I’d choose a big medieval battle like Agincourt or something. Medieval times interests me, and I’d like to see the long bows in action. Might pick a battle with Trebuchets though cos they’re cool
Dinosaur!
Assuming that this is spectator mode and I can’t inadvertently change history or die while I’m back there, I think watching the Chicxulub impact which killed the non-avian dinosaurs would be a pretty awesome spectacle.
Oh good call! Bring a torch it may get dark.
Only after it got really, really, really, really bright. 😄
Haha true torch and sunglasses!
I’d go back to about 222CE to the period of the Battle of Yiling. Not for the battle itself, but for the aftermath.
See, the novel Three Kingdoms mentions an incident where famed genius general Zhuge Liang ambushed an army chasing them down near Yufu, which is near present-day Zigui County, Hubei Province.
There are two versions of the story. In the first he uses a “Stone Sentinel Maze” to trap the pursuing army of Lu Xun of Wu while his own and Liu Bei’s troops escape. They wandered, lost, in this bizarre arrangement of natural stones until they were guided out by a local elder, but by then the people they were chasing were long gone.
The second version has him using an “Eight Trigram Formation” to confound and trap the Wei army commanded by Sima Yi, before magnanimously releasing it, demonstrating both that he could have destroyed said army, but chose not to.
These are fiction, I stress, but they’re fiction based on folklore, and folklore often has a basis in tenuous, grossly distorted fact. (For example the story of Hou Yi shooting the ten suns is very credibly a story based on a calendar reform that introduced China’s solilunar taking ten days off a month to bring the calendar in line with the novel creation of the 24 solar forms. The shooting of ten suns may have been a folkloric encoding of a calendar change.) So for the facts of this clear work of fiction:
- The Battle of Yiling is documented very well, and is supported by physical evidence.
- Zhuge Liang is a historical personage who was noted as being a polymath genius, including, but not limited to, military strategy.
- The Battle of Yiling did not go well for Liu Bei (it effectively destroyed his army) and he was, in fact, chased by Lu Xun mercilessly after the fact.
- The territory around Zigui has some of the most confounding terrain imaginable with weird rock formations and treacherous nearness to riverbanks.
So it is not out of the question that Zhuge Liang in desperation misled or trapped a chasing army in the weird terrain around Zigui giving the remnants of Liu Bei’s army (and Liu Bei himself) the opportunity to finally escape. Then, over time, as history faded and mythology grew around the giants of the Three Kingdoms era, a desperate, last-ditch effort to escape turns into a brilliant military plan in which Zhuge Liang toyed with a rival general in a catch-and-release program.
I want to watch and see what really happened. I want to see the truth behind the millennia of myth.
Good choice! What’s a polymath genius?
Polymath just means “knows a lot of subjects”. (It was easier to be a polymath back in ancient times.) Zhuge Liang was a philosopher, a general, a skilled warrior, a poet, an inventor, a …
Blimey… how inferior I feel.
Don’t. You likely personally know more than the greatest polymath of the third century CE in any nation. There was just less to know.
Assuming some sort of immunity, I would watch the big bang. Sure, most of it will be over before my brain even knows it, but then really cool shit will start happening I hope
Bing Bang Burger Bar, as opposed to the Restaurant at the end of the universe…
I think that would be impossible to observe it tho. Like there was no “space” outside of it to be able to observe it. As crazy as it sounds, the “void” we call space was created with the big bang.
- Not a physicist
Given we are discussing going back in time 13.8 billion years, and being immune to any negative effects, I think we can go ahead and say that part is figured out by the magic time machine as well.
“being outside spacetime” is probably fine.
Also not a physicist either but that is my understanding as well, there was nothing, no space, no time, no up/down/left/right. And space is still expanding (albeit unevenly) all these billions of years later.
What’s it expanding into? Nothing! At least as far as we know. Still waiting to bump up against the next universe bubble.
“Would you care to join me in watching the supernova? It is a once-in-a-lifetime experience.”
I would try to coordinate with linguists and scholars to find out more about language isolates. If everyone can do it, we could train everyone and go at 20-to-50-year intervals and solve some linguistic mysteries (specifically Japanese (current and peninsular) and Korean; Ainu origins; yayoi origins; jomon origins; etc.)
Can you explain what the mysteries are?
A very TL;DR version of some question:
Do any of the 3 have any other relatives (some conjecture that Japanese and Korean are related, Ainu may have had other relatives maybe something before Nikvh, and we have no idea what the original settlers to Japan (some of whom likely came from Taiwan but others from other places) spoke).
Was Peninsular Japanese a thing (we only think it exists because of some placenames in old Korean and/or Chinese documents). If so, was Japaonic pushed off the peninsula or was it brought to the peninsula?
What was pronunciation like of any of these languages in antiquity? We have some ideas, but it’s not as clear-cut as, say, Chinese which can be studied by things like rhyme dictionaries.
Of course pronouncing things must be really hard to work out! I’d never thought of that. That’s really interesting thanks for sharing
