There are so many significant moments throughout history, and so many things to consider when you’re talking about time travel.
I mean, do you go for the best party? The biggest moment? Something personal?
These 17 people have thought it all through, and they say they know where they would go first.
17. Just a bunch of water.
For a long time, the Mediterranean sea was cut off from the Atlantic ocean and the rivers flowing into it were not enough to prevent it drying up completely. At some point in time, the ocean was able to cut an opening at Gibraltar and millions of cubic meters of water poured into the basin.
That, I would like to have seen.
16. Ah, a cultured Redditor!
I would love to see the debut of a Molière play at Versailles.
15. Our human ancestors.
I don’t know if this answer counts as its not historic in the terms of a specific event, but I’d love to see early humans and how their lives were. Id love to witness a hunt and see how they survive. What their early community life was like. What they really looked like. I am curious to know what their teeth looked like pre-farming, how their bodies looked when food was scarce but they did a ton of walking, and really how they walked without shoes.
After writing this out, I’d like to see Otzi the iceman’s last day. Scientists know almost everything they can about his last few days on earth, but not who he was or why he was murdered. It would be interesting to see the answer to those questions.
14. I’d be careful there.
Strasbourg 1518, to witness the event where the whole town succumbed to mass hysteria and danced themselves to death over 2 months.
13. Now that’s a big bang.
Kepler’s Supernova
Visible to the naked eye, Kepler’s Star was brighter at its peak than any other star in the night sky, with an apparent magnitude of −2.5. It was visible during the day for over three weeks. Records of its sighting exist in European, Chinese, Korean, and Arabic sources.
It was visible during the day for over three weeks WOW! Just imagine the magnitude of that explosion… which was visible for 3 weeks during daylight (it was 20,000 light-years away).
12. The way way back.
Assuming I have a safe vantage point on some kind of space ship, I choose the planetary impact that’s believed to have given us the moon.
11. Now that’s a big moment.
Diogenes telling Alexander the great to step out of his sunlight.
10. The original earth.
Imagine if you were on original earth as that happened. You would first notice as the Mars-sized planetoid approached that gravity was changing. Tides were different, weather changes. As it approached closer and closer your weight would begin to decrease as you grew lighter and lighter.
Maybe the planet would go dark as it consumed the sky from horizon to horizon. Eventually the gravity would be so different that you’d begin to feel weightless as the planetoid got closer.
Earthquakes would likely be severe, tidal waves would sweep over the ground, and then the collision would crack the earth open like an egg, with all the hot gooey yolk, I mean magma exploding outward end ejecting en masse into space.
So much would be ejected that it would begin to clump together by its own gravity, and form an orbit around the new earth.
Because of this utter chaos we can live nowadays, dependent to a large extent on a moon born of cosmic chaos.
9. Bittersweet.
When the Golden Gate Bridge was finished, my Father was one of the first to walk across it. He died when I was 8. Would love to see him again.
8. The only hard part?
I have always wanted to go back in time to somewhere around 4500 BC and just record the languages being spoken around the world.
There are entire fields of research that deconstruct proto languages of the languages we speak, but those can only go so far back and don’t account for all the other languages that got abandoned over time.
The only hard part would be choosing how far back in time to go, because humans have speaking languages for a very, very long time.
7. Something to see.
A tour of Library of Alexandria before it was destroyed.
6. Awe and bewilderment.
I’d like to see Tenochtitlan before the Spanish destroyed it.
I’d love to witness the day Cortez first stepped foot in tenochtitlan. What a unique moment in history. The sense of awe and bewilderment from both sides. So much lost to history…
5. Beethoven himself.
The premier of Beethoven’s 9th symphony in Vienna
The story is that rehearsals were rushed due to time constraints, so Beethoven himself stood next to the orchestra conductor during the performance to give him tempo and dynamic cues.
When the last notes sounded, the totally-deaf Beethoven just stood with his back to the audience, not realizing what the response was.
Finally, the soprano soloist went to the maestro and physically turned him around so he could see: the audience standing in full ovation, many jumping up and down on their chairs as they cheered and clapped.
4. Found the geologist.
As a geologist, the Lake Agassiz flood.
During the last glacial period, over 12,000 years ago, there was a massive lake in the middle of the North American continent fed by glacial meltwater. This lake is now known as Lake Agassiz. At its peak, the lake was larger than all of the current Great Lakes combined . Estimates put it at 440,000 square kilometers in area. Most of that water was held in place by glacial and topographic dams.
At the end of the last ice age, the largest ice body containing the lake to the east in Hudson Bay retreated / melted, causing the lake to drain almost completely – in less than nine months . A freshwater lake with tens of thousands of years of history and input, and more fresh water than all other freshwater bodies on the planet at that time combined, drained in less than a year. The flooding was likely unprecedented, carrying erratics (boulders) the size of small houses hundreds of miles away. As the water drained into Hudson Bay and other outlets, the global sea level rose by 1-3 meters.
Lake Winnipeg, Lake Manitoba, Red Lake, and Lake of the Woods are the largest remnants of Lake Agassiz.
3. Very VERY far away.
I’d watch reactor 4 explode from very far away.
And maybe in a special suit.
2. Sounds dangerous.
Would love to see and hear dinosaurs roaming around our land.
1. Wouldn’t we all love to know.
Whitechapel. 1888. Finally see who Jack the Ripper was
These are all super valid.
I have no idea how I would even begin to choose!
