A Little Game in Time

If you could take one object back in time, what would you take and who would you give it to?


Just as a butterfly flapping it's wings in Tokyo may cause a hurricane in San Francisco, taking a simple weather prediction device (to help with crop planting) back to 1500 may very well lead to a weather machine by 2000 and a hurricane in San Francisco. This means most obvious answers like vaccines or a computer or even a science textbook become a potentially harmful object because they threaten the development of certain ideas; big important ideas like the scientific method, civil rights, international cooperation, etc!

If you just turned up out of the blue with something like penicillin or an iPad people would be impressed and it might be that you could save a few million lives (assuming they would cooperate with your plans) but you may damage their outlook massively - you don't have evidence for penicillin or any basis for it's creation therefore you might as well have come up with it by revelation, you'd be no better than Christ curing a leper (Clark's third law: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"). You could unintentionally set back science by a millennia. If you gave any technology with possible military implications you might inadvertently spawn a totalitarian dictatorship with as much concern for personal freedoms and international relations as (presumably) Kim Il-Sung.


Almost any technology could have possible apocalyptic or dystopian impact so the whole exercise may well be an attempt at damage-limitation; I am not such a pessimist, just as when Homer Simpson travels back in time...

...some of the worlds he 'creates' are better than the one he started with.


The other option is to not take technology back per se, but instead to take an object that will change the way people think. If you took a book there is still the large problem of getting people to believe you aren't just a crazy person or a god so it really needs to be an object.


I have two choices, one in each strand of reasoning:


First, an object that is not so miraculous as to be mistaken for magic but still significant enough to save millions (if not billions) of lives... The flush toilet.
If taken back to say, ancient Greece or medieval Europe it could be easily replicated by others; there would be no need to justify it as reducing disease (it's just there to make the smelly stuff go away, honest guv); it wouldn't change anyone's perspectives about science, etc in any negative way (it might show people they are capable of changing their world with technology); the reduced amounts of disease may even lead someone to stumble on germ theory early; there is a potential problem that is, with massively increased population resulting from lower death rates there may be a lack of resources leading to... well... more deaths. Another problem is that increased populations in one region might lead to the outcomes of certain wars being different for better (taking the crapper back to Greece might allow them to survive longer allowing continuation of some of the finest philosophy ever known) or worse (giving medieval Britons a pooper might cause them to conquer all of Europe along with the rest of the world and leave us stuck with a monarchy).


Secondly, and probably the best option, an object capable of changing perspectives in a way that promotes enquiry and the development of important ideas... A microscope/telescope.
Whilst I sway towards the former due to my professional bent, astronomy (as a slave to astrology) is where science really began. It is a real game-changer with only one obvious disadvantage - military benefit; with a telescope it becomes possible to coordinate armies more effectively and change the course of global history in a potentially negative way.
The microscope avoids this problem, at least for a time, as looking at the very small doesn't provide the same tactical advantage as looking at the very far away. This would provide a huge leap towards germ theory (and the creation of the flush toilet) as well as a deeper understanding of the world, however it would only take a mid-level genius to take this concept, change it into a a telescope and conquer the world.


All things considered, there probably isn't one good, fool-proof plan for objects to send back in time. I guess I will have to restrict my use of time travel to history, hijinks and shenanigans.