Changing the past....

Brineshrimp · Post by **Brineshrimp** » Sat Mar 12, 2005 6:27 pm

So, I was thinking the other day....

If I could change one event from the past (whether personal or otherwise), what would it be?

Would I give warning to Anne Frank days before her fateful discovery? Or, would I decide to have bacon, instead of sausage?

What would you do?

Serious Paul · Post by **Serious Paul** » Sat Mar 12, 2005 7:30 pm

Hmmm, so tempting. Aside from a number of events that I'd change just to see what happened, I would seriously chane only one thing: I'd have stayed in the Marine Corps.

Reika · Post by **Reika** » Sun Mar 13, 2005 2:10 am

I would have done the smart thing and gone to SUNY Environmental Science and Forestry instead of Stevens Tech.

Bishop · Post by **Bishop** » Sun Mar 13, 2005 6:03 pm

I would have left for work 15 seconds earlier.

Serious Paul · Post by **Serious Paul** » Sun Mar 13, 2005 9:33 pm

Damn dude. Damn.

Paul sends the positive vibe to Bishop

Kitt · Post by **Kitt** » Sun Mar 13, 2005 10:25 pm

I would have kicked Jeff in the balls about a week ago...and maybe Rob the Creepy Lighting Guy...and probably Mike, too. They're all bastards.

Johnny the Bull · Post by **Johnny the Bull** » Sun Mar 13, 2005 11:04 pm

I would have shot all over her face and told her to fuck off and clean up.
Then I would have gone to the pub and not missed the best football game of the last 10 years.

Or I would have given King Harold a full face helm and told him to go to town on those Norman bastards.

Serious Paul · Post by **Serious Paul** » Sun Mar 13, 2005 11:50 pm

Johnny you're my new hero!

DarkMage · Post by **DarkMage** » Mon Mar 14, 2005 2:02 am

I woudln't have hurt her....

Bishop · Post by **Bishop** » Mon Mar 14, 2005 2:50 am

lol. No worries, Paul. Not something I /can/ change.

Crazy Elf · Post by **Crazy Elf** » Mon Mar 14, 2005 3:09 am

Nothing.

Johnny the Bull · Post by **Johnny the Bull** » Mon Mar 14, 2005 5:31 am

Serious Paul wrote:Johnny you're my new hero!

I do autographed copies of my book and pilates DVD series at reasonable rates. You should look into it.

DV8 · Post by **DV8** » Mon Mar 14, 2005 7:38 am

Is there anyone that would have changed something that would benefit not themselves but others? Like in Brine's example? I don't mean it to sound as harsh as it might, but so far everyone's been looking to change something in their own past, instead of trying to change history.

Serious Paul · Post by **Serious Paul** » Mon Mar 14, 2005 7:45 am

No-I am not the judge of how the world should be, let alone together enough to make the world a better place through my limited knowledge of it and how it works.

Johnny the Bull · Post by **Johnny the Bull** » Mon Mar 14, 2005 8:38 am

DV8 wrote:Is there anyone that would have changed something that would benefit not themselves but others? Like in Brine's example? I don't mean it to sound as harsh as it might, but so far everyone's been looking to change something in their own past, instead of trying to change history.

Johnny the Bull wrote:I would have given King Harold a full face helm and told him to go to town on those Norman bastards.

DV8 · Post by **DV8** » Mon Mar 14, 2005 10:21 am

Sorry. Overlooked that. That's a good one, by the way.

Szechuan · Post by **Szechuan** » Mon Mar 14, 2005 1:11 pm

I would have stayed on my meds.

Eva · Post by **Eva** » Mon Mar 14, 2005 4:40 pm

There are things I've done that, when I look at them separately, I would maybe want to change or do differently. But they've all led to where and who I am today, and I'm pretty damn comfortable with those two things.

Atragon · Post by **Atragon** » Mon Mar 14, 2005 10:07 pm

I'd have to say, get my parents to invest in the IPOs of IBM, Microsoft, and Apple. Then in Yahoo, Amazon, and Google. And Berkshire-Hathaway when it IPOed.

Lord Death Hand · Post by **Lord Death Hand** » Mon Mar 14, 2005 10:40 pm

Well if I could go back in time I wouldn't move to Iowa, but that would mean I wouldn't have met my friends here....Damnit, I hate time travel. Oooo I could test out the Time Cop thing and bump into myself and see if I explode. That would be cool. Or maybe I could travel back in time and save the dinosaurs because they're really cool. Yeah I want to do that, save the dinosaurs.

The Eclipse · Post by **The Eclipse** » Mon Mar 14, 2005 11:14 pm

I wouldn't change a damn thing.

I have given this some thought in the past and I would leave everything just as it is now. Are there things that I would do differently if I knew then what I know now? of course.

But on the other hand, I have a good life and I'm happy. Why change anything in the past that could inadvertently fuck up what I have now. I use my wife as the prime example - We were a blind date that was set up by a mutual friend after my wife asked our friend who was that guy she was riding with in the convertible. So me and my wife meeting each other was dependant on me stopping at a red light at the right time and place and having the top on my car down.

The most important moments in our life aren't always what we think they are, sometimes they are minor and seemingly insignificant moments in time. Why fuck with that?

Johnny the Bull · Post by **Johnny the Bull** » Tue Mar 15, 2005 1:23 am

The Eclipse wrote:Why fuck with that?

Best. Football. Game. Ever.

Thats why. Nothing could be more important.

Cash · Post by **Cash** » Tue Mar 15, 2005 1:27 am

Eva wrote:There are things I've done that, when I look at them separately, I would maybe want to change or do differently. But they've all led to where and who I am today, and I'm pretty damn comfortable with those two things.

Amen. Although if I could combine it with Atragon's post....

Sock_Monkey · Post by **Sock_Monkey** » Tue Mar 15, 2005 1:45 am

DV8 wrote:Is there anyone that would have changed something that would benefit not themselves but others? Like in Brine's example? I don't mean it to sound as harsh as it might, but so far everyone's been looking to change something in their own past, instead of trying to change history.

Changing a little bit of history also might not necessarily benefit anyone or might potentially have worse effects. For example if you were to kill Hitler before the Second World War doesn't mean someone might not take his place. In my case, not having a Second World War would probably mean that I might not exist setting up a sort of time paradox and well... I don't really want to end up as a player in some Star Trek episode where we meet our doppelgangers who all wear beards.

But if I could change anything in the past I would have done whatever it is I had to have done to keep her. Or if my powers were much more limited, not have had that second cup of coffee.

FlakJacket · Post by **FlakJacket** » Tue Mar 15, 2005 2:17 am

If you whacked Hitler then it would have just led to a much stronger USSR, and possibly Beria taking over after Stalin snuffed it.

Kai · Post by **Kai** » Tue Mar 15, 2005 4:15 pm

Yeah, the problem with changing history would be where would it go? I mean you could say the Japanese decided not to bomb Pearl Harbor, or that the Great Library at Alexandria was never lost, but but it start such a chain reaction, I'd be leery of changing anything that I could't know what it would do to the world.

In my personal life, only that my grandmother didn't have and die of Parkinsons. I would have liked for her and Nightshadow to have met at least.

Sock_Monkey · Post by **Sock_Monkey** » Tue Mar 15, 2005 4:43 pm

FlakJacket wrote:If you whacked Hitler then it would have just led to a much stronger USSR, and possibly Beria taking over after Stalin snuffed it.

Are you sure? How do we know that someone worse wouldn't have taken his place? Maybe killing him at the wrong time would have turned him into a martyr like figure, or maybe - like a lot of wargamers like to speculate - that WWII would continue but without all the grievious errors that Hitler made on behalf of the Axis. OTOH if the Nazis wouldn't have rose to power and been snuffed in Europe who to say they wouldn't have risen elsewhere, like say in the US? Or Britain? If there was no WWII would Israel have been formed? How many people wouldn't have immigrated to North America - including such as Einstien? Hence would someone have made a nuclear bomb? would there have been a cold war....

Really the consequences of such a possibly good action would be too far reaching to really judge if they'd be good or bad, so I prefer to think small and selfish and limit the impact.

BlackJack · Post by **BlackJack** » Tue Mar 15, 2005 5:04 pm

Changing history for the "better" sounds great, but is a bad idea. No one really knows the consiquences of making changes. We can guess based on knowledge of history, but as to what will change and to what extent is up in the air. I'm also of the opinion that once you change the timeline, you cannot return to the point you started at. By making significant changes you destroy the time you left from.

That and if anyone could make changes, what is to keep neo-nazis from going back making sure Hitler took over the world. To them it would be for the "better".

As far as personal stuff, I'm pretty happy with my life. Of course I have regrets, but what is to say that I wouldn't regret the change more.

MissTeja · Post by **MissTeja** » Tue Mar 15, 2005 6:27 pm

I'd have tried to be more aware of the depth of Matt's despair. Beyond that, I only would have hugged my family more.

crone · Post by **crone** » Tue Mar 15, 2005 9:02 pm

Acting to change history should be the same as acting now. So if you are comfortable with the idea of shooting an aggressive military dictator, then it may as well be Hitler. You don't know how it will turn out, but you don't know how anything you do will turn out, so what's the difference?

If I could time travel, I would, but I'd be more interested in watching than changing.

3278 · Post by **3278** » Wed Mar 16, 2005 1:41 am

There are so many possibilities, and so little ability to predict their results, the Theory of Complex Systems being what it is. Certainly, I could kill a dictator here, or save some books there, or change my childhood or be a little more clever about some of the decisions I've made in relationships, but as has been pointed out, such results are unpredictable and would alter the world as we know it, which, as a whole, I'm fairly satisfied with. So beyond the changing of things just to see what might happen - and I'd probably indulge a bit in that, as well - I would choose instead to make certain the end of one man's life was less rife with tragic irony than it was in reality.

Archibald Cochrane ascended to the title of 9th Earl of Dundonald in 1778. Unfortunately, the previous eight Earls were all...well, "complete windowlickers" might be a bit much, but they'd anyway managed to waste the family fortune, having backed unfortunate Dukes or gambled quite poorly. So when Cochrane took over, all that was left of the family estate was Culross Abbey, the family's ancestral home, and a small coal mine nearby.

Somewhat desparate to rebuild the family fortune - and fortunes, if you take my meaning - Cochrane set about attempting to use the one asset remaining to make money: the coal mine. He tried most everything, financing his experimentation with the proceeds of three marriages, but everything he tried his hand at, failed. Either someone else found a less expensive way to do it, or what he had planned simply didn't work out at all.

England, at the time, was experiencing severe problems with the hulls of their ships. The great Carribean expansion was going on, and there was a mollusc in those waters - <i>teredo navalis</i> - which bored holes in the hulls. The solution at the time was to cover the hulls in a mixture of pitch and tar, produced by burning great tracts of forest to recover relatively small quantities of pitch. The problem with this was that England didn't have great tracts of forest, having burned most of the trees already either to keep warm during the Little Ice Age - for which the chimney, and thus the basic elemental layout of the house you live in now, was invented - or to fire the furnaces which produced glass, then in great demand. That situation had grown so grave that in 1615, James I passed the Proclamation Touching Glass, which disallowed the cutting of forests for use in glassmaking. [They had earlier forbade cutting timber within twenty-two miles of the Thames, within four miles of the Sussex forests, or within three miles of any portion of the coastline.]

By the 1770s, Britain looked much like it did now: practically treeless. This meant importing pine at great expense from the Baltics and America. A full four-fifths of the pitch used in England by 1725 came from America, which was all well and good until America decided to keep its pitch - and most overthing else - to itself, and damn be to the English.

The situation was most grave, and Cochrane decided this was where he'd make his mark. He would cook the coal in a great vessel - a large metal, fully enclosed vat - and condense the vapors to produce coal tar. He got his patent in 1781, and built four such apparatuses on his estate grounds, capable of burning 14 tons of coal at a time. Deep in debt from financing this great endeavor, he found out - and one can only imagine his reaction - that the Admirality had "switched to sheathing ships' bottoms with copper."

And that's not even what I'd change. It gets worse.

In the early 1780s, one of the kilns full of baking coal built up too much pressure and exploded. Cochrane discovered that the fumes would burn, but did nothing much else but play with this discovery, attaching gun barrels to the kiln and shooting flames around. Ten years later, one William Murdock made the same discovery - perhaps independently - while working for James Watt, and while Watt advised him not to move forward until the patent rights were clear, after the signing of armistice between England and Napoleon, Murdock installed two kilns at either end of their Soho factory and lit the resulting fumes. Gaslight had been invented.

Cochrane himself - and this is, to my mind, the worst blow of all - died penniless in a Paris slum in 1831, just miles from a relative who also died the same year. Neither knew the other was in town.

This is the tragedy, to me, the horrible irony I would seek to avoid. To die, alone, a failure, having been so close, so often in your life, to success, but always being slightly too early or slightly too late or slightly too foolish, seems like the greatest of injustices. Cochrane distilled ammonia from coal tar, but someone else had found a way to do it cheaper. He'd discovered a way to solve the greatest problem facing the British trading fleets, but someone decided to go with copper, instead. He'd discovered gaslight, which was to light Europe for the next hundred years, but he just never saw the possibilities. And then he died, alone, ignorant of a relative who could have given him comfort as he passed from his failed life.

I would whisper in his ear, then, in 1781, after the kiln explosion, "Wouldn't that be cheaper than candles, or oil lamps?"

Certainly, it wouldn't change history, unless by butterfly wings. But it would save one man from dying alone and penniless, miles from someone who could have offered him succor. It would avert a tragic irony in the life of someone who deserved something better, and that's a worthy enough cause, don't you think?

Salvation122 · Post by **Salvation122** » Wed Mar 16, 2005 4:04 pm

FlakJacket wrote:If you whacked Hitler then it would have just led to a much stronger USSR, and possibly Beria taking over after Stalin snuffed it.

But it would also have led to Chronospheres, Tesla Tanks, and nukes that failed to do any real damage. Even trade, really.