a baseball bat to the date that one dumbass fish crawled out of the ocean
The demo tape that made some music company to publish “Last Christmas”.
I’d bring a crate of textbooks as far back as they could be understood to the people who could do the understanding. Mostly engineering textbooks but also philosophy, law, political science, math, economics, accounting, etc.
What’s been the most stable written language over time?
What’s been the most stable written language over time?
The best possible combo of far back and wide reach is probably Akkadian cuneiform. Maybe you could get further back with Sumerian cuneiform and trust that it’ll get translated once Akkadian becomes the lingua franca.
Oracle bone script which becomes Chinese characters probably doesn’t get you as far back and maybe not as wide an area, but definitely much longer in time since it’s basically still in use.
The only problem is those are both languages of imperial systems and giving them greater power is probably a net loss for humanity.
My mom.
Crazy answer: The moon to 1969. Imagine, Apollo 11 launches to land on the moon then suddenly a second one appears in space orbiting opposite the original.
Less crazy but still far reaching: a tazer to the theater the night of the Lincoln assassination. I wonder how different the U.S. would be if Lincoln had survived and the resonstruction period gone differently.
Somewhat more plasuable: enough documentation and evidence to convince someone high up in U.S. intelligence in 2000 that I am a time traveler then everything we have on the world trade center attack. I’m curious how different things would be if that had failed. Maybe bush only gets one term and the whole U.S. political situation shifts for the better. Maybe a less destabilized middle east avoids the worst of ISIS and with fewer syrian refugees, right wingers in Europe are less successful, Brexit fails, and Russia declines to invade Ukraine.
A good, well researched history textbook the night BEFORE the assassination. Just show Lincoln what would happen.
