Question du jour
If you could travel back in time and ask any deceased political figure (famous or infamous) a single question, who would you choose, and what would you ask?
I would ask his name---so I could confirm that it was Adolf Hitler I was shooting dead. (Circa 1907, long before history would miss him.)
Conceivably, I could be stuck in that past, because that *would* assuredly change the future: time travel might not exist. It would be interesting to see what did and didn't happen next. There probably wouldn't be concentration camps, but would there still be a war? If Germany had been led by someone who wasn't afflicted with mental health problems and magical thinking, someone rational, how would that have changed the results? A truly rational leader wouldn't have gone to war at all, but if he had, he would probably have been smart enough *not* to have multiple fronts. Going after Russia while simultaneously taking on the rest of Europe = bonehead move.
I imagine returning to a discernably different future. Not necessarily better or worse in terms of my day-to-day life, but a bunch of subtle differences. There would have been a ripple effect. If all those German rocket scientists hadn't defected, would there have been an atomic bomb? Nuclear energy? The Cold War? If they hadn't had to fight the Germans, how much stronger would the Soviet Union have been after the war? If they hadn't annexed East Germany and all those republics and their resources, how much shorter might the Cold War have been?
When you think of all the benefits we've gotten from the space program (instituted to keep up with the Soviets), it's significant. I'm not saying we wouldn't have gotten to where we are eventually, but not at the same accelerated pace. I suspect we wouldn't have as many satellites---no 400 channels and nothing on, no wireless internet---internet? What's that? Computers talking to each other? That's just crazy---computers are those gigantic things that take up a whole room, regular people don't own them! You're having heart palpitations? I hope someone's gotten around to developing EKGs and all the other monitoring that harks back to the telemetry readings they did on astronauts. Nobody's ever heard of an iPod, but look at my cool new transister radio!
Another manifestation of the ripple effect---thanks to America's success in WWII, we've spent the last 70 years acting as the world's police. What if that war hadn't happened? Would we have stuck our noses into Korea? Vietnam? The Middle East?
One question. One bullet. If only.
.
I would ask his name---so I could confirm that it was Adolf Hitler I was shooting dead. (Circa 1907, long before history would miss him.)
Conceivably, I could be stuck in that past, because that *would* assuredly change the future: time travel might not exist. It would be interesting to see what did and didn't happen next. There probably wouldn't be concentration camps, but would there still be a war? If Germany had been led by someone who wasn't afflicted with mental health problems and magical thinking, someone rational, how would that have changed the results? A truly rational leader wouldn't have gone to war at all, but if he had, he would probably have been smart enough *not* to have multiple fronts. Going after Russia while simultaneously taking on the rest of Europe = bonehead move.
I imagine returning to a discernably different future. Not necessarily better or worse in terms of my day-to-day life, but a bunch of subtle differences. There would have been a ripple effect. If all those German rocket scientists hadn't defected, would there have been an atomic bomb? Nuclear energy? The Cold War? If they hadn't had to fight the Germans, how much stronger would the Soviet Union have been after the war? If they hadn't annexed East Germany and all those republics and their resources, how much shorter might the Cold War have been?
When you think of all the benefits we've gotten from the space program (instituted to keep up with the Soviets), it's significant. I'm not saying we wouldn't have gotten to where we are eventually, but not at the same accelerated pace. I suspect we wouldn't have as many satellites---no 400 channels and nothing on, no wireless internet---internet? What's that? Computers talking to each other? That's just crazy---computers are those gigantic things that take up a whole room, regular people don't own them! You're having heart palpitations? I hope someone's gotten around to developing EKGs and all the other monitoring that harks back to the telemetry readings they did on astronauts. Nobody's ever heard of an iPod, but look at my cool new transister radio!
Another manifestation of the ripple effect---thanks to America's success in WWII, we've spent the last 70 years acting as the world's police. What if that war hadn't happened? Would we have stuck our noses into Korea? Vietnam? The Middle East?
One question. One bullet. If only.
.