Changing the past....
- Brineshrimp
- Bulldrek Pimp
- Posts: 846
- Joined: Mon May 20, 2002 10:15 pm
- Location: Right here.
- Contact:
Changing the past....
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?
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?
This is my signature. Enjoy
God gave us a penis and a brain, but only enough blood to run one at a time.
God gave us a penis and a brain, but only enough blood to run one at a time.
- Serious Paul
- Devil
- Posts: 6644
- Joined: Mon Mar 18, 2002 12:38 pm
- Serious Paul
- Devil
- Posts: 6644
- Joined: Mon Mar 18, 2002 12:38 pm
- Kitt
- Baron of the Imperium
- Posts: 3812
- Joined: Sat Mar 30, 2002 5:42 pm
- Location: The state of insanity
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.
Real life quotes, courtesy of the PetsHotel:
"Drop it, you pervert!"
"Ma'am? Ma'am! You are very round."
"It's a hump-a-palooza today."
"Everybody get away from the poop bucket!"
"Drop it, you pervert!"
"Ma'am? Ma'am! You are very round."
"It's a hump-a-palooza today."
"Everybody get away from the poop bucket!"
- Johnny the Bull
- Bulldrek Pimp
- Posts: 930
- Joined: Tue Oct 07, 2003 5:16 am
- Location: Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
- Contact:
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.
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.
--------------------------------------------
No money, no honey
No money, no honey
- Serious Paul
- Devil
- Posts: 6644
- Joined: Mon Mar 18, 2002 12:38 pm
- DarkMage
- Bondsman of the Crimson Assfro
- Posts: 2133
- Joined: Wed Mar 20, 2002 3:41 pm
- Location: Upstate NY
I woudln't have hurt her....
_
What is a friend? A single soul in two bodies - Aristotle
Drive by Ogling
:plode :plode :plode
</hr>
What is a friend? A single soul in two bodies - Aristotle
Drive by Ogling
:plode :plode :plode
</hr>
- Johnny the Bull
- Bulldrek Pimp
- Posts: 930
- Joined: Tue Oct 07, 2003 5:16 am
- Location: Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
- Contact:
- Serious Paul
- Devil
- Posts: 6644
- Joined: Mon Mar 18, 2002 12:38 pm
- Johnny the Bull
- Bulldrek Pimp
- Posts: 930
- Joined: Tue Oct 07, 2003 5:16 am
- Location: Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
- Contact:
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.
--------------------------------------------
No money, no honey
No money, no honey
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.
One time I built a matter transporter, but things got screwed up (long story, lol) and I ended up turning into a kind of half-human, half-housefly monstrosity.
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.
_
Peace through superior firepower!
Thought for the day: Evolving long enough, your spam filter will become a construct emulating your own mind
Peace through superior firepower!
Thought for the day: Evolving long enough, your spam filter will become a construct emulating your own mind
- Lord Death Hand
- No-Life Loser
- Posts: 10666
- Joined: Tue Mar 19, 2002 7:42 pm
- Location: Flatsville, Iowa
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.
I am the evil monkey what lives in your nuts.
Lick my butt and suck my balls, America FUCK YEAH!
Lick my butt and suck my balls, America FUCK YEAH!
- The Eclipse
- Knight of the Imperium
- Posts: 3240
- Joined: Mon Mar 18, 2002 5:22 am
- Location: Salem, Oregon
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?
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?
-----------------------------------------------------------------
'How do you know I'm mad?' said Alice.
'You must be', said the Cat, 'or you wouldn't have come here.'
MooCow is a carrier of Mad Cow Disease
'How do you know I'm mad?' said Alice.
'You must be', said the Cat, 'or you wouldn't have come here.'
MooCow is a carrier of Mad Cow Disease
- Johnny the Bull
- Bulldrek Pimp
- Posts: 930
- Joined: Tue Oct 07, 2003 5:16 am
- Location: Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
- Contact:
Amen. Although if I could combine it with Atragon's post....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.
<font color=#5c7898>A high I.Q. is like a jeep. You'll still get stuck; you'll just be farther from help when you do.
</font>
</font>
- Sock_Monkey
- Bulldrek Pusher
- Posts: 761
- Joined: Sun Nov 10, 2002 7:59 pm
- Location: Under your bed.
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.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.
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.
I feel like I'm Han Solo, LDH is Chewbacca, Kitt is Obi Wan Kenobi and we're in that FUCKED UP bar!
- FlakJacket
- Orbital Cow Private
- Posts: 4064
- Joined: Mon Mar 18, 2002 2:05 pm
- Location: Birminghman, UK
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.
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.
10:41 Kai: Ohayou minna
10:42 Adam: ENGLISH MOTHERFUCKER!
10:44 Kai: Fuck off, how's that? ;P
10:45 Adam: Much better.
- Sock_Monkey
- Bulldrek Pusher
- Posts: 761
- Joined: Sun Nov 10, 2002 7:59 pm
- Location: Under your bed.
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....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.
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.
I feel like I'm Han Solo, LDH is Chewbacca, Kitt is Obi Wan Kenobi and we're in that FUCKED UP bar!
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.
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.
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.
If I could time travel, I would, but I'd be more interested in watching than changing.
Terror, like charity, begins at home.
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?
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
- Grand Marshall of the Imperium
- Posts: 3776
- Joined: Wed Mar 20, 2002 7:20 pm
- Location: Memphis, TN