Every day when I'm sitting in the off-ramp waiting to merge and get my ass back home, I dream about having a jetpack - I just want to go far enough in the future where that is my daily reality. Spoiler
I would love to go back to 49BC, and assuming that by being out of my own time I wouldn't age (because I'm damn well taking that liberty) I would love to watch the highlight events from the Crossing of the Rubicon through the end of the Battle of Actium. Can you imagine watching the Battle of Philippi? Or standing in the Senate as Cicero delivered an oration? Of course, I would have to learn Latin, and assuming that you would be tangible to others, I would probably not survive for long...although ancient Romans might see a running shoe, jeans, and t-shirt clad paleface as a god. Or, as others have said, bring a gun. "This is my boom stick" in Latin might be the most powerful phrase to be uttered. Specific events I'd go to, and much more along the lines of feasibility of survival (at least, as far as time travel could be feasible), would be the JFK Assassination, the takedown of Osama, and a safely distant view of the Tunguska Event. Even better, I'd go back and meet Nikolai Tesla. Also, as long as I was back in Roman Republic times, I would find a way to bang the hell out of Cleopatra, especially if she really looked anything like this.
I'd rather go forward, but if I had to go back I think I'd just zip back 20 years and invest in Google and Yahoo. Color me shallow.
In my humble opinion, anyone who had access to a time machine and chose to go to the past is a fucking idiot. Comes across like some kind of vicarious nostalgia where people think witnessing event X or meeting person X would be worth putting up with a lower standard of living and horrible hygiene. Also, as mentioned, the lack of rights for anyone who wasn't a white male (which I am, but I still wouldn't go back). This is of course assuming that it's a one way trip. If I could jump around to whenever and wherever I wanted, I'd check out some cool concerts from the 70's and stuff, maybe talk to Einstein and get his views on the little I know about modern physics, but then I'd go way back, to just before our primordial ancestors even shimmied out of the oceans, and chill for a while, eat some pre-historic fruit and just sit in silence. Something about it seems so serene. But even that would be way the fuck down on my list of times to go to. I would first take trips progressively further into the future and hang out, trying to learn as much as I can, and seeing how different we look as we continue to evolve. Eventually, I'd go to when the Andromeda Galaxy is even closer to The Milky Way and takes a more permanent, visible place in our sky. Of course, by then we'll have either died off somehow or made our way to other places in the universe, but it would still be a sight to see. Regardless, as much as I would like to watch Gretzky pass to Lemieux in '87 again, or hang out with Kurt Vonnegut, or tell Socrates "what's up?", or see if Jesus really did perform miracles, or kick Hitler in the nuts like ten times, that would all take a back seat to going to the future. What comes next is WAY more interesting than what's already happened.
There's a question of science at hand here. If we possess the technology to go into the past does that then mean we have the technology to go into the future? I'd be down for some future... Just to see what the hell happens. Of all the posts to bring me out of retirement... who'dve thunk it.
So according to those scientific wordbooks, there's a period in time where things that look like this and this and were as big as this all existed, and nobody would want to go back there and look? The future is already coming, we're going to get to that. Things that already happened aren't going to again, the past eons are interesting as hell.
<a class="postlink" href="http://www.spike.com/video-clips/5qnd80/ucb-time-machine" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.spike.com/video-clips/5qnd80 ... me-machine</a> Enjoy.
I think there need to be more parameters set here. If I get to just check it out and come back to the present, then yeah cool, I'd love to check out a bunch of different periods from the past, if just for a couple days or hours at a time. But actually live in the past? HAHAHA! Yeah right! I think most of the reasons have been outlined here already. I'm a white male, so there's a plus past-wise, but 99.999% of people before, oh I don't know 1920? 1875? lived in SHITHOLE conditions and died young. Women of the TiB? Any of you who want to go backwards are in for a shitty time. I'd love to see around 60-75 years in the future. A time when presumably the world would still be recognizable but you could see the extrapolations of our time manifested in super awesome/weird/horrifying future-ways.