Would you rather live in a different time in history?

[Powerboy]

was there ever a time when women ruled the Earth?

To paraphrase Hagar the Horrible, when he took his son to the endless reaches of the Earth to tell him a secret that would end the world as we know it if any woman ever found out the secret: "Men are in charge".

[Amadeus Arkham]

As a black guy, nope.

[SJNeal]

If I can't be born 10 years earlier and fully enjoy the music, movies, comics, and other pop culture of the 1980's, then stick me anywhere on the socialist utopia that is 24th century Earth.

[nx01a]

The future, definitely. Trek, sure, but more so Iain M. Banks' Culture novels.
As for the past... September 10, 2001. Forever. I think we entered the bad timeline when Bush became the US president but 9/11 was when things really went to crap.

[Hellion]

Honestly, I'd rather have been born roughly 10-15 years earlier so that I'd then be a teenager in the '90s. I listen to music from all eras and genres, but I wish I had been old enough to attend concerts in the '90s.

For shallower reasons, I wouldn't mind living in Ancient Greece, because everyone was sexy.

[Odd Rödney]

As convenient as they are I often find myself wishing I could live in the recent past, when everyone wasn't addicted to smartphones. Like, I get it, I use mine a lot too. But it really is kinda crazy to think how quickly they've taken over our lives. On the other hand, I think about what humanity will be like in a thousand years and I start to imagine superstructures and stuff like that. So yeah, I could do something like that I guess.

[DrNewGod]

As convenient as they are I often find myself wishing I could live in the recent past, when everyone wasn't addicted to smartphones. Like, I get it, I use mine a lot too. But it really is kinda crazy to think how quickly they've taken over our lives. On the other hand, I think about what humanity will be like in a thousand years and I start to imagine superstructures and stuff like that. So yeah, I could do something like that I guess.

I hear ya. I have to wonder if our future will be less Star Trek and more Wall-E.

[Odd Rödney]

I hear ya. I have to wonder if our future will be less Star Trek and more Wall-E.

Right? It wouldn't surprise me. We just lived through a slice of Idiocracy. We still have time for Wall-E.

[Scott Taylor]

Yah, I'd like to live during the Pliocene period which was about 2.5 to 5 million years ago, and I would prefer to live along the Mediterranean Sea (which was mostly dry at the time). Mastodons, ground sloths, early sabertooth cats and other mammals were roaming the earth. Dinosaurs long gone, reptiles still relatively harmless except for a few pseudo-crocs and venomous snakes. No stone tools. Fire had not yet been invented. I'd be an Australopithecus, possibly, and king of all primates.

Or, if you've read the Saga of Pliocene Exile, there could be elves, dwarves, mythical beasts and exiled future humans running around. I could be the offspring of one of them!

[Jim Kelly]

I wonder what time a time traveller from the future would travel to. I don't think things are going to get better in the future. Too far back in time isn't great either. I'd guess 1990 to 1995 would be the optimum period. The Soviet Union was gone, terrorism hadn't yet become so dangerous, climate change wasn't too severe, civil rights were improving although people of colour were still being incarcerated and killed, banks were relatively stable, technology was improving, life expectancy was longer, women were beginning to gain equal rights.

[The Gold Stream]

no things are pretty great now especially with regards to entertainment, i think id be very bored in prior decades

also I def couldnt live in a time before air conditioning

[DrNewGod]

no things are pretty great now especially with regards to entertainment, i think id be very bored in prior decades

also I def couldnt live in a time before air conditioning

Yah. No AC would suck bananas.

As for entertainment, maybe it would actually be better. We'd read more. We'd imagine harder. And just maybe, a hard earned trip to the cinema would excite us more, even if we could see the strings holding up Flash Gordon's rocket ship.

[foxley]

One of best friends has always said I probably would have fit better into the Edwardian era than I do into this. I'm not sure that i agree with him--I certainly have no desire to fight in the Great War (it cost me me enough relatives as it was)-- but I feel a certain (probably false) affinity for the period.

But a lot of it it depends on not only when you were born, but the circumstances you were born into. Isaac Asimov used to tell a story about his wife remarking on how nice it would have been to live in the Victorian era. When he asked why, she replied because it was so easy to get servants. He then said "Janet, we have been the servants."

There is an inherent assumption amongst those of us the 21st century idealizing an earlier time that we would have been at the top of the social ladder, when the truth is that the vast majority of wouldn't. We would have been the slaves or the serfs or the servants or the working class.

[Odd Rödney]

also I def couldnt live in a time before air conditioning

Same!!! I have the great misfortune of enduring North Florida summers. Can't live without air conditioning.

[Powerboy]

I wonder what time a time traveller from the future would travel to. I don't think things are going to get better in the future. Too far back in time isn't great either. I'd guess 1990 to 1995 would be the optimum period. The Soviet Union was gone, terrorism hadn't yet become so dangerous, climate change wasn't too severe, civil rights were improving although people of colour were still being incarcerated and killed, banks were relatively stable, technology was improving, life expectancy was longer, women were beginning to gain equal rights.

Jack Finney wrote a lot of time travel short stories and a novel. He was often accused of viewing the past through rose-colored glasses and he did. The past was always simpler and more pure.

In one story, time travelers from the early 21st century go back to 1950. Their time was corrupt and polluted. Democracy was falling apart and people just wanted to escape to a simpler time when things were more pure. So a family went back to 1950.

At first, I thought it a typical Finney story. Then I checked the copyright date: 1950.