Wirehead Studios

What would you do?

I'd go back to 1970 and spoil the ending of Star Wars...besides of showing people in a cinema my awesome terror/action movie!! (F.E.A.R.)

I think I'd try to warn Sega about releasing the 32X and saturn so closely together... and the general cluster spork of everything after genesis got old

I'd go back 2,000 years to witness the Resurrection of Christ.

I would go back to 1911 and tell the guy who said that the Titanic was unsinkable to shut the hell up.

That way we may never have had to endure Hollywood's trivialisation of such a disaster.

I would correct some of my past mistakes and visit different time-periods.  For shits and giggles, I'd screw with history's greatest tyrants.  Finally, I'd ensure my mother and father never met.

And thereby undoing all you'd done before.. ;]

Let's not allow a causality paradox to screw up a "what if" thread, please.  -_-

Only to annoy Kain! That should make a great exception to the rule! ;]

but if kain, did go back and stop his mother and father meeting then like you said he wouldn't be born

but if he wasn't born then he couldn't stop his parents meeting

et amendum he would create a infinity paradox that would threaten all of time / space as 2 events that cannot exist in the same time continium would cancel each other out or tear the very fabric of reality

but hey as this is a what if thread

i would

1. remove hilter before his rise to power
2. make sure lee harvey olswald wasn't in dallas texas in 1963
3. stop the 1987 challenger shuttle mission
4. take penicilin back to the 1300's and eliminate the black death
5. stop 9/ 11 by having the terrorists blow themselves up before they board the planes

generally stuff like that

It appears that I'm the only one who seems to wish simply to observe significant events rather than attempting to change the past.

Kind of thought that changing history was the idea, but hey, if we're going down the observation route, I'd go back to check out what the Great Pyramid of Giza looked like when it was just finished, you know, before they used all of the outer stones to build Cairo. I'd need to bring my sunglasses, mind.

but surely having power over time, would either

A. Spur you to right historys wrongs

or

B. Corrupt you, so that you make sure that you control the world

personally i'm more of an A person, as there's too much evil in the world as it is

other things i would stop

6. The Titanic from sinking (was a terrible loss of lives)
7. Saddam Hussian from coming into power in Iraq ( 2 wars worth of people saveable there alone)

Frankly (and very much politically incorrect), I wouldn't correct the 'mistakes of history'. For instance: Seeing the enormity of the historical influence of the Titanic and its fate, knowing it has become a symbol, if a clich?d one, for man's (over)confidence in technology and pioneering, I wouldn't change one bit of it. As a more modern version of Icarus's tale, it's pretty damn good. Most of the wounds involved in the disaster have either healed over time or developed in rich storytelling and (less pleasantly) profitable franchise. Why 'fix' such a 'problem'?
I'm not averse to preventing or ending suffering, but I'd be way more cautious for a lack of knowledge of the bigger scheme of things (if there is such a thing) or what horrendous unknown alternatives might take the place of known problems. In fact, I'd sooner use such powers to stop overeager time-manipulators from leveraging us from the frying pan, into the fire.

See, now that's why I choose something more or less inconsequential, that and  I miss the sega/nintendo rivalry, back when it seemed like game companies  had a soul.

of course there would be consequences

but surely not having every girlfriend forcing you to endure titanic is worth whatever happens

In that case I think it would be easier to just go back in time and bump off James Cameron before he could make the movie.  :P

I'd go back in time and kill my grandfather before he met my grandmother, therefore undoing one of my parents, therefore undoing me. But if I had been undone, then I would never had gone back in time in the first place ensuring the existence. of my grandparents, blah blah time paradox

Look, if everyone's going to drag temporal mechanics into this there's no point in having the discussion as you cannot travel backwards in time anyway.  You want to know why?  No?  Well let me tell you anyway.

First, there's no such thing as time.  Time is simply measurement of the change in relative positioning of matter and energy in the universe.  Time as measured is simply a comparison of one state to another.  In order to travel backwards in time, you would have to be able to completely rearrange the entire universe to a specific configuration, which you would have to know beforehand.  Second, even if you could do this, you would be screwed because the matter and energy that you are composed of would have existed as part of other structures at the time, meaning you'd have to destroy yourself in the process.  Third, besides the matter and energy in this universe you also have to deal with the nature of space itself, and the fact that space is not uniform, so you'd have to be able to measure and reconfigure that as well.  Fourth, this does not even begin to cover how this universe interacts with others.  Perhaps some matter and energy in this universe has transitioned into another continuum, and matter from other continuums has transitioned into this one.  Of course there's the shortcut in which you could just reconfigure the matter and energy of the Earth itself to just modify the local environment, assuming you could even do that of course, but that's not actually traveling in time.

Now if you reject the definition of time that I work by and assume that string theory is correct and time is somehow dimensional the same as height or width or depth, then you still have the problem of violating the second law of thermodynamics and in effect subtracting matter fron the universe and adding it back in, so you're still screwed.  Besides, human technology falls way short of even doing anything remotely close to any of this, so it's not even worth discussing what you cannot do with what you don't even have!  Unless it's a purely BS discussion like this thread appears to have intended to be in the first place.

Now that you've all collectively groaned and thought of various ways in which to contradict me or otherwise have had your heads explode, can we please leave causality and temporal paradox out of this and have some fun with the thread?  :wall:

I'd go back in time to prevent this thread from being made...

But really I'd go back in time to profit myself but, in different ways, ignoring the question of "How?" I'd try to get more games like Battletoads or Star tropics made, you know the cult classics that even though they have a following don't see the light of day in a brainstorming meeting at a gaming company when they wonder what to make next.

That and I might kick my ass when I was in high school on a daily basis.

Or go back in time before all my NES games were borrowed to see if any of them had a famicom/nes adapter in them, I'd like to see one of those in person...

It always did my head in that Doc Brown was just about to explain how the time machine worked when he and Marty had to dive out of Einstein's way ...

I had to make a lot of difficult decisions when I was younger.  Some of those decisions I regret and others I'm fiercely proud of.  I would not be who I am today without those decisions, but part of me questions if what I am today is better than what I could have been...

What if my family never moved to FL?  What if my mother and father did get divorced?  What if I had been arrested that day?  What if I never moved to AZ?

Questions like these resurface from time-to-time and gnaw away at my self-worth.  The resulting desire to have greater control over my own fate leads to whimsical musings such as altering past events.

The desire to tease Earth's greatest tyrants solely stems from my sense of humor however.  I have the ability to travel through space and time, yet I chose to appear before Adolph Hitler during the height of the Third Reich's power, inform him that he's a lousy painter, and disappear just as suddenly.

No no, you must tweak his nose and bounce around like Daffy Duck and whack him on the head with a wooden mallet first!  :P

I'd rather not go back in time, lest the whole history as we know it gets royally sporked up the butt. :wtf:

You're implying that it somehow isn't already.

That's a pretty good point... How the hell would someone know if someone has screwed around by going into the past and sporking things up?

That brings us back into discussions about temporal paradox and the "butterfly" effect, but in short, were such a thing possible, you wouldn't know unless someone had record of the appearances of some kind of time machine or other anomaly.  It's been speculated by some in the UFO circuits that UFO's are not extra-terrestrials but instead time travelers from the future and are, in fact, the "evidences" of this very thing happening.  Make of that whatever you will.

No, that's not what I was implying. It's already pretty screwed up, the last thing I'd want is it to get screwed up even more.

Yeah, It'd be pretty awkward to go back in time, mess things up and then come back, only to find out that the orifice that you use to get rid of waste is the same one you use to talk...

A lot of people do that already, too.

what about the whole black hole theory, or the wormhole theory

surely even they conform to the second law of thermodynamics, which would Mean that time-travel would be possible

just not very likely

as the probablity of finding a wormhole that's usable would be very tricky indeed

Well... like I said, that would lead to a lengthy discussion on temporal mechanics - something I don't want to get into.  Let's just say for the sake of this thread you can go back and do what you like without creating a paradox or violating any laws of physics.  It is, after all, a purely hypothetical scenario.

Fair Enough as getting into a discussion about temporal mechanics would probably make some peoples head explode

 :slippy_thumb: