Bring back an assload of technology, fill hard drives with:
- Sci-hub articles
- All of Wikipedia
- List of known Nazi & American spies
- Newer theory
- Full modern GNU/Linux source code/history,
- As many FOSS packages as I can fit
- Everything else I can scrape off GitHub
- Every tech spec and data sheet I can find online
- Designs for modern firearms
- Human genome data
and give it to the early Stalin era Soviet Union
Everyone's talking about going to the past, but going to the future seems like a better first step.
for visiting and looking:
Ancient Rome, Greece and in general ancient civilizations.
For helping history:
Early enough so that I can stab Khrush, Beria and Yezhov without much of a challenge.
1941 to warn the Soviet upper command of the date of war(I'll probably be executed or deported for looking and acting suspicious though, hopefully the fact that 2 independent people would give the same date for the start of the invasion would help their response atleast)
Warn Mao to not engage in the pest eradication campaign and that the official reporting of crop yields during the early part of the GLF were false.
Butterfly effect would probably fuck up a lot, but it would likely be a better world than today.
Go back in time and jerk myself off to see if I came in the future.
I assume branching timelines, otherwise you get so many paradoxes.
for the past, you gotta go with October 1917 and bring back as much information and material as physically possible to help the Bolsheviks. that and just experiencing that moment in history. I'd talk to Lenin about war communism, it's faults, but also why the NEP can become the slide into revisionism. show him what became of the USSR under later leaders like Brezhnev and Gorbachev to instill a sense of anti revisionism from the start.
for the future, I'd like to see 5 years after the final fall of capitalism, and how the world is healing from the 600 years of trauma that have come and gone. the new systems people are implementing, the art that will flourish, and the statues of the martyrs who made it possible
massive technological assistance early 20th century to ensure world socialism by the 1950s (and assuming this just creates a new alternate time line since i doubt you can go into the actual past). the exact logistics depend on the time machine. the exact date will be critical because just your appearance will start alternating the events you know so at that point it's a race. modern medicine, weapons tech, manufacturing techniques, possibly actual material (compact weapons, components, anything that you can boostrap from).
honestly if i was going to pick a singular event to bet my money on it would be to help the spartacist uprising to succeed. drop in a bit ahead of it, give rosa as much foresight as possible (warning her my very appearance could start altering it but i think it would allow a better game plan). provide them with advanced weapons, disassembled microfactories, body armor, communications gear, etc. M1A1 might suck for urban warfare i think assault weapons, body armor, and advanced training be best
drop a tactical nuke on columbus' fleet just a few kilometers after leaving port, close enough for everyone to witness god's punishment for those foolish enough to try to cross the great unknown seas
I said before I'd sink Columbus. That still seems like a good idea. Beyond that, though, I'd spend the rest of my life wandering around and seeing history for sure.
I think the thing with Columbus is that somebody was gonna get there eventually right. like the Portuguese in particular had spent a lot of resources exploring the east and Africa before the discovery of the Americas. I think you're better off helping spread cow pox, as it's far less deadly than small pox but provides immunity to smallpox which is what killed far more native peoples than guns and swords did. but I think you should still kill Columbus anyways because he fucking sucked and was 🤮 It*lian
I'd kinda just want to visit various earlier geological eras and gawp at weird ancient animals and ecosystems. I have a hard time trying to imagine a world without flowers, grass and modern trees so that'd be cool to see
All the cool stuff I'd like to do would probably change history to the extent that'd I'm never born and thus can't change the past with a time machine. But then history is back to normal and I'm born. Then I try to use the time machine to alter history, and once again I succeed, but as a result I'm never born. I then can't change history with the time machine. But I can. Because history is once again normal because I never changed it.
If the technology is even possible, I wonder if this is why we never see time travelers visiting us from the future.
