, thank you very much!

I was going to say some things that I would change about my past, but then I realised that if I changed those things, I never would have met my horse, who was the love of my life. So now I think I would like to go back to when she was still alive, and spend some more time with her.

If I go back in time, that means I'd be the age when I left in August 2014.

In that case, I'm going back to the 1970s and marry Alice Cooper, the rock star with a menagerie of snakes and the black eye makeup. Just imagine the children...They'd get my thirst for knowledge and art and my youthful looks and their father's bravery around their father's snake and his rarely-seen smile (certainly not from my genes. I am still scared of every little thing. Not only that, I have British teeth, even after braces), then introduce today's technology to the masses and improve relationships with the straight and LGBTIPA communities, and give reason to match the wages between genders...I could go on.

If we had the upper hand 45 years prior, all societal ills and lack of connections to the world would literally be a thing of the past.

Me in 1974: Where's Alice II?
(me frantically searching the Arizona mansion. Alice walks in.)
Alice: Honey, what are you doing?
Me: Your 3-year old son Alice II is gone.
Alice: He was with me. I was showing the snakes to him. I put him in his bed for his nap.
Me: He better be there...
(I go upstairs and Alice II is asleep)
Me: You're a lucky man that I am forgiving. You don't want to see the ligress from within.
Alice: Honey, come here a minute. I know you had a rough childhood.
(Alice holds me)
Alice: Take it easy for everyone's sake. I know you lost people and animals near and dear to you. So have I. Try sleeping off your anxiety and I'll watch Junior during his nap.
Me: Okay, sweetheart.
(Alice stoops down to kiss me)

(it would end with a family cuddle on a beat-up, futon-styled mattress a la something that I used to do with my parents at that age and yes, I'd sew cute outfits for my son. Make a 3-headed snake pajama onesie with what I know.)

I may be going against a causal censor of something making the universe collapse.