I'd like to visit ancient Greece or Rome with some modern weapons. I'm not sure what I would take though. I mean, you would have to take a lot of ammo if you were taking some kind of machine gun. I think a taser would be pretty good for making people think you were a god (although, I don't no idea about how long the battery would last in it). But yeah, a taser would make people think you're the son of Zeus or something in that you could "shoot lightning bolts" at people.
Definitely the late 60s and 70s if only for the amazing music and concerts. And LSD. Definitely the LSD. edit: also, Roman times. Those guys knew how to party. I'd demand to be the governor of Judea around the year 30 AD onward, so then everyone would quote ME as washing my hands, not Pilot. And by washing my hands I mean I'd totally bone all the hot JAPs and never leave my palace.
I've always wondered what kind of genetic advantage we do/don't carry over previous civilizations. Are we bigger, faster and stronger due to increased nutrition, increased hormone consumption from said nutrition and better physical knowledge or are we physically inferior due to the lax lifestyle and lack of a survival instinct that our predecessors were spared from? Send me back to medieval days with a kevlar vest, an M16 with holo sight and heartbeat sensor with UAV, Predator and Pave Low. Gonna lay some bitchass motherfuckers out. And steal their grog and wenches. And shit.
Speaking of hot wenches, do you people have any idea what disease, stress, bad nutrition, incest, does to physical beauty? Not to mention the lack of any form of personal hygiene, guess how the dentistry of your wench must have looked like in the absence of toothpaste, brushes, and a dentist. For wenches I'd much prefer this day and age.
Maybe, but at the same time they've clearly encouraged threesomes and ATM. I'll take that tradeoff. Focus: If it's just for a visit, I'd go with the height of classical Greece. Athens or Sparta, either one would be interesting in its own way. If it's for good, none. Why the fuck would I voluntarily give up some of the thousands of years of human civilization I benefit from??
I would never give up current technologies and luxuries! But, if I had to, I would only go if I knew what I know now. Then I would go back to a time period where one move by me would perhaps greatly alter history -- just to see how differently it would play out -Kidnap Brutus -Get a good shot on Hitler when he was in WW1 -Smuggle away baby Jesus -Arrive to the grassy knoll a day early -Invent something crazy way before it actually came out But, if I couldn't do that and a gun was to my head, I would go back to the early American colonial days. Chill with Jefferson, fly kites with Ben, be some sort of blacksmith probably.
That kind of gives a new meaning to the phrase 'get them while they're still hot'. That's the figurative meaning, a secondary more literal meaning might relate to the high death rate....
Go back and find out if Jesus really thought he was the son of God, preaching his dad's word..... or just a guy trying to be cool and get laid.
2550 BC to witness the building of the Great Pyramid at Giza. It's too bad a lot of cool ancient stuff is set so far apart, so you can't see the pyramids being built and the Trojan War (a thousand years later) and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon (a few hundreds years after that). Oh, it's also too bad backwards time travel is impossible in the first place... I think in the future, people are going to romanticize the 1990s, when the internet was a wild and free frontier.
Going off this, and at the risk of getting a bit controversial, I'd want to see Jesus perform a few miracles. I imagine it'd be like trying to figure out a magic trick. Trying to see if the blind guy was actually blind before he was cured, taking a stethoscope to Lazarus, making sure the resurrection wasn't some biblical marionette theater. Whether you believe in it or not, he clearly did something to captivate people, and it's something I'd want to see.
Putting these two together, going back in time, taking Pilot's place, and then ordering that Hay-zeus never be crucified or killed or anything like that. Instead he gets a whole palace to himself and spends his time having orgies with all the hot servant girls. Why? So when Christianity rolls around, instead of preachy sermons and gay hating, there'd just be sex all the time. How much better would that be?
Original thought: I would live in the U.S. in the roarin' 20's and make it rich on the stock market for the first half of the decade. For the second half of the decade, I would move to Berlin. Why? Because the inflation in Germany would mean that my American dollars would be worth billions of marks, and I would live it up where the sex, drugs and jazz would make whatever 1960's free love haven you could imagine blush with embarassment. And then I'd saunter on down to Munich and kill Hitler. Just to be of some service to humanity.
A) I'd like to go back to Jerusalem to around * 27 AD and keep a look out for that Jesus dude and see for myself what really went on. *It has been calculated by historians that Jesus was born somewhere around 3 - 8 BC. or B) I'd like to go to Dallas , Texas on Friday, November 22, 1963 , set up a few strategically placed cameras and let them roll while a certain President drove past in a roofless limousine.
Edinburgh, Scotland 1973 just hanging out with the Bay City Rollers being witness to 'Rollermania' taking over the world. Wait...what? Sorry I thought the theme was to give fucking retarded answers to a potentially very cool question. My bad.
This. And if I could bring an almanac I'd make huge sports bets that I know will pay off ala Back to the Future II. Also if I could choose social class I think being a noble in ancient Rome or living like a Vanderbilt would pretty much be tops. I'd also just like to see how the Vanderbilts lived their daily lives. They had such an excess of space and possessions that it's hard to see most of it actually getting use, but without modern technology maybe they were able to do it.