Ask Lemmy

Go back in time and stop diddy from diddling so bad.

Visit the library of Alexandria before it burned, just to see the insane amount of books.

As someone else commented, see how stonehenge was built/used.

Find out how the Antikythera mechanism worked and how it was used.

Witness the construction of the pyramids.

Experience the telling of the norse mythology.

Probably see the dinosaurs in the late Cretaceous. Just before the KT extinction. I want to know how accurate we are about what dinosaurs looked like. All we know are from the bones and some fossilized skin and feathers here and there. I bet there are a TON of animals we don't even know about because they were never fossilized. What did the T-Rex use their little arms for? Were dinosaurs covered with waddles, weird skin flaps, some hairy stuff, and what color were they? For comparison, if we drew modern animals like we draw dinosaurs from just their skeletons:

I'd love to get the chance to talk to Isaac Asimov and talk to him about the future and how he decided to start releasing his stories. Probably around 1972 because I liked bicentennial man a lot.

Other than that:

• go back to see socialist radical anti-authoritarian Jesus do his real protesting instead of the biblical king washed stories.
• or go back to the fall of Amen to see the end and beginning of monotheism of the modern day and understand the actual departure of the worker force
• see if I can find the actual great flood that all the myths seem to talk about and see if the conspiracy of it being about the Mediterranean basin is true. So probably Mesopotamia time and hope it's recent enough memory to hear actual stories.

I would go back to when this post had no comments and be the first so I can explain to everyone else what no consequence means. That way when I come back to the present I can still be disappointed by half of the answers in this thread.

Camera in hand, time to visit Chavín lands! They're one of the earliest recognizable societies of the Peruvian Andes. Given that a language barrier would be true for pretty much any "too far back" visits, might as well go with one that I'm really damn curious about!

Assuming no consequences means I won't die, or catch a disease or something, I'd go back like a hundred million years or so to look at dinosaurs.

Option 1: Attend Stewen Hawking's time traveller party - he likely won't expect someone so dumb though
Option 2: Watch and experience Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia - I often hear our conservatives argue this was actually friendly

I'd definitely try to record everything in both cases.

Initially I read that as “you can go back in time for 24 hours” and thought why would 24 hours ago be that interesting? :)

So my initial answer is: Not eating the late night burger I had last night.

My final answer is: San Francisco in the 60s/70s to hang out with the Dead and all the other amazing artists of that time. Maybe see a show at the Fillmore.

I would go back to ancient Rome, Athens, or somewhere similar and just do turism.

It would be incredibly cool to just look around and feel it how the world has back then. Video games like Assassins creed Odyssey scratch that itch but it would obviously be cooler in real life.

I'd go back to fuck at a Roman bath house in ancient times. Fuck it, no regrets.

I'd like to go back many times to earlier in my life and try different dialogue options.

Like that time you thought of the perfect comeback two days later?

Or just learn how people act and react. If I say this, they react that way. Now if I say that how do they react?

• Kill as many communist leaders as possible

edit: FUUUUUCK NO CONSEQUENCES HOW DARE YOU

At first I thought you meant "go back in time 24hs" in which case my answer would have been "yes! And get my haircut elsewhere!!!" But seeing what you mean for real, and with no consequences, I'd go back in time to see extinct animals. Shame I can't bring photos back with me

I would prefer to go back in time literally 24 hours and HAVE consequences.

I would not eat the food that likely gave me food poisoning.

I'd go back to the Yukon Gold Rush and make sure Fred Trump never made it out of Canada.

Edit: Doh! No consequences... huh. I'm not really sure it would be worth the trip then.

Go back to see how they built Stonehenge

(Assuming that "no consequence" also means that I won't die on the trip...)

• Witness the Tunguska impact.

• See a Beatles show when they were just some small time dudes playing in a crummy club.

• Visit the Great Exhibition of 1851 and go inside the Crystal Palace

• Going back to slavery and beat some slave masters
• Meet my mom when she was younger, maybe in high school. Tell her that she seems like a lovely young lady and very smart. I don't think she heard that enough.
• Go back to the first day I got my first cat.
• I would like to see a royal party of some kind.
• Go to a Shakespeare play while he was still alive.
• Go back to where my grandma alleges she met Bill Cosby to confirm if it's true, and, if so, punch him because apperently he was rude as hell.

My two choices:

• Pontic Steppe, around 3000 BCE. Likely region where Late Proto-Indo-European was spoken.
• northern Lazio, around 650 BCE. If possible/reasonable I want to spend a bit of time in an Etruscan city, then in a Faliscan city, then in a Sabine one. I'm OK travelling by foot if necessary, as long as there's always people talking around me.

In both cases I want to be able to record everything people say. Preferably video, but audio is good enough. I just want to know better about languages of the past.

It's kind of tempting to include 1450 Uruguay as a choice, since we barely know anything about the Charrúa language. However the Charrúa weren't exactly friendly to outsiders, so this option would be only if neither side can interact with each other.

Gonna go see some dinosaurs

Go back to when I sold all 100+ Bitcoin for like $5 each and tell myself "no".

I'd try to meet the Buddha, and see if he could shed some of that instant enlightenment on me. In the stories, he seemed to be able to say just the right thing to people to wake them up out of the matrix.

My first answer was "buy Apple stock" but no effect on the time line probably means I don't make any money. (well wait, what about enlightenment then, does that come with me?)

Go back to 1986 and slip a morning after pill in my mom's drink... Oh wait, no consequences? Fuck me...

Find out a burning question that paleontologists have but can't find an answer to and tell them where to look.

Prevent myself from being born.

If there were no consequences, I can think of a few different things I'd wanna see.

1. Just out of morbid curiosity, what an atomic bomb dropping looks like when it explodes, being there in person rather than just seeing footage (from a safe distance with protective equipment, just in case I can still get hurt, otherwise get as close as possible if there are absolutely zero consequences to my actions, as if I'm a spectator in minecr*ft).
2. Probably just go back in time and watch as many cartoons as I could back in the early netflix streaming era because I absolutely love cartoons.
3. Definitely go back in time and watch either An American Tail or Fivel Goes West in theaters because I really like both movies.