There is an elementary school close to the World Trade Center site. Little kids watched what was going on. Turns out many were unable to describe what they saw to parents or teachers but the images they took in were etched in more deeply than people were able to understand. Some of the kids started to exhibit behaviors that were out of character for them, disciplinary problems mainly.

After almost a year with child psychologists, some of the kids started to open up and began to draw rather terrible pictures of the twin towers burning and little spots on the sides by the flames. It was revealed that these kids saw the bodies of people who had jumped as they dropped from the heights and that they visually recognized what they saw but were not able to come to grips what was going on. And why would they be able to come to grips?

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Back OT..... I'd go to the future, see what is in store for me, check out some stock performances and then go back to my time and capitalize on what I learned.

Edited by - Indy11 on 11/8/2004 8:05:59 AM

I'd travel to the future and become immortal. About 200 years should do it. They'll have replicators by then, right?

ahh but the future is in flux, you couldnt do it by sheer principal unless every choice creates a tangental universe.
Either way, because the future is unknown by its sheer nature, you could time travel to a point where earth is being ravaged by aliens, or killer viruses or maybe nuclear war. best to stick with what you know, that or maybe develop some time traveling probe which goes to that time period, takes air, soild and radiation samples, films its surroundings then 5 minutes later returns to our time to relay the results. could be cool


Seek the truth
Behold the truth
Reveal the truth
That is the law and the whole of the law

I'd be off back to the late 1960s/early 1970s....so I can go check out my friends Hendrix, Zeppelin, Cocker, Joplin, Stones, Who, Jefferson, Creedence, King, Hooker, Clapton, Moore, Floyd, John etc etc etc in their early days, when music was sex and sex was music.

Besides, I'd also have the luxury of being able to brush my teeth and wipe my behind with pseudo-modern products, without having to resort to using soda powder and leaves

I'd also do something similar to Indy, I'd probably hang around til the mid-seventies and buy a controlling share in IBM so when I return from my years of abuse I've got a little nest egg to put my feet up with

Edited by - gromit on 11/8/2004 9:40:51 AM

I would go back to when I was about 19, and kick the sh*t out of myself for being such a fool...

Now that would be something to see, KS the elder kicking the stuffing out of KS the younger.

but it's not really possible to separate the practicality of time travel from the morality of doing it, is it? If you could travel to the past, anything you do would in some way upset the timeline, as Star Trek demonstrates q often in its time travel plots. So how could you travel in time without affecting history even in the smallest way? same works for the future, you go to the future, get some useful info, act on it in your "native" time, and thus alter the future probably in ways you couldn't begin to predict.

as it stands time travel is a practical and logical possibilty. if it were possible it would be immensely dangerous and a terrible weapon. I can understand the fascination, almost everybody has a part of the past they hark back to and would like to know more about, and of course the idea of putting "right" things that went wrong is very appealing. but just think about it and you wouldn't, would you?

it would be dangerous for the time traveller too. Let's say for the sake of argument that you could make a short leap back to say just before 9/11. what would you do? warn everyone in the WTC that there's going to be an attack? you'd be in a police station in a flash. go to the Federal Government? same thing except a few days later you'd be in Guantanamo Bay on suspicion of being involved. Maybe you could get on the planes and try to stop the hijackers yourself? how would you get past security? what would you fight them with?

and this is the other side to the time travel coin, what do you do when you get there? how do you stop yourself from standing out? how do you get by in what is in effect a foreign land? can you remember the details of that period other than the attacks?

I once read a short story in which time travellers had become the hoboes and vagabonds of the future, as they could only travel to the past and could only go naked (like in Terminator) and were mostly made up of the disaffected who didn't fit in their own time and wanted to try out their favourite past. They ussually ended up in abject poverty, mad, or locked up and maybe executed as witches/whatever.

time travel - not a good idea, leave it in the realm of science-fiction.

I know this isn't strictly on topic but I must say something.

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Maybe you could ... stop the hijackers ... what would you fight them with?

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Fists, feet, teeth, nails, cans of soda, books, sheer cussed willpower, you name it. I'd fight them with anything and everything available to me.

a fair point but rather futile. there's a lot more of them than you. will you take some backup? what if they cut your throat like they did to the stewardesses? in order to succeed you'd have to be in superior physical condition and/or well armed, in which case you'd probably never be allowed onto the plane in the first place. how would you explain your weapons to airport security? "i was trying to stop a hijack before it happened because I'm from the future....." do you see where I'm coming from?

major events have been theorised to have such a temporal impact, in the sense that their "shock waves" extend into the future and the past, and would be very difficult if not impossible to stop because of the inertia of the huge chain of consequential actions that led up to them. you'd be better of going back further in the past and altering the conditions that led up to such an event, making smaller changes. and even that probably wouldn't work, you'd almost certainly change some details but not the major event you were trying to stop.

@Bandersnatch - you could always cause a huge riot during the runway part - that would stop the plane taking off, and sorted Best way? Punch and kick the stewardess........

Now thats just mean,

Edited by - Finalday on 11/8/2004 12:21:11 PM

Code and Chips are right.

There weren't all that many hijackers on each plane. They had the upper hand only because of surprise and the unthinkable nature of their purpose and they had the confidence to do what they did BECAUSE what they were about to do was so diabolical.

As was indicated by United Airlines Flight 93, the one that went down when the passengers took on the hijackers, if you know you're going to die if you do nothing anyway, may as well see if you can take out the hijackers and see if you can save yourself that way. Even if the chances are slim, you still might save the lives of others, which is what those on UA93 ended up doing. God bless all those innocent passengers.

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Besides, with the new security procedure, I discovered that I used to travel with quite a few things that now are deemed contraband weapon material. Metal nail file, pen knife key fob, pointed steel manicuring scissors, nail clipper, 12 inch aluminum ruler, etc. Also, since 9/11, airports around the country have confiscated fire arms, bowie knives, machetes, and other more obvious weapons from otherwise "legitimate" passengers.

Edited by - Indy11 on 11/8/2004 1:29:59 PM

I have two additional advantages. The first is a brown belt in Judo. The second is a pilot's license. Both would come in handy, I'd wager.

I would use my thumb..........my right thumb. My left thumb would be farrrrrr to powerful.....