The magic time portal has opened and you're being pulled in!

I'mma go the obvious answer to some maybe not to other's. 1985, I wasn't born yet (90s baby) and it gives me a decade to get a life together before the Microsoft boom assuming there's no odd butterfly effect with my actions and things happen exactly as they did. Investments, get to know the right peeps of the era, etc. Boom. Set for life and I get to relive the 90s as an adult.

Somewhere in antiquity, like classical Greece or bronze age mesopotamia. Not a rational decision by any means, I'm sure I'd come to regret leaving behind all the amenities of modern life at some point. But I'm fascinated by the distant past, and wouldn't pass up an opportunity to see it with my own eyes.

2011 so i can get a head-start on some investments, OR 2020. To get a head-start on a different investment.

Do I get to keep the interest rate on my bank account? Year 3000 sounds fun. Don't know if I could live without the internet again in the recent past. May just as well gamble on the future.

I like my wife and son, but if I had to go, I'd pick the civilization we call the Minoans in Crete. They had malls that were ancient ruins before the pyramids went up, women in positions of power, tits consistently out, sunny beaches, and IIRC two thousand years of mostly unbroken prosperity. Maybe I'd get to be some eccentric noblewoman's pet scientist. Maybe I'd just fish for a living in a sleepy village.

I'd probably get a monkey's-paw trip to 3000-years into a bleak future* or straight-up non-existence.

The time portal, after I tried to explain it: "So you want a low-bureaucracy down-to-earth human life, in the far future where you're a not-always-online symbiotic cyborg?"

* where I wouldn't understand anyone, but they're just speaking Swedish

Easy. My spouse is 5 years older than me. Go back 10 years to 2016. Make tons of bets and buy lots of crypto under my own name. Pull a Steve Rogers and show up older right after now me jumps in. Happily retire.

2002 so my highschool self never talks to my sexually abusive ex and he never enters my life to cause a cascade of illnesses.

Also from there I can invest heavily into bitcoin just like I thought about doing in 2010 but talked myself out of instead. I could retire by 30.

I could also save a friend.

I'd either go a few decades in the past or several centuries in the future, depending on how adventurous I'm feeling at the time.

going 30 years into the past puts me in the mid 90s. Recent enough to have technology levels that I could live with and to remember what companies to invest in, but far enough back for non-digital identity records to be a thing, so it would still be possible (albeit difficult) to create an identity.

Skipping forward by 500+ years would also be really interesting. Changing technology would make that world nearly unrecognizable from anything we know today, and I'm hopeful for the far future, if not the near future.

I would go to March 1886, Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and I would seek out William Stanley Jr.

Stanley had already built the first practical transformer and was demonstrating a complete high voltage AC transmission system. In 1886, his system transmitted electricity along Main Street and stepped it down for individual businesses. This was one of the critical technological foundations of the modern electric grid.

From there, I give him the conceptual roadmap for the electrical civilization that follows his work. I know enough about how modern renewables work to give him some good ideas. Oh and involving Westinghouse would be important and pretty much inevitable. This would be easier if I could prepare like, a binder, but I could still potentially help with just what I happen to know.

The goal is to go back when petrochemicals as an industry were still weak enough to be slain. If I were successful it would be one of the most outsized positive impacts I could have on the course of human history.

Jump 200 years into the future, and go from there. If things are better, then I'll gladly stay. If things are worse, I'll look for ways to either go home and break time, or stay and try to fix it/help other people survive.

Depends on how much time I have to think about it. At least back to 04, but probably earlier. I have at least one life to save, one to ruin a little earlier, and money to make, and to tell myself Jesus is total bullshit way earlier than I figured it out the first time. But 04 is when I have to save the life, so definitely at least that far. Probably would like earlier for the other stuff tho.

But it would be hard to make money before that (by predictive means) because being 18 makes having a bank account a lot simpler.

Someone has to go back to the primordial puddle and shit inside it or else humans wont happen

To the year I was born to move my family out of the suicide belt region of the US so I wouldn't grow up there.

I just watched a movie that kinda sorta fits this, but it’s suspenseful and a little horror-ish. It’s called The Lost Daughter if you’re interested.

Honestly, they say it’s horror, but once you figure out what’s going on, it’s more like The Others. But it’s still really good.

Too many choices. My knee-jerk reaction is to seconds after the big bang (though I'd also need to be able to move through space since I think it was pretty empty here, if here even existed -er- here.

A second choice would be Kyushu around 300CE. There are tons of interesting places and times I'd like to see.