As KaiYves describes it, this started with an idea for a story called “I Saved the Titanic.” Then she thought “I Saved Pompeii,” “I Saved Apollo 1,” and several other things worth saving. Then she thought, “Why not make this a thread?” So we did.
As KaiYves describes it, this started with an idea for a story called “I Saved the Titanic.” Then she thought “I Saved Pompeii,” “I Saved Apollo 1,” and several other things worth saving. Then she thought, “Why not make this a thread?” So we did.
I Saved the Hindenburg.
The result: Airships are still considered a viable (and eco-friendly) way to travel.
Why I did it: Because airships.
How I did it: Even today the exact cause of the Hindenburg explosion is unknown, ranging from sabotage to lightning strike. Therefore, I may need to come up with several precautions.
The simplest method would be to ensure that the airship is filled with helium. It had already been discovered. If 1930s methods are not sufficient to produce enough helium, it may be necessary to introduce modern methods.
If this is unfeasible and a smaller, less intrusive fix is necessitated, I could arrange for the Hindenburg to be coated in fire retardant materials. If none are available/too expensive…
As a last ditch effort, I can mess with its flight schedule and either divert it or keep it from making that fatal flight.
It seems that the “you” in this analysis must be some early 20th-century figure with the power to make such changes. I’m not sure exactly who, if anybody, that would be — but a 21st-century teen transported back in time might have trouble pulling it off.
Is it possible that, even blessed with your knowledge of the past, nobody had the skill, authority, and persuasive ability to save the Hindenburg?
It would be interesting to ask, which popular method of travel would result in more deaths, airships/blimps or airplanes/jets? Perhaps some divine intervention was saving us from some future disaster much worse than the Hindenburg. Think about it, it would be like running out of fossil fuels. We get used to airships, but they’re so dangerous that everyone stops using them (equivalent to running out of fossil fuels). We’d be behind in airplane development, and pretty screwed.
And that makes me wonder what could have saved us from doomed fossil fuels.
I’m not entirely sure if this is another purpose of the thread, but I think the questions are interesting enough.
I think saving Tesla’s reputation and giving him funding to carry out his ideas on solar and geothermal power in the early 1900s would be one way.
Alternatively, increase nuclear safety precautions in the 1970s to prevent Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, so that people aren’t soured on nuclear power, and push solar power satellites as a primary useage of the space shuttle.
To some degree, saving (to stay with the theme of the thread) Chernobyl and Three Mile Island might help increasing its popularity, but by then we had automobiles using gasoline. In addition, I don’t know if we would’ve been able to harness nuclear power in time to install them in automobiles in the 70s. I don’t see anything back then that could replace fossil fuel as practical. Today, at least we have ideas that could be carried out if enough money was put into it, but in the early twentieth century?
Not nuclear cars, electric cars running on power produced by nuclear and solar facilities. And if those are the main sources of electricity, you’ve already reduced the use of fossil fuels for power generation.
You have to sieze the moment when there’s the early 70s oil crisis and people were willing to change. A lot of great ideas were proposed, but the trouble was that the crisis ended before they could be acted upon, so people went on with business as usual.
There’s nothing bad about not having aeroplanes. Zeppelins could easily serve as efficient substitutes.
I believe that the Hindenburg’s shell was part of the problem and acted as a catalyst to the fire.
Here’s an alternative option: Don’t save the Hindenburg, but hold enough support for zeppelins so that research could be continued. If one knows how to prevent something, even if the attempt to prevent it fails, it could be applied to the next model.
If that’s the case, then what’s to say that anything could be saved? And then what’s the point of this thread, then?
Plus I could always bribe some officials. Or write them letters suggesting the better option…Well, it might not work, but like I said, this is the saving things thread. That’s what I’m going to do.
Although I do like that all of these great ideas have been proposed. Anyone else got something they want to save?
I’m sure it would be possible to save some things. It’s just not clear to me yet what this thread is about. Is it “if I could somehow have saved X, then Y might have happened,” or is it “here’s how I would have gone about saving X, so that Y could happen”?
In the case of the Hindenburg, your saying that you would have given it fire-retardant paint makes me wonder about the details. Could one person repaint a Zeppelin when nobody was looking? But maybe that’s not the point.
Well, if they had time travel, they could keep traveling back in time to help their past selves paint the zeppelin in something like 12 hours, overnight.
One could just add a small amount of chemicals to the ‘paint’ and let the workers do the rest.
My idea was “Here’s how I would have gone about saving X, in which case Y might have happened.”
Has anyone ever read “The Never War” from the Pendragon series?
SPOILER WARNING SPOILER PENDRAGON SPOILER
They predict exactly what would happen if the Hindenburg did not blow up. It ends up to be a fairly morbid series of events in which everyone gets nuked.
That probably should have gone on Books & Reading but this reminded me of it.
I saved Abe Lincoln
Why: So he could do more for the country and die a natural death.
How: I warned him and his family they shouldn’t go. (How I did that: We’ll they’d be surprised enough a 11 year-old popped out of thin air.)Result: Civil right’s movement moved forward as Lincoln was president longer.
Or, like in the novel Second Sight, you could sabotage Booth’s gun, so he would be caught for TRYING to kill the president, but failing.
Reconstruction would have been much easier if he’d been president, too. He had good ideas.
I saved the world’s economy.
How: Inspiring trillions of dollars of spending by releasing the next hot market item – The iCube, then spending the money by hiring many, many workers.
Result: Jobs saved, more worldwide economy boost, U.S. not more than 14 trillion in debt, European nations not having to bail themselves out so much.
Result: Your company becomes a dominant world power, more powerful than any other, because it has so many workers, and soon you aren’t able to leave and return to our present time. You’re trapped in the past as the head of a powerful company! And when you die, the company can’t really innovate much anymore, and the economy is worse than before.
YAY PESSIMISM.
How would you be “trapped” in the past if you were the leader of a super-powerful company? Just because you felt obligated to stay? Couldn’t you, like, fake your suicide and leave instructions for a worthy person to take over, having actually travelled back to your time?
Many companies have a severe loss in profit/innovation when the leader dies- enough so that it would crash the economy again.
But why would I really want to leave? This wouldn’t be that far in the past, and I would most likely be a multi-billion dollar philanthropic famous businessman. Plus, my family would still be alive so I could talk to them. Which of course brings up the age-old debate of what would happen if I killed myself.
What exactly is the problem with dying in the past? It doesn’t affect future you unless you heard about it, which would probably mean you wouldn’t go back or would change what you did, which would change the past, which would change future you’s response, etc. But in itself, your death shouldn’t affect the timeline.
I saved Albert I.
How: By punching an air hole in his capsule.
Result: Alberts II-IV are spared. Space exploration is advanced by a year.
Albert I? The king?
Oh, the monkey. Now I see. Good idea.
The recent Doctor Who episode was deeply disappointing, in that its title was “Let’s Kill Hitler” but Hitler only appeared briefly in the first ten minutes. It got me thinking, however. If a time traveler were to go back in time and kill Hitler, what would be the best time to do it? What would be the consequences? And could we avert WWII and/or the Nazi atrocities without having to kill Hitler himself (for instance, could we bolster the Weimar Republic’s economic system somehow so that hyperinflation doesn’t push Germany to the brink? Subvert Nazi ideology early on? I read one essay that went as far back as the Franco-Prussian War to prevent both World Wars.)
Food for thought: Hitler survived many, many assassination attempts, some of which failed in unlikely ways. What if, throughout the future, time travelers are desperately trying to keep Hitler alive because his horrible crimes against humanity inadvertently prevented something worse?
Spielmann. *shudders*
Who? What?
This is the second time Spielmann has been mentioned in a discussion of time travel. I’ve added him to the HG2MB.
Wait, I thought Spielmann had been mentioned thousands of times and we all knew him as the Arch-Emperor Of The Third German Empire…
Right, that was the doomed timeline I escaped from to find this universe. Sorry for the confusion. Carry on.
Enc, I think a counterfactual time-duplicate got hold of your account again. You really should look into causal security.
Oh gog cake it.
I can be really annoying, can’t I.
Almost makes me wish I hadn’t set up a shelter in my home for those guys.
He doesn’t bear thinking about. But almost as bad is the thought that time-travelers have tried to change history to optimize our time line, and this is the best they can do.
“An optimist believes that this is the best of all possible worlds. A pessimist fears that this is so.”
Pie Girl – Apparently, President Lincoln grew a beard because he recieved a letter from an eleven-year-old girl told him his face looked to skinny and a beard would make it look chubbier. I don’t think taking advice regarding attending a play is really so far-fetched.
I saved the Tainos.
How: I went back in time disguised as a navigator and got signed up to be in Columbus’ crew. While there, I taught him to navigate decently so that he never landed on the island in the first place. Once I was certain that I’d removed Columbus as a threat, I faked drowning and came back to the present.