If you could travel into the past but not return, would you? Where would you go and what would you try to do if your goal was to reshape history?

Well… For the first question, no. I like to think of time travel, if it were possible, as a tourism sort of deal. It’s like going on vacation somewhere amazing that’s really only amazing in small doses. You vacation somewhere for a week or two, but you wouldn’t necessarily want to live there. That’s how I’d see the past if visiting it were possible. Send me back to witness the signing of the Declaration of Independence. But I don’t want to stay and discover the advances that have been made in sanitation during the mid to late 18th century.

However, if I were to go back in time with the goal to reshape history, I’d try to stop the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which is viewed as the inciting incident for World War I. Imagine… If there had been no World War I, there may have been no vacuum of power in Germany and Adolf Hitler may never have been allowed to come to power. Millions of lives saved.

Then again… who knows what kind of butterfly effect that would have on our present. Who’s to say Hitler or someone like him wouldn’t have eventually taken power anyway? Maybe someone worse would have come along… This is why time travel is so difficult to think about.

*The Question of the Week can be found in The Book of Questions by Gregory Stock, Ph.D.