Started as a shower thought (literally in the shower), but decided to make it more open-ended.
My answer to this would be “watch future seasons of anime that I am waiting on”.
I don’t see how that could cause a huge ripple through time.
The world has yet to notice me traveling one day into the future every 24 hours.
There’s a quote in a book I like along those lines, that goes: “First of all, we are all time travellers. The vast majority of us manage only one day per day.”
I’ve always really liked that
We travel into the future at the blindingly fast rate of one second per second.
Watch Primer, that’s the whole point of the movie, how a couple of engineers who discover time travel try to profit from it while causing the least impact possible.
Also easily my favorite time travel movie by a long shot, and I’m a time travel movie fan.
Time travel to 12 hours ago so I can get more sleep
Go back in time and prevent your time machine from working.
Nice tight little loop. Minimal interference, hopefully.
Cheap and easy food storage.
Make a dozen extra servings of whatever I’m cooking and just leave it in the pot on the stove. When I’m hungry in the future I’ll come back and serve myself up another bowl. When I take the last serving, I leave a note saying when I came from so I know to prepare another batch by then.
Rewind the last 15 seconds of a meal to enjoy the last bite again.
Wow. Great idea! You get to enjoy a great meal again, but without getting overfull
Going back a few hours and getting some more sleep sounds nice
Going massive events that are either completely void of people or full of people.
Star exploding? No one around, nothing to change.
Parade for the astronauts coming back from the moon?
What’s another guy standing around, just minding my own business.
Until everybody throughout time, after the machine has been invented I gues, also wants to experience the same parade 🙃…… I mean not until…. It’ll just happen ?..… now my head hurts
Long, but relevant Douglas Adams quote:
One of the major problems encountered in time travel is not that of becoming your own father or mother. There is no problem in becoming your own father or mother that a broad-minded and well-adjusted family can’t cope with. There is no problem with changing the course of history—the course of history does not change because it all fits together like a jigsaw. All the important changes have happened before the things they were supposed to change and it all sorts itself out in the end.
The major problem is simply one of grammar, and the main work to consult in this matter is Dr. Dan Streetmentioner’s Time Traveler’s Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations. It will tell you, for instance, how to describe something that was about to happen to you in the past before you avoided it by time-jumping forward two days in order to avoid it. The event will be described differently according to whether you are talking about it from the standpoint of your own natural time, from a time in the further future, or a time in the further past and is further complicated by the possibility of conducting conversations while you are actually traveling from one time to another with the intention of becoming your own mother or father.
Most readers get as far as the Future Semiconditionally Modified Subinverted Plagal Past Subjunctive Intentional before giving up; and in fact in later editions of the book all pages beyond this point have been left blank to save on printing costs.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy skips lightly over this tangle of academic abstraction, pausing only to note that the term “Future Perfect” has been abandoned since it was discovered not to be.
There’s a ‘theory’ the Titanic really sunk under the weight of time travellers going to watch the sinking firsthand
