You have a time machine with a single round trip. You hate everyone. And you are lazy. What is the least you can do to completely screw over the world with your one trip through time?
Make it a good one.
Shoot Arch Duke Ferdinand. Few people even now about it today, but he was subject to a horribly mangled assassination attempt that many scholars belive would have set off a major war in Europe had he died.
Holy crap it took way too long for me to realise what you're doing
Procrastinate, the world is going down the drain just fine without my help.
You're going to pretend we're not on that timeline right now? I see your play, time traveller.
He did it.
The crazy son of a bitch did it.
Go back to before life formed on earth, and shit in the ocean.
It's possible someone did, and that's where we all come from
it would explain a lot
"Hey look! It's the first fish to walk on land"
*stomps
"You saw it, it was coming right at us"
You would immediately die in agony. No oxygen and a lot more CO2 in the atmosphere
And upon said death he would immediately shit himself. Mission accomplished!
Also a climate so scorching hot we won't ever see anything like it again before 2030.
And release an incredible cocktail of gut and other bacteria on the world to entirely change the course of history.
This was my first thought, too 😂
Who pissed in your gene pool? it <sup>was</sup> <sup><sup>me</sup></sup>
I hate the 'hate' part (pardon the pun) of the question.
I'd rather go back in time and get Jesus and bring him back here so that he can go all 'temple money changers' on today's MAGA Christians asses, give them a proper yelling to.
You think they'd listen to a random brown dude who couldn't speak English?
If there's a jesus with powers in the first place, he could do the holy spirit thing that happened after his death where the apostles proselytized by speaking in languages they (previously) couldn't to people who couldn't understand the native tongue.
Something tells me that if Jesus was 'Jesussy' enough, that they'd listen to him, regardless of skin color.
I want to watch this series.
Jesus the time traveler tells off assholes.
The comedy series "Black Jesus" has some of that vibe, if I recall.
And yeah, it's great.
I want to watch this series.
Jesus the time traveler tells off assholes.
I'm not religious by nature, but yeah, definitely would sub for that series, for sure.
Wait until I'm about to die, then go back to when the first land-dwelling animals first started coming ashore. I'd bring a bunch of cockroaches with me and then I'd die there. Either the roaches or my decaying corpse will hopefully cause enough change to the timeline that humanity never develops in the first place.
I think that's the most I could screw over the (human) world.
Can I appear anywhere? Pop into white house or Kremlin during the Cuban missile crisis and say: I'm from the future, you must attack, or... Then travel back to the future without finishing the sentence.
Go to back to the big bang. You presence alone will butterfly effect the earth out of existence.
I legit popped this thread open to type ohhh I wish I wish I hadn’t killed that fish …
The thing here is that I have zero desire to screw people over.
Come on, little roleplay here
How much power do I have?
If I could divert the asteroid that resulted in the K-T event, that'd drastically change history. It may not have stopped dinosaurs from eventually going extinct, but it'd have given them 33 million more years more to evolve, and would certainly have affected mammalian evolutionary history. Maybe, just maybe, raptors would have gotten smart enough.
Ooh! Take back a lot of ravens. They're almost smart enough already. Heck, I wonder if taking ravens back even earlier would be enough for them to evolve into something dominant. Problem is, they're not particularly social, and I think that's been our greatest advantage.
Or: introduce modern octopus to ancient oceans.
Stopping the K-T event is my favorite, though. It would absolutely have changed how life on Earth has evolved since.
30M years between extinction events is about all you get, though.
Those are great ideas but miss thr mark on the second part. They all require a lot of work and we're lazy.
Maybe? Like, how hard is it to put a Tsar Bomba on the asteroid when it's a light-year away? Or, if it came from the Oort cloud, a thousand years before whatever nudged it in, nudged it in?
I don't know. Putting a bomb on a timer on an asteroid seems pretty simple. If we're time traveling, we're also space traveling, because the solar system was about a third of the way around the galaxy at the K.T. event. In comparison, the shift to the impactor 1ly away would be margin-of-error stuff.
There were no constraints posted; no "you can only take a truckload of stuff", or, "you appear on the Earth where that point was at that point in time". I mean, if all you do is travel back in time 1 year without also traveling in space, you're going to be breathing hard vacuum when you come out.
So: I'm assuming:
However, for the other ideas? What's hard about transporting a murder of crows to the Triassic? I don't even have to go myself.
Go punt kick the first fish back into the ocean as it tries to waddle it's fat ass out of the water.
I know that's not how evolution works but I can dream... Life would likely be vastly different given such a long period of time with something like that changing either way.
Go back to 2011ish and unleash WanaCry on a world that is not ready for for a global crypto locker.
Jeez. Wow. Just wow. Lol.
Bring knowledge of CFCs to a time when we’re able to make them but not able to detect the ozone problems they cause.
Get COVID, go back to the neander valley and cough.
Based, you might prevent the entire covid pandemic!
I read about a study that said Homo sapiens may have been down to as few as 40 breeding pairs at one point.
I’ve got way more ammo than that in my closet.
I really like this question. So: rather than killing Hitler, what if, instead, you killed Stalin? Was it inevitable that a strongman dictator would have taken over, and ruined the potential of communism? I guess we have evidence that the answer is "yes," in the form of Mao, but weren't the Chinese communist party(s) greatly influenced by the Soviet model? What if Russia had, instead, developed a more democratic system of government - was it possible, and couldn't it have affected how China's developed? But, maybe it is always inevitable that dictators emerge from internal revolutions like this.
Here's another scenario: what if you stopped Oswald, and prevented Kennedy from being assassinated? He was popular, and likely to win a second term. What would 4 (~5) more years of Kennedy look like?
My favorite version of "killing Hitler" is instead of murder, blackmail the school dean so Hitler gets admitted to art school. Goodbye genocidal tyrant, hello moderately successful landscape painter!
Check out the show 11.22.63 on Hulu. Exactly about preventing the Kennedy assassination and the fallout from that choice. Seriously good!
Based on the novel with the same name, by Stephen King. So that's another option.
Thanks for the suggestion! I'll watch it.
I'm heading far into the future - say 1000 years or perhaps 100 if communication would be an issue. I'm going to grab all sorts of portable devices and tools to take back with me, and I will maintain the remainder of my life without sharing my goodies. The world is screwed because they get no fruits of my intense labor, but that is fine since I hate them anyway. For that afternoon of work, I get to live a great life while everyone else must suffer in modernity.
At current pace, I wonder what you could do with a spear and a club from the future
Hmm I don't know. Probably go back to Germany 1940 and give them all the information needed to develop nuclear weapons first. You just know that Hitler would've pushed the red button a hundred times over if he had the chance.
The TV serie "The Man in the High Castle" interestingly explores how would be the world if the nazis would have won the war.
My name is Friedrich Trump (aka Frederick Trump) and I already did that and even had a nice hump.
I'd kill Harambe. Wait a second...
Buy a cheap pistol, go back in time, and shoot Gutenberg.
We'd still be living in medieval times.
I support this one.
Bring COVID and HIV to the USA in 1929.
Maybe Zika as well.
Life will find a way. Going back can be used to create nuclear winter but even then, life will go on.
To completely screw over the world, I would go into the future and acquire the source code for a general AI.
Then the world can be locked down and robots can be built to abuse every human and sentinent being individually, for a very long time.
The biggest killer for indigenous people is said to be infections - bacteria and viruses. Collect some in this time - maybe a cold - and go back and presence will be enough.
It depends on how you interpret "screw over the world", but I guess "you hate everyone" implies humans. If you go back to the first humans from Africa, before spreading out, that may have the biggest impact - significant delay or suppression in development and spread, or eradication.
Go back 1000 years before Europe makes contact with the Americas. Infect everyone and let their populations get wiped out, but give time to recover so first contact with Europe doesn't go as poorly. Also give them horses much earlier.
I'd kill my parents before I was born.
Easy now. You only have to kill one of them.
Where's the fun in that?
Well current events lead me to believe that allowing the orange turd to live would do the job nicely so in the spirit of laziness I'd do absolutely nothing.
Go back from 2026 to 2024. Report a pet has gone missing and you heard that an immigrant neighbor ate it. Come back to 2026. Book your dream vacation at the Trump Gaza resort.
Go back to the stone age and drop modern steel tools and weapons where a tribe could find them. That tribe would likely become dominant and perhaps change everything.
Kill all the chickens before humans had the chance to domesticate them
Let the Cuban missile crisis actually happen?
Land the time machine on top of the first animal to walk on land. Don't even have to get out of the machine.
I'd sink Cortez's ship.
Lowkey, just travelling back may be enough with the amount of diseases we would carry with us
If I ever got sick from something like COVID, I'd just go back to medieval Europe and let it spread like wildfire. I guarantee this modern disease would absolutely wipe out a large majority of Europe and everywhere else it spreads in the world. And little to no effort besides waiting for if I ever get it (which I thankfully never have had and hope I never will).
I'm not sure if it would. Travel was awfully slow back then.
Fair enough, but I'd at least end a good amount of family trees if I'm lucky.
Much more virulent diseases didn't wipe out Humanity I don't know why that one would.
I could skip my next union meeting, I guess...
"so there's this dude named God..."
Tell Hitler to focus on Operation Sea Lion and to leave Russia alone
Nahhh I'm not messing up my opportunity. Im going back in time and giving John Brown kamakazi drones just before he gets to Harpers Ferry.
Give the ancient civilization ruled by the most evil ruler modern weaponry and explain how it works
Your plan fails and the proletariat rise up and seize the weapos. You return back to a world of gay space communism.
Stop Hitler's parents from getting together in the first place.
Re-read the question
We just found Elon’s account here
Go back to the Garden of Eden with a bucket, grab all the apples, then head back.
Kill Lincoln earlier during the Civil War.
Go back in time and do something to prevent Vasily Aleksandrovich Arkhipov from becoming the Executive Officer on the B-59 Soviet nuclear sub in October 1962. He's the guy who talked the Captain and the Political Officer out of launching the nukes when they thought they were being attacked by the US Navy during the Cuban Missile Crisis. His persuasiveness is generally considered to have avoided WWIII from starting then.
He probably literally saved the world, he should really be talked about more
The scary part is, he's not the only one
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_close_calls
You could also flip the switch that was literally the only thing keeping the nuke from exploding over North Carolina in the Goldsboro incident.
Nuke going off over US soil at the height of the cold war could very well have started everyone firing.