Places & Times You'd Like to Visit

[Queequeg]

Let's say that you have a time machine.  What places/periods would you visit?  What would you want to see the most?

For me, I'm separating this into Historic and Pre-Historic periods

Jurassic: Dinosaurs at their largest on land, some truly magnificent icthyosaurs and pterosaurs
Pleistocene: A lot of things would be recognizable, including our ancestors, but you actually have some of the most magnificent, weird creatures ever, particularly in New Zealand and Australia; Megalania, the Giant Sloth, the American Lion, Haast's Eagle, the Moa, the Platybelodon, etc...
Neolithic: First real signs of civilization, in particular I'd be curious to see some of the earliest towns in Anatolia and the Fertile Crescent. 
Carboniferous: Super-high oxygen content, huge insects, huge forests, near constant storms, a few of our weirdest, reptilian-looking ancestors.  What's not to love, other than how fantastically dangerous it would be?

Historical:
Athens, about 450-300 BC.  Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Aristophanes, Herodotus,  maybe Alexander the Great or Sophocles, etc....basically, what the Triassic is to land life, Classical Athens is to Intellectual Life. 
Constantinople, any time from 350s-700, 900-1200 or 1500-1700.  Center of the world. 
Baghdad, 9th-12th Century.  Wondering what the Islamic Golden Age would look like.  Kind of hard to imagine the Arabs being great scientists and humanists. Almost a vanished civilization.  Ctesiphon, almost the same area, would be equally interesting, though obviously a few centuries before.
Berlin/Vienna/Prague, 1917-1931.  Interesting as fuck, most of my favorite artists (Klimt, Schiele, Grosz, Ernst, Kandinsky, Brecht, Kafka, iirc young Nabokov, etc..)
New York City, 1950s-1960s.  One of the few to honestly be in living memory, but Kubrick, Pynchon, Robert Mitchum, young Bob Dylan, miniskirts and whatnot.....an interesting period, like the Pleistocene familiar enough to be recognizable but still pretty alien. 

[Valmy]

Paris 1789.

Shocking I know.

I suppose I would also like to visit Sarajevo on June 28th, 1914.  That day would end up a bit differently.

[Caliga]

Interesting, Spellus.

Prehistoric:

Hadean: I want to show up at the point when life begins and pee into the tidal pool it's evolving in, to see what happens.  I guess if I start to fade away a la Marty McFly I will have screwed up. 

Historic:

Constantinople, 1453:  I want to go :nelson at Constantine XI and then welcome the Turks into the city.  Hopefully I won't be taken into Mehmet's harem or baths. 

[Valmy]

Constantinople, 1453:  I want to go :nelson at Constantine XI and then welcome the Turks into the city.  Hopefully I won't be taken into Mehmet's harem or baths. 

YOU MONSTER!

[Caliga]

YOU MONSTER!

Sorry, but Turks > Greeks. 

Would you really have it any other way?  I mean, what if there was a modern Byzantine Emperor?  Emperor Balki Bartokomous? 

[Valmy]

Would you really have it any other way?  I mean, what if there was a modern Byzantine Emperor?  Emperor Balki Bartokomous? 

Not really I just like Constantine XI

[lustindarkness]

I guess you mean visit that time as an observer without the ability to affect or be affected right?
What would be the use to travel back in time to be killed by a prehistoric animal or a greek that does not like the out of place geek? 

If so, ancient greece sounds like a good place to start.

[Queequeg]

YOU MONSTER!

Sorry, but Turks > Greeks. 

Would you really have it any other way?  I mean, what if there was a modern Byzantine Emperor?  Emperor Balki Bartokomous? 

I'm a lot more interested in Turkey than Greece, but the Greeks did as much for civilization as any people in history.  They deserve to be a bit more than a laughing stock, with more people speaking Serbo-Croat (!) than Greek. 

While these days I tend to think that the Turks did Constantinople something of a favor, because it was in danger  of becoming some kind of footnote after 1205 and the collapse of the Renewed Empire, I think it is fairly safe to say that the Byzantine Empire was a lot more impressive than the Ottoman. The Ottomans couldn't make buildings as complex as Hagia Sophia a thousand years later, for crying out loud.

[PDH]

The byzantines couldn't either, just a couple of centuries later.

[DisturbedPervert]

I'd go back in time to Saudia Arabia and kill Mohamed.  Then it's off to 2300AD Japan, to get some sexbots.

[Queequeg]

The byzantines couldn't either, just a couple of centuries later.

Plague and four straight centuries of constant war, including the fantastically devastating final Byzantine-Persian war, can do that. 

[Caliga]

I'd go back in time to Saudia Arabia and kill Mohamed.  Then it's off to 2300AD Japan, to get some sexbots.

[lustindarkness]

I would go back to when they were building the pyramids and leave some graffiti of "FU Jaron" or something. 

[Queequeg]

I would go back to when they were building the pyramids and leave some graffiti of "FU Jaron" or something. 

That'd be kind of cool.  Go into an Egyptian Tomb that won't be rediscovered until the early 1900s, write "FRANZ FERDINAND, STAY OUT OF BOSNIA, AND COMMUNISM DOESN'T WORK, AND DON'T VOTE FOR ARTISTS!

[Norgy]

The problem with time travel is the lack of good books on idioms back in the day. How do you ask Socrates where the nearest Starbucks is.