Sat 11 Oct 2008
Bill and Ted have loaned you their phonebooth. You can bring one person from the past to the present to show them around. (Assuming no time-space continuum stuff is messed up,) Who to you grab?
Posted by starman7 answers so far!
Okay, let's hear it.
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Turing. Alan Turing deserves a good goddam tour of the technological marvels he helped create, and a good look at the difference in sexual politics between his day and ours. Either, I think, might have kept him around for a good deal longer once he landed back in the past — presuming, that is, he wanted to go back.
It would depend on how selfish I’m allowed to be. If I could do it for purely selfish reasons and for just, you know, hang-out time, I’d consider D. Boon from The Minutemen. Because I’d really like to hang out with D. Boon. But if it’s someone I’m tasked with bringing forward to SAVE HUMANITY FROM ITSELF or something, I think I’d pick H. L. Mencken or Ambrose Bierce. Or Wittgenstein — it’d be interesting to see what he would have to say about programming languages (look, grammars that do actual work!).
Nah. On further reflection, It’d hafta be Karl Marx. Give him a year in the British Library (and after teaching him ho to use Google) and I’d bet he’d come up with some astounding observations.
Or Grace Kelly. Circa “Rear Window”. *sigh* She was dreamy…..
I would like to meet Diogenes of Sinope. And yes, there would be plenty of drugs and alcohol involved. I am not sure I would want to actually show him around and explain stuff – I’d rather just act like everything was absolutely normal, to fuck with him.
Okay, I’m gonna go Freud.
John Browning. As a gun guy, Browning is like one of the biblical prophets; there are only a few, and you really should listen to what they have to say, because they were “there”, in the beginning and all that.
I would love to see what the father of modern contemporary firearms would have to say about how his designs have evolved into what we are using today.
It wouldn’t make the world a better place, but from a really selfish personal place, I think I could really have discovered some awesome insights.
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Failing that, Isaac Asimov. Most of the good things about science fiction that I respect came from him way before anyone else, and his love of random facts is still an inspiration to me to this day.
Plus, I’d love to know what his opinion of modern robotics is, considering his influence in the at-that-time hypothetical field.
I’d have to go with Ben Franklin… get his thoughts on, well, everything… but mostly how America turned out (so far) and the mass media.
I think I’d go ahead and get Thomas Jefferson, see how he feels about things. I am sure he’d marvel at a lot of our technical achievements, but would be aghast at the consolidation of power in a few hands (in the USA anyway). I wonder if he’d be surprised to see that the country was still around, though much changed over 200 years. I would love to ask his advice on how to restore dignity to our public life, and whether he really meant it about the revolution every now and again.