Not sure how to stop this alone, and for good, besides take everything.

@rafferty it would require going back in time prior to the event long enough to evacuate books to a safe location. Probably something like a year before, long enough to effectively convince enough people that it's going to happen to get people to help.

@HoracioM I think it’s Voyager not TNG, no?

But they love a peach.

You’ve got a point. Maybe if you wear a hat no one will notice cigar waggle

Were you really foolish at 11 years old? Would it really have been better, or merely different?

Cristobal Colon (alias Christopher Columbus) was way behind the Vikings and only slightly ahead of others who wished to sail ever more Westwards. He, an Italian, was lucky in that the Catholic Monarchs of Spain gave him three (cheap) ships as a sort of venture capital excercise. The deaths of so many South Americans was not mass slaughter by force of arms - it was susceptibility to the common cold!

@Petter Umm... My apologies. That is not correct. I've seen some of his own surviving documents an he personally sanctioned the slaughters. Then there is the records from merchants who explicitly speak about training the peasants to be more gentle to the Arawacks because the "die too easily". The law was that for each European killed by the natives, the colonizers will kill 100 of them. The deaths by decease just made the genocide that much quicker. The main culprit was their slaughter.

just go back and smash the rudders off all those ships like three weeks in, and there you go.

@Elsantoasauro Interesting.

yes, because lack of art school was the problem, lol...

The guy really wanted to be an artist before WW I and was rejected twice. I do wonder how things would have played out if he was accepted

Interesting use of language, but wouldn't one say that L Ron Hubbard was a greater profit, along with present day Televangelists and the mediaeval Catholic church?

Without the influence of Christianity, Muhammad's religion would have been significantly different. A lot of stories in the Qur'an are just retelling of Jewish and Christian mythology.

Sounds interesting. I guess Hitler is the obvious choice for many.

Restrain the evolution of our last common link with chimps, and instead "help" the closest linked we have with Bonobos. Bonobos are a lot more chill than chimps. We may turn out better with some of their conflict resolving instincts. ?

i wonder at statements like this.

Phil would get rid of Alexander the Great

hitler and joe would alter stuff significantly, in favor of not killing millions of people

honorable mention to madam blatavatsky, eugen fisher, and ayn rand, who i would either whack as kids before they can write, or take them back to pre civilization times and leave them there.

recommend either me or someone else definitely whack shiro ishii. right after signing the Geneva convention, or earlier.

hmm.. go back and give bob oppenheimer a massive dose of lsd and leo slzard too, and take them out of the whole nuclear weapon thing. heisenberg, too. monkeywrench them pretty good and scramble them so they never develop it and just do music and beatnik poetry.

Then off to Cathage to do the same. But yes, good call.

I like it!

Damp or dry? (For which colour of smoke?)

From a purely logical point of view, you are quite right of course. The interesting thing about this impossible hypothetical is it reflects people's attachment to past things that happened, usually bad things, sometimes personal, sometimes historical, and what they would change. In that sense it's interesting. Some would change big things - eg Hitler- some would change personal things - eg love interest etc - and some, like me, a specific awful person/event. In my own case, taking out Charlie Manson, I find it hard to believe that this time travel intervention would make the world a worse place.

65 million people were killed in ww2.

Youd need to go back and get rid of key people before they even get going. Trotsky replacing Stalin, for example, or getting rid of the weirdoes behind nazi race theories

@David1955 Consider that if you changed history, even if "better" for the world in general, would likely cause some catastrophic but uncalculable change for some people. In sum, what our lives are like today is very dependent upon the sum total of everything that has happened up to now.

@dahermit I'm aware of the argument. Some choose the 'change one thread in history and the whole picture changes' view, while others might say 'history is a tapestry and even if you change a few stitches the tapestry remains'. Who knows. Since this hypothetical will likely never be played out, we can speculate in safety. It may seem strange, but I'd rather take out Manson rather than Hitler, despite the enormity of the latter's crimes against humanity, because perhaps killing hitler might have led to an alternative even worse and militarily successful dictator from which we might never have recovered. Whereas Manson was a pimp, theif and conspiratorial multimurderer whose crimes could be expunged and the world a better place. But, you're right, who knows what the results would be.