i was thinking along similar terms with the selfish part. I was going to do what they did in Back to the Future and take a sports almanac with me and then retire at 26. 

Since you are going to go back and see if jesus was real ( that was my other idea also) I think I may go forward 10,000 years and see what the earth looks like. I wonder if people will be around or if the earth will have killed us off. 

I'd take my laptop, as much information as I could pack on it, a generator and then drop myself back about 20,000 years and unite the World under the banner of science before any silly religious nonsense started.

That way we'd now be polluting the universe with our xenophobic taint by 21st century.

How long is the trip? Can I know what the future would be like at all ahead of the decision?

If no, and I only get one trip, I guess I'd go back to 1967. I could make tons of money betting on stocks, comodities and sporting events. Otherewise, I think going back and struggling to survive would not be so great after a while.

If I went to the future without knowing, there is a good chance the earth would be uninhabitable for humans.

 Hmm... that makes it substantially less interesting, as far as personal gain goes...

I guess from my science geek perspective, I'd like to see how marriage, childrearing, and love really worked before the enlightenment.  We really don't know a lot about how people's mating and bonding behaviors for most of history.  It's all guesswork.  So... maybe 1600 or so someplace in Europe in a "regular person" part of the world.

    Well as a unseen observer, I would travel back in time to November 22, 1963 to Dealy Plaza, Dallas, Texas.  I would hang out on the sixth floor of the school book depository and try and determine if Oswald was acting alone when he allegedly shot the President.   Then I would follow Kennedy's  remains to Parkland Hospital to actually view the autopsy and to try and discover why there were discrepancies regarding the damage to his skull, etc.

    Later I would materialize at the appropriate locations to secretly monitor the behind the scenes activity of the Warren  Commision.....

  In my opinion , I think that it's a lot more likely that we will kill ourselves off.Read Jared Diamond "Collapse" and Guns,Germs and Steel : the fate of Human societies.  

Well, I might be interested in going back and committing a bunch of the so-called paradoxes, if for no better reason than to show that they are really literary tropes. Think about it...

If you did manage to kill your grandfather a week before he married your grandmother, well, a hundred years ago, it was considered a fairly common thing that the first child in many marriages was often premature. Either that, or your grandmother had a secret that rendered the whole exercise moot in the first place.

Alternatively, you could go back a million years and kill a butterfly. While it is probably true that you might have prevented a tornado a year later, consider that chaos theory requires a simply uncountable number of tiny sources that have a larger role later on. After a few centuries, the general trend will almost certainly average out to the point where the lack of a single tornado probably would go fully unnoticed.

EDIT - AGAIN with the theist posting in FreeThinking anonymous. be glad I was on vacation. next post I see puts you on an account time out.

Sorry Doom.

If has to be either make money or check to see if Jesus existed.

Despite how anti-religious we are, I don't think anyone on this forum would kill Jesus. In fact, if he turned out to be the son of God, I'd probably convert. Either way, killing him is definitely not the best route.

What? Ahahahahahahahahahahahaha!! Oh my God, you really think we're that horrible and evil? Awww...well, I wouldn't be surprised, if outside the battlefield of this forum, you're actually a pretty nice person. 

The desired end I seek to achieve, first and foremost, is to discover the truth. You always have to keep yourself open-minded; after all, the greatest enemy of the truth isn't lies, but conviction. If I discover that Jesus didn't exist, I'd try to bring back proof that he didn't exist. If I discover that Jesus did exist, I'd try to bring back proof that he did. Yes, Hamby would like to put a crimp in Christianity, but that's because he believes it is false and detrimental to mankind, so do I. If we ever discover that it isn't, then we must change our views. Reality comes first. No one should ever forget that.

Actually EXC, there are a growing number of physicists who are willing to treat time travel as potentially something more than a cool idea for a bit of fiction. Parallel universes being only one way in which it might just be possible.

That being said, the overall concept of changing the past=changing the future is just not in line with the current speculations. As I noted above, if you try to off dear old grand dad, the fact that you succeed really only shows that either you got there a bit late to do the deed or he was never your grand dad in the first place. Honestly, paternity cases that come up in divorce court suggest that in the range of 20% of people in general are not their father's children despite what the mother had to say on the matter.

A related issue is that the English language (indeed any language) is just not suited to describe time travel. The verb tenses alone show that much. How would you really describe in mathematical terms the idea that something “is used to be”?

The idea of parallel universes is an interesting one however. Under the many worlds interpretation of quantum physics, anything that can happen must happen. However, it also happens in every way possible, leading to uncountable branching futures.

For example, we know that Alois Hitler spent most of his time from the late 1880's on in a bar. Had he had a few too many on one critical night, the history of Germany from about 1920 on (and subsequently world history) would have been very different. In fact, under the many worlds idea, that did happen, just no on our world line.

Given the right physics, it might even be possible to set up a time machine that can visit that version of reality. Of course, nobody is seriously suggesting that such a machine is even possible but there are mathematically consistent physical models where such things are possible. Whether any of those models is an accurate description of reality would be the real key to doing such.