Would You Rather: Time Travel

The machine works exactly once and then never again. Every destination you pick costs you every other one, permanently and without appeal.

The list splits three ways and the split is worth seeing before you begin. Some destinations are about knowledge — the year 3000, your own future, watching the dinosaurs — where the point is coming back with something you did not previously have.

Some are about repair, which is what undoing your worst mistake and warning someone in time really amount to. And a few are about contact: meeting a great ancestor, meeting your younger self, attending your own funeral. Almost nobody wants all three of those equally, and most people have no idea which one they want until the options are placed side by side.

Altogether, thirty-two destinations wide, written rather than illustrated, since the whole appeal is imagining your own version.

Undoing your worst mistake tends to win early and lose late. It is the first thing almost everyone reaches for and, once they have imagined it properly for a round or two, frequently not the thing they would actually spend the trip on.