"Which Prehistoric Period Would You Choose To Colonize?" Topic

"Wolfshanza, the executives at Fox hardly qualify as hooman. No one with any sense of humanity would have cancelled Serenity…"

Too true :(

Well, that's a matter of opinion/taste…

Gracias,

Glenn

Warbeads: "Sadly I would do the Dr. Smith in Lost in Space (only competently) to destroy/sabotage the mission. Why? That I have to work out but I immediately had that thought upon reading the OP. Seems good enough to me"

How come? What did I do?

Dan

You did nothing. It just was a spontaneous thought. Now I need to work out the "why" part!

Gracias,

Glenn

I'd take my colonists back to the glorious Cretaceous, to insure my reptilian ancestors survive the asteroid impact and those pesky mammals get what's coming to the-…
…
…
…
…uh-oh…
<slither, slither, slither, slither- *SLAM!*>

LOL!!!

So this is what you're after?

TMP link

Dan

I could cheerfully take Average Joe's idea and run with it as an RPG campaign.

The Last Ditch was carefully planned, as a slip in location would give away the game and the future of Mankind. Time Capsules with trained personnel, technical archives, and select physical resources were deep strike infiltrated into the far-flung frontiers of the enemy's space, paired with non-Temporal decoys. As each Time Capsule vanished into its target planet's prehistory, the decoy would crashland in the same pre-selected location, hopefully concealing any trace of the time travellers that might survive and simultaneously sinking a temporal homing beacon into the planet.

Each Time Capsule colony was tasked with developing the primieval resources of their target world, building a new fleet and the temporal drives needed to return to the modern era, and returning to the modern day at a pre-determined point. Alternate plans were provided should some part of this grand plan fail.

You are a member of the Galataea Fleet. Your distant ancestors were on the Time Capsule that landed on proto-Galataea, and the time has come to jump forward and aid the cause of survival. Galataea waited longer than planned, building beyond the stated goals and executing several of the backup plans as well, while listening to the skies to see if any other Time Capsule was out there. Finally, even those goals are met, and there is no further reason to wait. It is time to make the million year jump forward to save Humanity.

But what really awaits?

---

This would also make an interesting basis for the usual space combat game: Dozens of fleets built *almost* to standard, each with a different, blurred idea of why they are here, now, each with a slightly different set of technological advancements on top of what they were sent away with, and each pumped up over a million years for the prospect of all-out War.

They had that model of a humanoid reptile at the LA county museum ages ago. It's creepier eyeball to eyeball ! <lol>

". . . the colony's scientists discover that time travel really just takes you to a parallel Earth (think "Sliders"). So, in essence, you are just traveling to a different planet where conditions are uncannily similar to those of your Earth's past. :)"

And before there was "Sliders," there was H. Beam Piper's classic LORD KALVAN OF OTHERWHEN which posited that very idea.

I pick the period just as modern humans are beginning to emerge. The climate, flora, and fauna are closer to what we modern humans comprehend and can adapt to and work with, with the added bonus that we can be on the scene to influence the development of humanity as our cousins start to migrate out of Africa in earnest (poor sods… they get to meet us!).

Leland R. Erickson

LOL, Dan, I saw the first picture in that gallery and I immediately saw it as a Gary Larson cartoon: In the last second before the asteroid hits, that Tyrannosaurus is yelling: "I'M A CLOSET VEGETARIAN!!!"
<BOOM!>

Get ready for Terra Nova, which premieres Sept 26:

link

Dan
TMP link

NONE: as developed above, because of the butterfly effect I'd be sure to disappear (have never appeared) -as well as the biosphere and civilization we know. Would *never* allow anyone to go back more than a few hours!

Which one had Raquel Welch in the fur bikini?

Actually she was married four times (hardly surprising considering the stories of her behavior), so take your pick.

Twisting average joe's plotline slightly:

The group sent back succeed in their basic mission. They survive, thrive and develop an advanced techological base.

After several thousand years the Earth begins to enter one of its periodic ice ages.

Unable to stop it they frantically build a fleet of warships and colony ships and flee into space. Unfortunately their newly developed FTL drive isn't all it is supposed to be and instead of ending up only a few light years from Earth end up lost, hundreds of light years from home.

They eventually find a habitable, but unoccupied planet and settle. Remembering their purpose and convinced the enemy is probably somewhere close by they bend all their energies to building their population base, expanding their technology and watching for the enemy they are sure will be coming to destroy them.

Millions of years later, the "truth" of their past forgotten, they are a galactic wide civilization spending all their efforts looking for the enemy their ancestors warned them about.

Unsure who they are looking for, and taking no chances, they attack and subdue every alien race they encounter. Until the day they run into a new race, one that superficially resembles them and who couner-attack fiercely and begin winning the war.

Here at last is the great enemy they have been looking for!

Send them back to the 1980's specifically to stop it all from happening.

The whole Belisarius series link deals with a Terminator-fashion fight between two AI from the future, one tempting to change the past in a precise direction, the other attempting to prevent it -but NOT attempting to keep the past unchanged, it's simply impossible: thus the series is more 'realistic' than, say, Poul Anderson's 'Time Patrol'. A time traveler *changes* the period he reaches with his very first breath, releasing microbes from another time in the ecosystem. Re. the impact of 'European' diseases on Amerindian -or most recently of Nepalese malaria on Haitian populations.

An consequences (departure from the 'original' timeline) increase (exponentially) as time passes by a snowball effect. 'Pavane' link is a demonstrative thought experiment; so-called 'historical' wargamers should meditate over it -and the potential consequences of a game having, say, Alexander killed at Chaeronea or Washington during the FIW, before disparaging 'what-if?' and 'Imagi-Native' wargamers.

So to answer 'seriously': for me, never before the last important event of my personal life, i.e. the birth of my little dog!
Not seriously? Then 'When dinosaurs and cavegirls in fur bikinis ruled the world together': YouTube link Seemingly anywhen before 1 million years BC YouTube link and the present (in some 'Lost World' YouTube link , Skull Island or at the Earth Core YouTube link

Funny you should mention this Dan; I've been wondering about an alternative explanation to the Dinosaurs extinction whereby some cataclysm sort of bent or broke the boundaries of time/dimensions/whatever, where the dinos weren't killed but flung either into an alternative dimension or some sort of time loop, which removed them from our current timeline. Anyway in't Fyucheh humans discover a way to visit the dimension/loop safe in the knowledge that they won't mess up things by going back and studying… and later hunting or something… They can't bring anything back with them and suchlike…

Oh and of course if every mass extinction was the same and kind of worked akin to "saving a file" or something, so every era leading up to a ME event would be "backed up" in this way (so you can have Apatosaurus being hunted by T.rex, or Dimetrodon bothering Eryops etc etc)…

Yes it's a little silly but how else would you get a sort of "off-planet" idea with prehistoric beasties? I like your idea though, a sort of temponaught thing going on there!

I would like to see the Jurassic. I want a pet Allosaurus I can call Sam, and teach it to roll over and retrieve Camptosaurus for the tea and things.

Ignoring all the barriers and caveats about getting a "do-over", why would you pick a time when enormous predators roamed the Earth, and life was tough on tiny mammal-types? Why not go back to a time when the gigantic predators have mostly died off or shrunk down to a manageable size and you know that the environment is able to sustain life for our species (AKA Homo Sapiens, hint, hint)?

Actually, that would make make a pretty cool scenario. A bunch of young, good-looking, hot shots from the 21st Century going back in time with motorcycles and knobby-wheeled SUVs and high-powered ordnance (Hells yeah!) to tear around the place efficiently killing off all the mammoths (and probably other species) for food and plain ol' kicks, taking the food out of the mouths of the less efficient hunter tribes (probably speeding the demise of the Neanderthals as well), until the ed-off tribes start ambushing them.

Wait, where have I sen this before?