If you had a time machine, would you feel obligated to preserve history, and use it only for anthropology and history research, or would you feel obligated to possibly right major wrongs in your life or in the history of this planet?

You could fly back in time and top the Crusades, or the Inquisition, or Hitler, or the Trail of Tears, or stop Samuel from ordering a bunch of "infants and sucklings" to be killed (regardless of the guilt of the parents, if they in fact were guilty of death).

You know, not judge somebody before they do evil, but either try to intervene and warn them or someone not to do this, or else wait until they give the first order for these atrocities, and then intervene since then they will be guilty and you will not be judging an innocent person, but will be stopping the madness before it gets out of hand.


What about cyclone Nargis, or Katrina, or Fukushima and the Japan tsunami, or the Boxing Day tsunami? Would you interfere and warn people, even bring back a video and show the governments? Bring back official government documents with seals showing them the death and financial casualties ahead of time?

Think of all the good you could do, and the suffering you could prevent.


you could fly back and study the history of who we really are and how we got here.

How old are the pyramids for real, and exactly what were their functions beside just tombs, since some of them have chambers that are illogical as the function of a tomb?

Hey, if the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil, or pandora's box thing are based on some literal truth, that somewhere people were given such a choice, you could even fly back and prevent them from doing the wrong thing. Would God consider it an offence if you had a time machine and flew back in time and destroyed that "tree" before anyone else could touch it? After all, in my time line, I allegedly am already cursed anyway, according to the story, so if i touched it there seems it wouldn't matter.

After all, I wouldn't even be the only person interfering. The story claims that Satan interfered (by traditional interpretation) through the person of the "Serpent".

It would seem that the "Good Samaritan" standard of altruism would require a person to intervene if they have the means.



would you travel back in time and meet Jesus of Nazareth in the flesh, and speak to him or listen to him in person and see what he taught for yourself, instead of trusting (or not trusting) in an poorly preserved book's claims about his teachings?

Given the nature of morality and the Bible, seeing it for yourself if you had a time machine would seem to be a moral obligation.

Then again, it could take several lifetimes just to get the high notes of the "real" history, as opposed to just "text book, holy books, archaeology, and tradition".

Changing the past would almost certainly have unforeseen consequences. Everyone wants to kill Hitler, but what if killing Hitler prevents the world from learning from their mistakes? Eugenics and anti-semitism were on the rise world-wide, not just in Hitler's mind. Something much worse could have happened if Hitler never showed the world the ugly side of racism.

Of course, there's the whole butterfly effect thing, so ANY trip into the past could radically change the future.

If I could travel back in time, I would use it purely for observational purposes. There are a practically infinite number of things that I would want to observe if I went into the past. Everything from the Big Bang to the ancient civilization of Sumer would be of huge interest to me.