The first time Heinrich Kramer tries to show someone the Malleus Maleficarum, I appear directly in front of him and set the book on fire. Not only is the book destroyed, but a clearly supernatural event took place to put the fear of god into him. Bam. No witch trials.
Or, the first time he steps foot in Innsbruck, he slips on a banana skin and slides down the street, much to the comedic delight of the locals. Helena Scheuberin even giggles and praises him for his comedic wit and skill. With high praise from an affluent local, and a natural penchant for comedy, Kramer leads a cult following in banana-skin comedic antics, and kick starts surrealist humour centuries before Monty Python.
If you're fine with utterly erasing pretty much every human being conceived after that point in favor of new human beings (or other creatures entirely) may as well go big or go home and start here.
Show
You'd have to kill every single salamander-like though, in order to find the true "first eggs on land" that spawned us all. Or maybe it was a group effort, and you really will have to kill them all.
Allegedly, when William the Conqueror first landed in England he tripped in the sand.
I'd've left a land mine where he was going to fall, turning the future king of England into a fine mist and a scattering of viscera.
Probably Sound of Thunder meself out of existence, but it'd be worth for the immediate chaos it would cause.
I often wonder how people would react if you showed up to a concert hall in, say, classical music era Europe or something and performed modern music. Assuming you could kit it to provide infrastructure for whatever your performance required, and the acoustics of the venue were idealized.
Would attendees hate it? Would the unfamiliar musical styles be repulsive to them? Would the sounds and textures of modern instrumentation like electric guitar and synthesizer upset or even frighten them? Or would they find something to appreciate about it? Would the music be copied and spread, becoming a time worn classic folk tune in an alternate future? Or would it be rebuked and suppressed, condemned for all time as evil influence? Which genres would have the best acceptance chances in which cultures, and which eras?
In my mind in particular, I think about this with the niche realm of video game soundtracks. If not just the music played as-is through some playback device (which would probably be rather boring, but who knows, maybe the novelty of recorded music alone would be fascinating enough) then perhaps arranged for live performance, like the orchestral performance of Undertale, or the Sinnohvation big band album. Or, of course, if the soundtrack was itself a recorded live performance, just perform it. These collections of compositions often outline rich adventures, communicated by a wide range of musical styles. I wonder if they are strong enough to stand alone, and if audiences would respond to them without the context that they were written to accompany.
Failing live performance (which would be trickier than one would think--to sound good, live music has to be written with its venue in mind, and I'd assume most modern music would sound like garbage when performed in victorian era concert halls or ancient ampitheaters), I'd also consider putting them to vinyl LPs and dumping them in old record shops in any era that had phonograph or turntable technology and see if they get discovered.
Why not just send back the video games themselves? I dunno. I guess I'm less interested in wowing them with futuristic technology and more interested in how they'd react to something they already have (music), but in a strange, new context.
Killing Bill Gates. It would be a weird timeline, maybe Microsoft would still exist, but in a different shape.
I would go back in time and arrange Genghis Khan to have a better father.
Ending the first living cell on earth. If we are alone in the universe, preventing life from forming would do the most to change the timeline.
every day, i pray for god to do the bare minimum and give His people an internet without men
Yeah, I might've worded too dude like for your taste, I'm genuinely curious though, what part of my statement angered you to the point of calling for segregation? My potentially but unintentionally offensive language or the fact I mentioned the situation?
it was mostly a joke. your comment was just phrased in a fairly gross way and i felt like hyperbolically expressing my distaste
as for why it took that exact form...well, spend some time as a woman and see how long it takes before you want a break from men lol
Bring a time machine with you and teach ancient Egyptians how to use it
I wonder how much difference one Stinger SAM would have made at Blair Mountain in 1921.
i'd go kill all the tiktaalik or maybe whatever the first common ancestor eukaryotes were
