The question:

If you could go anywhere in time, when would you go?

Rules:

1.) If you want to change something that occoured in your lifetime, but didn't directly affect you, choose "The world's past, to change something"

2.) If you want to view something that occoured in your lifetime but you weren't there - I think you get it...

3.) You may explain your choice in greater detail by responding to this topic.


I would go back and change the fact that I asked Dad for a portable laptop over memory, because my current laptop only has 16Gb

@Kerm: I put the question in a post to bring attention to the "Rules".

Personal past. I'd have done more extra-curriculars in highschool. Then I wouldn't have attempted being a math-ed major in college. I would have went straight to comp sci. I would have dropped honor's calc 1 first semester and took regular calc 1. And I would have added my theatre minor freshman year so I could graduate on time.

And your laptop ONLY has 16gb of memory? Mine has 1gb, and my desktop has 2gb.

I'm gonna guess he's talking about disk space.

World's past, specifically the mid-80s, not to view anything but to live there for a little while. I want to experience the world when it was fun: when video games were first coming out (the NES especially), when good cartoons and tv shows were on (MacGyver and A-Team, anyone?), when airport security was lax and terrorism was the least of concerns on a person's mind.

The 80s on up to/through the 90s were a peaceful time I'd love to live and live again.


And yeah, Xeno_cre8or definitely meant hard disk space not RAM

I'd jump to the left, then take a step to the right. I'd then put my hands on my hips, and bring my knees in tight. However, you'll probably find that it's the pelvic thrusts that really drive you insane.

What part of resize your avatar was confusing?

My vote was for humanity's future. The past is neat, but I'm usually content with historical accounts and a little imagination. Humanity's future, though.. it's mind-boggling. I'd really love to see the singularity (cough).
Basically, I rather enjoy having my mind boggled.

Has someone been watching flashforward?

And if a laptop can have 16GB of RAM I am so upgrading my RAM, I've already got the 64b OS to recognize it!

QFT

Any time there was a frontier to explore. Either in the past or in the future if we develop some form of ftl travel.

Yay, someone else here likes musicals! Dr. Frank-N-Furter is by far my dream role.

Currently my desktop only has 6GB of RAM. I'm probably going to upgrade to 12GB

The time warp song was the first thing that came to mind when I saw this too.

XD

My "view on the world" is: given the full state of the universe, everything (future and past) can theoretically be computed from it. (it's impossible though, because merely possessing the knowledge affects the state).
Therefore IMHO it is completely useless to time-warp. The results will be the same.

You see I'm a (m)atheïst...

More correctly the view point you just described is one of strict naturalism and a belief in a deterministic universe. The former of those is certainly a justifiable philosophical view to have (though I strongly recommend you read this essay), however we do not live a universe whose current state is determined strictly by causal relationships and so it is entirely impossible to compute it's previous or future states down to a quantum scale, even assuming you had a computer external to the universe that was capable of holding it's current state in memory.

Insightful essay elf.

It is impossible to know the full state of the universe at any point due to the Uncertainty Principal: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle

You're reason for it being impossible isn't true.

My view of the world is in a lot of ways similar to Mapar007's but I have different reasons for the impossibility of actually calculating it and I believe you were mentioning one Kllrnohj, the fact you can't know both the position and vector of a particle at the same time and the impossibility of computing things faster than the rate of atomic vibrations for every particle and unit of energy in the universe due to the need for an impossibly large and fast computer of some sort. I believe that were those 2 facts not true that we could process with a reasonable degree of accuracy if not perfect accuracy all past and future states the universe will take as long as the computer is fully isolated from the universe as to not have it changing the future with its calculations but the past could be computed without that worry. Also if we are talking on this topic look at http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/113/the-story-of-schroedingers-cat-an-epic-poem I think it has a fun way of talking about Schrödinger's cat.

yes, it has 16Gb, but about 15.5 of it is taken up by the OS and all the programs.




were you talking to me, because I shrank mine (from 160x?? to 100x59) in response to this. And now I can't undo it.






Yes! I love Picard! So much better than Kirk (I almost accidentally wrote "Kerm", there. Glad I didn't.)

Xeno, your avatar is properly-sized now, thank you.

And I would probably go to the future, if I had to pick one; I'd love to see what new technologies await our future (or global economic and ecologic meltdown, depending on who you believe ).