Hypothetical: Get your time travel assignment here.

[Rain Man]

Here's the situation: you show up for work on Monday morning, and as you're drinking your initial cup of coffee or Dr. Pepper, an e-mail arrives from your CEO with one of those red exclamation points on it. You open it up.

In a surprise move, your company is moving all operations to the Central African Republic. You can relocate there at a wage of 50 cents per day, plus the company will cover the cost of your first 100 rounds of self-protection ammo, or you can get laid off. You take the second option.

You start browsing through the job ads and come across this one:

Local community college seeks documenting historian. Must be open to new cultures, foods, and experiences.

You answer the ad and you get an interview immediately once they see your resume line item about proficiency in the Microsoft Office suite. You go to the interview and they ask questions about how much you need coffee and electricity and indoor plumbing. They seem satisfied with your answers.

A few days later, you get the nice e-mail that you’ve been accepted into the Twin Pines Community College Time Travel Project as a documenting historian. As it turns out, one of the dental technician students wired some machinery together oddly and created a time machine, so now Twin Pines is the world leader in time travel.

Your assignment will be to go back into the past, live for a year, and document what you see. You can pick your landing location anywhere on the earth. The only challenge is that the time machine picks a random year and no one can control it. You’ll arrive on January 1st according to the Gregorian calendar and depart on December 31st, but no one will know what year until you arrive. The machine overweights more recent years, so the odds are 50 percent that you’ll be more recent than the year 700 AD, and 80 percent that you’ll be more recent than 1,100 BC, but conceivably you could go all the way back to the earth’s beginning.

If you accept the job I’ll randomly assign you a year, and you’ll have to report back on where you would go and what you would try to document. Assume that you will be equipped with a translation device and that you will not change history if you interact with it. Any people or creatures will merely see you as an oddity and minor annoyance, kind of like Michael Strahan on TV shows.

Who wishes to enter the Twin Pines time machine? Volunteer in the thread and I’ll assign you a year.

[Rain Man]

Originally Posted by mr. tegu

In.

You get 1807 AD, a good time to watch President Jefferson in action. Or would you rather watch Napoleon invade Russia?

[Fairplay]

Im in

[Rain Man]

Originally Posted by Fairplay

Im in

1793 AD for you. I think you'll enjoy some early American government or maybe some French infighting.

[Otter]

Originally Posted by Rain Man

You're going to leap back to 1177 AD in the body of a North American.

Actually, that would be a good time to go to Mesa Verde if you want to do Colorado. It might be a tad early, but maybe you could get some clues.

I chose to study: Battle of Montgisard for my time travel history for a couple reasons:

1. I love war strategies for this time period and how the outcomes shaped the modern world
2. I didn't known much about this event and the more I dove in I found out it was a fairly significant event in history
3. There really wasn't a whole lot going on in 1177 AD
4. I missed the rise of Genghis Khan by about 100 years

(I plagiarized A LOT)





Wikipedia Link for further reading

[Boise_Chief]

Send me out Boss

[Rain Man]

Originally Posted by Boise_Chief

Send me out Boss

I have a nice one for you. 1552 BC. I don't know much about 1552 BC, so you'll have to enlighten me.

Oh, I just looked it up. You might be in the right time period to see Stonehenge being built. You could at least talk with the people who are going to build it in a few years.

[Rain Man]

Originally Posted by Otter

I chose to study: Battle of Montgisard for my time travel history for a couple reasons:

1. I love war strategies for this time period and how the outcomes shaped the modern world
2. I didn't known much about this event and the more I dove in I found out it was a fairly significant event in history
3. There really wasn't a whole lot going on in 1177 AD
4. I missed the rise of Genghis Khan by about 100 years

(I plagiarized A LOT)





Wikipedia Link for further reading

I really should sit down and learn more about the Crusades. It seems like there are a lot of interesting stories in that thread of history. I'm intrigued by the fact that the Christians were being led by a 16 year-old king with "aggressive leprosy".

[The Franchise]

Originally Posted by Rain Man

789 AD for you. You can pretty much pick your topic since I have no idea what was going on in the world in 789 AD.

Can we bring any technological advances with us?

[Rain Man]

Originally Posted by Pestilence

Can we bring any technological advances with us?

You can, but no one will pay any attention to them. Remember, though, that wifi is terrible for most years before 1994.

[Fire Me Boy!]

Originally Posted by Rain Man

586 AD for you. My guess is that you'll get tired of hearing about barbarians before your year is up.

I've decided to spend my year in 586 AD in Northern Ireland at Bangor Abbey. It was founded only about 30 years prior to my arrival, and is one of the best centers of learning in the world at the time. Antiphonarium Benchorense was written there.

[Pennywise]

I'm in.

[Rasputin]

So I was jaunting along in Europe and these people were talking about how if you travel out to sea you would literally fall off the edge of the Earth. It's a miracle America was ever discovered at all some 100 years later.

Not the brightest bunch of people and their hygiene is of horrific. Someone needs to teach these people how to bath & invent a toiletry system before a plague wipes out half of humanity.

[Rain Man]

Originally Posted by Fire Me Boy!

I've decided to spend my year in 586 AD in Northern Ireland at Bangor Abbey. It was founded only about 30 years prior to my arrival, and is one of the best centers of learning in the world at the time. Antiphonarium Benchorense was written there.

I'll admit it. I had to look up the Antiphonarium Benchorense to figure out what it was.

[Rain Man]

Originally Posted by Pennywise

I'm in.

You got 40,477 BC. Dress warm and tell us about the petroglyphs.

[mr. tegu]

Originally Posted by Rain Man

You get 1807 AD, a good time to watch President Jefferson in action. Or would you rather watch Napoleon invade Russia?

I went and saw the first performance of Beethoven's 4th Symphony in B. It was a private concert so getting in was difficult. It's not his most iconic work but it was still good.

I rode the first fare paying passenger railway in Wales. I recommend waiting until they improve their service.

I had to go see Napoleon's army defeat Russia at the Battle of Friedland. I saw the treaty signed by both sides that was just a few weeks later.

There were probably some other notable events worth seeing but there actually wasn't too much going on. I decided to just buy a bunch of land in the Sierra Nevada range in California. That turned out to be a great investment.