Pretty simple concept. You get to meet a couple of guys with your time machine. Who do you meet and why?

Robert E Lee&Erwin Rommel : The mystique around these two guys amazes me. They both ended up losing, but i've rarely seen such admiration for two generals. I would love to see how they were.

Benjamin Franklin : The do it all guy. The jack of all trades. This guy amazes me. The greatest american polymath.(polymath = multi skill person).

Cicero : Declared by so many as the greatest orator and lawyer of all time. Man i would love to sit in the senate for one of his speech's.

Peter The great : Propelled russia to the next level. Created st-petersburg. Went on the first ''grand non military euro-trip'' ever made by a king. Passionate in many subjects, but able to be brutal as well.

Miyamoto Musashi His five rings books is truly fascinating. To me he's somewhat of a japanese version of sun tzu.

Sun Tzu : Actually, i would like to meet him so we actually know who sun tzu is. The sources are so damn unclear when it comes to him, no one really knows who sun tzu is, what period, etc... Would like to talk starcraft strategy with him!

Jesus ainec. For the obvious reasons.

The Buddha. Also for the obvious reasons.

Philip II and Alexander, I have a few questions for them regarding their ancestors and some other stuff.

Robert Oppenheimer. What was going through his mind? How did he administer the beginning of the potential doomswitch? Would like to meet him later again, after he had thought things through more, leading to that the H-bomb got Edward Teller's name on it.

Socrates.

Nikola Tesla you mention time machines and he is probably the only human who ever existed who could come close to making one, his lost body of works actually has held back the human race lord knows how many years all we know about him is crazy and innovative enough but a fire in his lab in the 1890s truly the greatest mind to ever have existed!

Good point. Tesla's tech was truly one of a kind.

Mary Magdalene. I hear she was easy.

I'd say Stalin - meeting the man face-to-face would be a lot of help for the paper I'm writing. He'd probably lie to me of course, but that'd be my challenge.

My history teacher once told me a quote, maybe from churchill, that he'd rather spend the rest of his life with Hitler than Stalin as Stalin had no charisma?
Anyone else heard this?

Wanting to meet people from the 20th or even 19th century is wasting a lot of potential imo.

It would have to be Jesus, just so I know for sure how it really started.

Tesla is cool.
I don't think we missed much.
Others developed a bunch of his discoveries when he refused to engage in the arduous work of making them working products. For example: x-rays, radio, television, fluorescent lights and others.

Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Kurt Cobain, Layne Staley.

To name a few.

Adam and Eve.

A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving. - Lao Tzu


If he existed, I would like to meet Lao Tzu.


-Zeno

Interesting choice. I do think that he got a lot of human behavior right(if it was him), but his stuff got incredibly twisted/perverted over the years, which led to the downfall of Taoism(or daoism w/e). It had shrinked incredibly even before mao's cultural purges.

Just discussing with him how he got the idea of the ''ying and yang circle'' would be quite a talk!

Oh man, don't even get me started on musicians.

If I could only meet a couple, I'd probably shy away for musicians out of worry they'd be prentious douchebags

In terms of musician, obviously Bach&Mozart for their virtuosity. Beethoven&Wagner seem a bit too pissed for me.

As for modern era, im not so sure as most of them were just coke heads, although if i could meet frank sinatra to see how much he was involved with the italian mafia, that could make a great story.

Isaac Newton. I would give him some valuable tips. It would change what we know of the world up until this point. We would have progressed tenfold if he just knew a few extra things.

I'd rather meet any random person from 500 years in the future than the top 500 people I'd most like to meet from the past.

If the nets that are around then can be defined as persons. Question is if a "person" stays an optimal entity when development goes forward. I think it's a long shot to expect **** sapienses to be around 500 years from now.

Never heard the quote, but the Stalin that Churchill was acquainted with was very different from the one that developed between the First and Second World Wars.

Bach & Mozart are definitely on the list for me. Not sure how much fun Bach would be, but Mozart seems like he knew how to have a good time.

Alexander the Great , definately