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If you could change one thing in history....

I would prevent the death of Archimedes by Roman soldiers acting against orders at the end of the two-year Siege of Syracuse in 212 BC during the Second Punic War. General Marcellus had ordered that he be brought to him alive and treated with the utmost respect as a valuable scientific asset for Rome, but according to Plutarch's account, Archimedes either refused to come because he was trying to complete a mathematical diagram and the soldier killed him for his insolence, or he was killed while trying to surrender because a soldier misinterpreted his mathematical instruments as valuables to be looted. Either way, General Marcellus was apparently outraged at his death, as he had planned to take him back to Rome as an honored guest and put him to work for the scientific benefit of the Roman Empire. While already well known for his engineering and mathematical genius at the time, the full extent of his mathematical accomplishments was not rediscovered and copied in many cases until centuries or millennia later (as late as the Archimedes Palimpsest in 1906, which has only been fully readable with infrared and other scanning techniques as late as 1998 on). Perhaps if he had lived and worked in the service of Rome, his works could have been copied and spread throughout the known world even earlier, inspiring others as they did during the Renaissance. And who knows how many of his ideas were lost to the world forever thanks to his untimely death?
 
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I would only alter something that would not change history too much because if you stop something bad from happening what follows might even be worse.

I think I would go back and try to save an extinct animal which still could have a place in the modern world - maybe the thylacine, or dodo, the great auk or Stellar's sea cow.
 
I would have a hard time choosing between preventing Hitler from being born or stopping the assassination of Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theater.
 
Im talking about how could we make life better today if we changed something in the past.Who know what the light bulb would been replaced today if we done it earlier. Like did you know lightbuilbs didn't excist in star trek? Something replaced them. Some kind of lighting device on the enterprise.
Not sure if handing Franklin the light bulb in the 1700s is going to usher in a golden age of invention that will give us flying cars and moonbases in the 2000s. We could just enter a centuries long period of stagnation.
 
I'd stop Gene Roddenberry from being hit and killed by that drunk driver in 1971.
 
Im talking about how could we make life better today if we changed something in the past.Who know what the light bulb would been replaced today if we done it earlier. Like did you know lightbuilbs didn't excist in star trek? Something replaced them. Some kind of lighting device on the enterprise.
Not sure if handing Franklin the light bulb in the 1700s is going to usher in a golden age of invention that will give us flying cars and moonbases in the 2000s. We could just enter a centuries long period of stagnation.

Heck why stop there, give the light bulb to Jesus. The light of the world! He would be even more popular!
 
As a reader of history, I'm all too aware there are WAY too many events that need to be changed. Example, and interesting to note, no one has suggested on 9/11/01, ringing the World Trade Center about 8:20am and issuing threats that cause an evacuation.

Hitler, Kennedy, Lincoln, the Mary Rose, honestly, we'd be all over the shop like Sam beckett, trying to rectify everything.

The only one I an really think of, because I'm very anti-religion, would be how to stop the Bible being written, or written the way it was, and that's something that happens over centuries, maybe slapping Abraham up the side of the head, tell him to not be a dick to his sons, and pass it on, might do the trick.
 
I'd go back and add Jar Jar to the original trilogy just to piss people off and prove that humans can't be trusted to use time travel responsibly.

That or I'd break Johnny Wilkinson's legs the day before the 2003 RWC final.
 
I'd save my mom and my grandparents. They went before their time.

The rest of life is on it's own.
 
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