Re: How would you save mankind (was Re: What would make you believe?)

Derek Lyons wrote:
> Jens Egon Nyborg <jens.e.nyborg@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> 
>> Imagine that you are agent A, hired by someone - anyone - to save
>> mankind in a number of paralell timelines. You have access to a time
>> machine that will take you back into the past of these timelines.
>>
>> What do you do?
> 
> Hard to say without knowing exactly what threat we are trying to
> defend against or what even we are trying to prevent.

Wildepad has mentioned a "war" and a "plague", so I'm guessing some kind 
of biological weapon caused the problem. Introducing a countermeasure 
for that could be relatively easy depending on the details of the 
disease itself. I'm assuming the future-folk will have developed a 
vaccine or cure of some kind by the time they've got time travel, or 
will be able to do so in relatively short order. Getting the basic 
information for that inserted into the scientific community could take 
the steam right out of the bioweapon and might even prevent its 
development or deployment (since there's no point any more).

Alternately, if one's worried that this knowledge will only lead to 
improved bioweapons research that makes things worse, one could take 
steps to immunize the population without their knowledge. Whip up your 
own version of the bioweapon that isn't lethal (or at least has vastly 
reduced lethality) and release it into the population to allow them to 
develop natural immunity.

You could take the Terminator approach. Surgical strikes to assassinate 
key figures before they _become_ key figures, or to destroy materials 
that will be needed for the future research. If that old flu virus that 
was dug up from frozen graves in Norway turned out to be an important 
foundation to build the superbug on, a little preemptive graverobbing 
could throw a monkeywrench in that. This is probably more 
labor-intensive, though. With the other approaches I suggested you could 
create some sort of standard information or infection package that your 
agents merely need to drop into the nearest mailbox on each timeline 
they want to save. Might not work in all of them, but by spamming lots 
you could save more.