I'm assuming I couldn't change the past - one guy in weird clothes with weird attitudes probably isn't going to get too far. But what would I like to see? There are so many moments in time where I would love to see how crowds really reacted - too many. So I'll take the easy road and say I would like to have seen one of Louis Armstrong's 1920s concerts.
But I would also kind of like to see what my corner of the world was like before humans.
So, you only have to go back as far as all those crazy British explorers that is easy. Darwin always surprises me, for some reason he thought killing birds etc. and taking them back to England was a good thing. I have never figured out, a man with his intellect would produce that as a clever idea.
The basics of taxonomy would have any scientist doing that, before or after. The practice was established long before Darwin went to work. If you describe a species, you need a type specimen which is preserved in a public access place for researchers to have a look at if they have questions. It keeps people from making up species, saying they saw them and named them and that's that.
So if you wish to describe a bird, or a fish, you have to collect it and preserve a specimen or two for the future. A good example of why this matters is that the Nazis wanted to prove their superiority, so they sent people out to collect and describe new species. They wanted to prove they could discover more than anyone else. As you can imagine, since success paid, they played fast and loose, and some killifish species, as an example, were described quite a few times under quite a few names. When people later tried to make sense of the relationships, they had to go to the preserved type specimens to prove that 'errors' had been made. Some fish had been given 5 or 6 names.
When the common krib was imported, it was given that name because an importer confused it with another species. Pelvicachromis pulcher is a kribensis to us, and Pelvicachromis kribensis isn't. How was it figured out that we were wrong? Type specimens.
I sacrificed some fish to a major DNA based study of killifish when that was a new process, and the paper produced by the scientists who did the study really changed our understanding of killifish evolution. I've also preserved unlucky fish from undescribed species and sent them off to researchers. I don't like it, but it makes perfect sense to me. I've stood at windows in natural history museums and looked at creatures Darwin worked on. It's an interesting experience.
Future? The last few decades have made me a pessimist, and I'm not sure I'd want to see 100 years along unless I had managed to stay alive and healthy the whole time. I think it'd be great to see tomorrow, and many days after that.
