if you could travel back to any place and any time

where/when would you go?
if i could snap my fingers or hop in my phone booth i would want to go to mid 1400's-mid 1500's italy.
the heart and the center of the renaissance.
it would have been amazing.
all of the 'new thought' going on. the start of humanism...

it would have been an amazing time in an amazing place.

to continue the fantasy could you imagine what it would have been like to meet leonardo da vinci? to speak to him?
hell, to simply sit back and watch him work verrocchio or at the guild of saint luke.....

i get all bunged up just thinking about it.
da vinci is my favorite historical figure and in my opinion the greatest mind that has ever lived.
this # he did and when he did it......unreal

there are a lot of things i would like to have seen and a lot of places but this ranks number 1 for me.

then of course id like to see some dino's

be excellent to each other

oh and what about the art?
i am no fan of religion but i do love religious art and architecture and there was a lot of that going on at the time.
would have been amazing to see some of those paintings when they were fresh

a reply to: TinySickTears

alternate dimension as geronimo, don't judge me

a reply to: TinySickTears
Im a simple man, I would go back to 2003 when I got my 4month old puppy, then I would stay and change all the things I f'd up that caused me to have to move and give my boy up 4 yrs later. Then I would be happier and not so depressed all the time.


Peace.

I'd like to go back to when I had a home before I became homeless and be aware of the things that caused it and prepare to prevent it from happening.

Can I come back and can I bring a camera/video camera?
If "Yes" on both - I'd go back to the the birth of earth to see (and shoot pictures and video) who is right........

Back to when I was King of England, strong and young and all the Ladies mine.

1400s....Polio, scarlet fever, cholera, typhoid fever, typhus, diphtheria, and others. Sorry, no antibiotics until 1940s. Sorry, I think its a fantasy to think that it was all wine and roses back then. I'd rather go back to the 80s !reply to: TinySickTears

Where woukd I travel in time...

Before the priests and kings started playing role play and tricking everyone stupid in believing religious doctrine and power of wealth.

I'd stop the churches establishment, which would ripple throughout time, saving millions of souls from slaughter, millions of others from deception and man-ipulation.

I have my reasons, don't judge.

1650's - 1730's with a newly acquired schooner in the Caribbean. ...I know pirates weren't nice people. ..but this is fantasy ....

a reply to: TinySickTears
I would go to pre-1492 America. I think it would be cool.

originally posted by: thejeremybenthem
1400s....Polio, scarlet fever, cholera, typhoid fever, typhus, diphtheria, and others. Sorry, no antibiotics until 1940s. Sorry, I think its a fantasy to think that it was all wine and roses back then. I'd rather go back to the 80s !reply to: TinySickTears

i didnt say it was all wine and roses then. not all wine and roses now.
trade all the # you mention for predatory lending, big brother, riots, high gas prices, high medical insurance prices......

yeah. i'll go back

a reply to: TinySickTears

I'd go back and partner with Bill Gates or Steve jobs when their companies were still in the "Garage phase."

a reply to: TinySickTears

I would go back in time 30 seconds and change this reply.

a reply to: TinySickTears

where/when would you go?

My goodness. Everywhere. And I would go well prepared.

Prepared for the filth, the stink, the general lack of hygiene (it wasn't always mediaeval squalor but standards of cleanliness were generally more relaxed before the germ theory of disease was formulated).

Prepared for the sickness: my own, because there may be extinct bugs to which modern humans have lost their immunity, and others', because I am going to see a lot the the crippled, lame the scarred, the scabrous, the poxed. Beggars thrusting their oozing stumps and noseless faces in mine.

Prepared for the appalling social divisions, the cruditiy with which they are emphasized and the callousness with which they are regarded.

Prepared for slavery.

Prepared for the universal dominance of religion and superstition, like a black cloud obscuring the light of reason.

Prepared for unending personal danger in a world where the possibility of death from violence is never far away, and where members of social classes distant from one's own — higher and lower alike — must be regarded as inherently hostile.

Prepared to have my fondest preconceptions and theories about the past blown away by experience.

But yes, I'd still go. In disguise as an important foreigner, an ambassador from some distant land whose halting speech and bizarre accent are only to be expected from one of his barbarous kind, but who must needs be treated with respect as a guest representing a powerful master. Even so, I should have to be careful of my every word and action: not only to protect myself but to protect history, because any decisive action on my part may well wipe out the world in which I live and replace it with one unfamiliar to me, in which I may not even exist.

*

Where would I go?

Classical Athens during the great ninety years that ended with the death of Socrates, though the temptation to rescue a few more of the works of Aeschylus and Euripides, or photograph the Acropolis in its pomp with Phidias's Athena crowding the interior of the Parthenon, might prove irresistible. Imagine watching the first performance of Antigone or Oedipus Rex! I suppose the camera would have to be left at home. Baghdad in Haroun Al-Rashid's time, Shah Jehan's Delhi, Constantinople at any time. The ruined cities and monuments of my own land, the temples and palaces and stupas when they were whole and full of busy life.

The ancient world that we barely know from the few stones, shards of pottery and scraps of metal they have left behind. Worlds shrouded in mystery: Sumer, Ur, Mohenjo-Daro, the ancient city-states of North India whose civilization nurtured the Buddha and the Jain prophet, Mahavira. The great trading cultures of the Indian Ocean basin: Akkad, Dilmun. The brief, violent civilizations of pre-Columbian North America, the Aztec empire, the obscure South American cultures that have left behind nothing but enigmatic stone heads and Cyclopean figures carved into the earth of the high mountain plains.

*

The farther back one went, the less easy it would be to present oneself as a member of some contemporary culture. One would have to remain concealed at all times, or follow the opposite route and manifest oneself as a god. The latter would present inconveniences and dangers of its own — but if one could pull it off, how great it would be to watch scenes from the dawn of humanity in Africa, or the discovery of the uses of fire, the beginnings of language and culture, the great migration out from the mother-continent, the settlement of other regions. To see the megafauna of Holocene Earth before man destroyed them, the great mammoths and terror-birds, the strange marsupial forms of Australasia. To watch the hunts that brought them to extinction. To see the rafts set off into the Pacific unknown, laden with pigs and chickens and sweet potatoes...

To observe the felicity of the first hunter-gatherers in their Mediterranean Eden, living amid such abundance that a few hours' labour was all that was needed to support whole days of ease, with nothing to do but paint and carve bone flutes and bangles, and sing and drink beer and dance, while one's women grew extraordinarily fat on the land's plenty, after the fashion of the time...

*

Farther back still: disguise and concealment are no longer necessary when one is the only true sentient being on the planet. Observe the glaciers advance and retreat. See the Cretaceous sky filled with great, dark wings. Feel the earth shake when the thunder-lizards, roaring, make love. Watch the first flower bloom, the first fruit bud, the first blade of grass thrust itself out of the earth. Solve the mysteries of the great exctinctions, see the pre-Permian world in all its bizarre abundance.

Watch the first living thing crawl out of the water on to dry land.

Earlier than that, there would be nothing much to see, unless you had a small submarine.