What historical moment or event do you wish you could have witnessed or participated?

Being able to read the "books" in the Great Library of Alexandria before it burned.

Ozbenno said:

As for human history, having a chat with Aristotle would be good.

Click to expand...

That would be a lot of fun, wouldn't it? I can see it now:

ME (in terribly accented, slow, stilted ancient Greek): ΄ο στρατεγοs αρξει το στρατευμα ειs τον πεδιον.

The general will lead his army onto the plain.

ARISTOTLE: ?

ME: πλειστοι στρατιωται εμειναν εν ταιs σκηναιs.

Very many soldiers remained in the tents.

ARISTOTLE: ??

ME: ΄Αι Περσαι επειθον τουs παιδαs λεγειν την αληθειαν.

The Persians used to persuade their children to speak the truth.

ARISTOTLE: Your Greek sucks. English please?

ME: !?


Quite a polyglot, that Aristotle.

It's interesting to note that, in a few months of studying ancient Greek, I've learned the word for soldier, general, 2 words for army, and army camp, but I haven't even the foggiest idea how to say "hello." I suppose it makes some sense to dispense with the pleasantries--they won't help you read Xenophon very well--and its true that soldiering was very important to the classical era Greek citizen, but it still seems quite odd. Indeed, I wonder what Aristotle would have thought of people over 2000 years in the future learning his language in such a strange way.

I would have loved to have witnessed the brutal horror and astonishment that Genghis Khans' warriors and himself imposed on the less fortunate.

Romanian revolution, Christmas 1989.

London on VE Day

Sherman's March to the Sea

Fall of the Berlin Wall

More to come as I think of them...

I just want to go back to a time when there was uncertainty, a mystery of what is in our world, that feeling that there is something out there, something new and undiscovered, and it only needs to be found....

Forget effing aliens.

Mirc said:

False, Christianity doesn't believe that anyone before Jesus Christ went to hell. In fact, Christianity says Jesus, during the 3 days when he was dead, freed the souls of all the people from hell that didn't belong there.

Click to expand...

Maybe Christians where you come from.

I would love to witness the Normandy Invasion. My uncles fought there. I'd want to see them in action.

amadeus said:

Romanian revolution, Christmas 1989.

Click to expand...

How could I forget about that??

Ace said:

Being able to read the "books" in the Great Library of Alexandria before it burned.

Click to expand...

That was the first thing I thought of when I saw this thread. Alexandria was one of the greatest repositories of ancient knowledge in the world...especially that 30+ volume set that was essentially a complete history of the Ancient and Classic Mediterranean.

Moment of decision to founding Istanbul.(Byzas)
Darius' suicide.
Raid times through the great wall.
Attila forgives the pope.
Viking warships during combat.
Sanheribs conquest over Phonicea.
Burning of Hagia Sophia and after rebuilding seeing Justinians face.
Conquering Istanbul.
Cathy at her visit Pashas tent.
Termophylae
Munich under Swedish control.
The wedding of Henry 8 and Anne Boleyn.
WWI at Çanakkale.
Saddam get caught in a hole.
I dont know,I just want to see all things like a movie..

Everything, everywhere.

As a bonus, that would make me essentially immortal, except that I would eventually run into the Wowbagger Paradox.

Specifically:

Tenochtitlan on the eve of contact with the Spanish
Rome at its height
The Somme
the first cities in Mesopotamia

BeyondCivilized said:

Wow, your opinion matters so much, it's so fulfilling. Now that's I'm witnessing a world where Israel actually exists, if I had lived in the 1940s I'd for sure know that "it's not going to get better".



Yeah since Lebanon exists in another planet, in another universe, and in another dimension. Trust me, 2 thirds of the Lebanese problems are the Palestinian immigrant militia and Hezbollah (the Iranian-backed nation within the Nation) Not to mention that we can't have a proper standing army (or we'd be crushed by another foreign stimulated devastating civil war) because we happen to neighbor, which happens to have the full privilege to defend itself, a privilege we can't possibly have.

Lebanon is a goddamned sh**hole, and it wouldn't have been so if it didn't neighbor that fortress of a country.

Click to expand...

How typical of a Middle Eastern opinion: just blame it on everyone else, God forbid you take responsibility for your own destiny.

Eran of Arcadia said:

Everything, everywhere.

As a bonus, that would make me essentially immortal, except that I would eventually run into the Wowbagger Paradox.

Click to expand...

What's that? Is that when you are alive at the time you're born?

In (I think) Life, the Universe, and Everything, one of Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Book, he introduces a character, Wowbagger, who through an unfortunate accident with a particle accelerator and a rubber band, has become immortal. Now, the galaxy is not; it ends up collapsing in on itself. This is not a problem for Wowbagger, since time travel is quite a common occurence. Extreme boredom is.

So he takes it upon himself to travel throughout the galaxy and insult every creature that has ever existed - in alphabetical order. But this could lead to a problem, depending on how time travel works.

Now, the universe isn't really going to collapes on itself, probably, but it will just keep expanding until it is a thin hydrogen cloud of uniform density and temperature, thanks to entropy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics. There is probbaly no way around this. So even if an organism gained immortality, it couldn't really last forever in any meaningful way.

It occured to me once that one could get around this by time travel, and thus never be at that point of the universe's lifetime, because it would be possible to travel to another point. But this would only buy you a few trillion or so lifetimes. Because, if you lived, became immortal, and then traveled back to the very beginning once the universe started winding down, you would still only have 100 billion years or so. Then you would have to travel back, again, once the universe winded down again (in your timeline). Keep doing this, and eventually, at any given time in the life of the universe, you will exist in several trillion places at once, and it's going to get pretty crowded.

I have no idea how the physics really work, I am sure that there is some problem with what I described. But it might work at the level of a planet - if I am around to see everything, it's going to get crowded with all the billions of me there are running about.

Cheezy the Wiz said:

How typical of a Middle Eastern opinion: just blame it on everyone else, God forbid you take responsibility for your own destiny.

Click to expand...

Just to be the Devil's Advocate, some Muslims seem to think they are taking responsibility for their own destiny, and I don't like the steps that certain Middle-East radical organizations have taken.

I would love to be present or witness the following:

1: Mankind making first contact with another sentient species from beyond our solar system (imagine the profound universal implications of that?)
2: Mankind's first mission outside of our solar system using "warp drive" or equivalent.

I doubt I'll be alive to see either though. So if I had a time machine. I'd go ahead, most certainly.

The Bolsheviks executing the royal family.

Any event more then 6000 years 1 day ago. Finally put this god damn debate to rest.

chad187 said:

The Bolsheviks executing the royal family.

Click to expand...

Checking for Anastasia? Hate Imperial swine? Blood lust?

So many things would be awesome, it would be awesome to see as many extinct things as possible, so long as they're interesting.
Classical civilizations at their height.
Battles
Places of mystery.
Build me a damn time machine

Godwynn said:

Fall of the Berlin Wall

Click to expand...

Am I so old?

The European Enlightenment.