If you could go back in time and invent one thing...

[iguana_tonante]

I love that the list is all over the place, from Facebook to aqueducts to the atomic bomb.

As for me, I would say electricity (I suppose it means the commonplace use of electricity in modern infrastructures, since electricity per se is a basic component of the physical universe and can't be "invented"), or maybe the atomic bomb, not for the destructive potential but because I'm more interested in nuclear physics than everything else in the list. Beyond all the death and destruction, the atomic program taught us a whole lot about fundamental physics.

 

[mimic]

I would invent the sandwich.

 

[Miss Chicken]

I would invent the sandwich.

What would you call it seeing the sandwich is named after the Earl of Sandwich who is said to have invented it.

 

[Brent]

I don't have the knowledge to invent anything, or the materials.

I guess I could tell people of wild and crazy future things, but they wouldn't believe me or be able to make them simply out of my ideas.

I guess I would have loved to have been in Bill Gates shoes, but I certainly don't know how to invent the operating system Windows.

 

[M'Sharak]

Wish I had his cash, but sadly no, just too lazy to figure out the keyboard shortcut to type out a proper ash instead of ae.

Alt+145 = æ

Bah, can't get it to work on my keyboard. Wonder if there's a difference between UK/US keyboards on this, or whether it's because I'm typing on a laptop.

Probably the latter, due to the absence of numeric keypad. There's always the Windows Character Map.

However by related key-bashing, I did find out that AltGr+14 = €, which is probably a more useful discovery. Or not, if the Euro ends up imploding soon...

Heh. Maybe you could invent a bulletproof Euro?

 

[Holdfast]

However by related key-bashing, I did find out that AltGr+14 = €, which is probably a more useful discovery. Or not, if the Euro ends up imploding soon...

Heh. Maybe you could invent a bulletproof Euro?

I'm good, but not THAT good.

 

[Pingfah]

If you had to go back in time and invent/discover one thing, what would you invent?

FTL drive.

 

[T'Girl]

When I was eleven my father used scrap metal and other junk to show me how to build a steam engine. I basically remember how.

So, I'd time travel and "invent" the steam engine. Screw you James Watt.

 

[mimic]

I would invent the sandwich.

What would you call it seeing the sandwich is named after the Earl of Sandwich who is said to have invented it.

The Darvill. My reasoning for that is somewhat nonsensical, but maybe someone can figure it out.

 

[PlainSimpleJoel]

The TV.

 

[Subcommander R.]

The internet! Take that Al Gore!

 

[farmkid]

A time machine.

 

[Roger Wilco]

Hot water. Because in my language, someone who "has not invented hot water" is an idiot.
And I like an easy challenge

Why don't people just google the recipe?

 

[Finn]

Go back to just before the revolution and invent trains and stop George Washington from wasting so much time and energy on having canals built. Only if he had known that trains and cars would be invented within a century of his death.

Of course, that would mean my avatar would cease to exist.

 

[Shazam!]

A tension sheet.

 

[Finn]

^why?

 

[Holdfast]

Because then he gets to marry Lady Sabrina Mulholland-Jjones.