re: Say you were teleported back to AD 1400

clean water and clean women.

antibiotics

quote:

---

While there, kill Hitler's bloodline.

---

Noble, but that's 600 years ago, or roughly 20 generations back. To kill 1 generation before Hitler, you'd have to kill 2 people or, 2^1 people. Wanna hit his grandparents? That's 2 generations back and is 4 people or 2^2 people. His great-grandparents? 3 back, 2^3, 8 people. Following the pattern and assuming there was no inbreeding, you'd have to track down and kill 2^20 people. That's 1,048,576 people.

You're gonna be busy.

ETA: Also, what if you kill all but one of his ancestors and can't find the last one. The last one you couldn't find is where all of Hitler's evil was inherited from and the genes from the other 1,048,575 people you just slaughtered were the only thing he inherited that kept Hitler from being a REALLY bad dude. You've just created SuperHitler by slaughtering over a million people.

You monster.

quote:

---

Noble, but that's 600 years ago, or roughly 20 generations back. To kill 1 generation before Hitler, you'd have to kill 2 people or, 2^1 people. Wanna hit his grandparents? That's 2 generations back and is 4 people or 2^2 people. His great-grandparents? 3 back, 2^3, 8 people. Following the pattern and assuming there was no inbreeding, you'd have to track down and kill 2^20 people. That's 1,048,576 people.

---

Or just kill the great great....X grand parents of hitlers parents who lived at that time. No need for going on a killing spree unless the genealogy history doesn't go that far back otherwise, open season.

ETA: Although the situation is to go back to 1400, considering the fact we have a flipping time machine, might as well make it easy and just go back to kill the grand parents of hitler. Hell, we do have a time machine after all. I just hope it's a DeLorean and the flux capacitor works. Might need to bring a spare capacitor to ensure the job gets done.

quote:

---

Or just kill the great great....X grand parents of hitlers parents who lived at that time. No need for going on a killing spree unless the genealogy history doesn't go that far back otherwise, open season.

---

Nah, man. That IS how many there are. That doesn't include the people between them and Hitler. Exponential numbers get big fast.

Hitler is one person, has 2 parents a generation back, 4 grandparents two back, 8 great-grandparents three back, 16 great-great-grandparents four back... and 1,024,576 18th-great-grandparents 20 generations back.

1, 2, 4, 8, 16... 1,024,576

2^0, 2^1, 2^2, 2^3, 2^4... 2^20.

You're gonna need a sharp knife. Remember, if you use the boomstick, that whole "he's a witch!" nastiness is going to take place. The 1400s were a bitch.

The good news is that we're all the products of generations of happy inbreeding, so you don't have that many distinct ancestors (though there were that many people that boned to get to you). Still, things happen like one couple having children, one of the spouses dies and the other remarries and has a new set of children. Three generations down, a woman descended from the first set lets a guy from the second set lift her petticoat and BINGO, you end up the product of inbreeding. Somewhere along the line we all have people who is are ancestors on both our mother and father's side. Everyone's parents are likely cousins if they're from the same general area just because of all the cousin-fricking that went on, and most of our parents have perpetuated the ages-old tradition of cousin-fricking. Even if they're not from the same area, they still share ancestors, it's just not as rampant. Inbreeding: It's not just for Arkansas.

Our gene puddles aren't as deep as we think they are, and because of this, wiping out Hitler's bloodline would, in reality, not involve killing over a million people. It would still be a lot, though.

quote:

---

You could just find his great great great grandpa and cut his nuts off...then you wouldn't be a murderer

---

But what if THAT guy were super not-evil and his genes were the only thing keeping Hitler from being a REALLY bad dude. You just killed an innocent person and created SuperHitler.

You monster.

ETA:Yes, in my haste to brand you a monster, I missed that you didn't kill him. You did create SuperHitler, though, so you're still a monster.

Killer

quote:

---

Yeah, but what if those people you kill were the only people whose genes kept Hitler from being a REALLY bad guy? All the other crazy evil genes still got to (a slightly different and less neatly moustachioed) Hitler, and you just created SuperHitler.


MONSTER!

---

ETA:

quote:

---

Killer

---

I hypothetically kill 1-4, Hitler kills an estimated 1 million plus. Yet I'm dubbed the killer. Gotta love the OT

quote:

---

You're gonna need a sharp knife. Remember, if you use the boomstick, that whole "he's a witch!" nastiness is going to take place. The 1400s were a bitch.

---

quote:

---

Printing Press

---

So you'd go back in time to beat out the competition by 36-40 years to print bibles? More power to you and to each their own I guess.

quote:

---

Ac/heat

---

All good choices but wouldn't you need an energy source? A generator would work but then they'd need to know how to obtain oil and turn it into gasoline. Unless we could modify it to use the fuel sources of the day. Just bring an oil engineer and leave him there when you leave