In a more serious vein than my above “contributions”, I’d like to be able to observe exactly how big and what the behaviour of whale pods were before human intervention changed it.
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I too would like to be just about anywhere in the U.S. pre colonial destruction. While plenty of people were traipsing around here earlier I’m with @charlie in that I want to see things in the U.S. before all the deforestation (old growth northern woods? yes please), hunting-to-extinction, introduction of everything from smallpox to taraxacum sp., ya know, that stuff… I’m in New York (upstate rural for a long while) and grew up in New York City. I was always fascinated as a child by the illustrated maps of the boroughs before the Dutch settled everything. It was all probably the most amazing bird migratory stop…like Jamaica Bays only the whole city. I would also like to see the area I currently reside somewhere in the timeline of the last major glacial movement that created the mountain ranges I live between above and below. I bet things were crawling with weird things just afterward. Can it be a sloooooooooow historical visit?
yes. No comment. Excepting this one ;)
those are the ones of us who go to the northern or southern border and answer the question, " what country are you from?" with, “America” instead of, “the U.S.” It’s true…many silly ones but we aren’t all bad silly. Some of us (me) are good silly. Plus, iNat was born here, right? ;)
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(reposting bc i accidentally replied to someone i didnt mean to)
right where i am now, south florida, but just before europeans got here (assuming that my presence would not be detrimental to anyone and anything in my vicinity). i would love to see what it was supposed to be like. it would be unrecognizable. the amount of now extinct or rare animals, the everglades before it was drained out, now im all wistful
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well and probably true for you too but i am also interested in how the indigenous people were managing and using the land! For pre human impact you have to go way back before the ice age, that would be neat too, but we all know the indigenous people interacted with the land in a very different way (and with thousands of different cultures it was/is different from place to place too).
And yes i am assuming i am either invisible and undetectable or else somehow not infected with any diseases i’d inflict on people (or plants ie dutch elm disease etc)
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Very interesting response. A trip to the north pacific would have also revealed stellar’s sea cows. Something that very few people today even know existed only a few hundred years ago:
Madagascar in year 500 BC would have been incredible. One of the last large land masses (besides New Zealand and Antarctica) to have been inhabited by humans. Really the last gasp of the pre-Anthropocene world.
https://beta.capeia.com/paleobiology/2017/12/13/the-late-survival-of-madagascars-megafauna
Nice topic. I would go back to 60-s to swim in the sea before Soviets screwd it up.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aral_Sea
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I’ve always wanted to see that too.
I have read that since they built the Kok-Aral dam there is beginning to be some recovery of water levels and fish. Of course it will never be the same.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pk4v0uu5rkY&t=569s
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/03/north-aral-sea-restoration-fish-kazakhstan/
it’ll recover someday. Probably long after all of us are gone though
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It is somewhat recovering, and will recover to some bigger extent. No grievances, let’s use it as a good lesson for future projects when human beigns will feel that they are rulers of the world.
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Oh man!! I would love to go back into time right about when living beings were at the point of evolving into land creatures. 
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A lifetime of watching TV has taught me that traveling back in time would be bad. If I could just see back in time, I’d look back at the one time I saw a Mountain Lion and didn’t grab my camera in time to get a pic. That would be one screenshot I’d accept as an iNat observation.
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I would like to go back to 1980 and do my life over and see all the creatures I missed when I wasn’t paying attention. I started being seriously interested in nature just a few years ago, I think about my life and the places I’ve been and I regret my lost opportunities.
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All of the above suggestion are great, I would add a borderline human element and go back to central Africa when “we” were first coming out of the trees and see how “Lucy” walked, socialized and generally survived. Maybe see the first tool users.
I might also take a club from those tool users and go (not as far) back to any modern human introducing a species to somewhere it shouldn’t be and then smack them upside the head with said club. (I know, I know. You shouldn’t change history. Oh no!!)
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Speaking of the North Pacific, the birder in me can’t help but also add “hooray another cormorant for my life list”
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Uhhh, how about every time period and every location on the planet!?! 
Okay, tops on my list would probably be the Carboniferous period with gigantic dragonflies. I would love to see those and the plants growing during that period of time.
I would also love to see some of the ancient Cephalopods (Ammonites and their relatives) which left behind so many amazing fossils.
And some of the feathered dinosaurs.
The list goes on and on…
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Years ago, the State Museum of Pennsylvania used to have a walk-through exhibit of the Carboniferous. You were in a damp forest of tree ferns and cycads, with strange pre-dinosaur reptiles in the underbrush and lobe-finned fishes in the stream, and one of those giant dragonflies hovering alongside. It was such an evocative exhibit, you really felt transported. As coal began to fade in importance for the State, that exhibit was replaced. I don’t even remember the replacement.
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I would love to go follow some of the great 18th- and 19th-century naturalists around, and document additional associated organisms they weren’t catching. It would be cool to augment what we know about the contexts in which some of those early collections were made. Not that they weren’t thorough, but nobody can document everything, and we now know some things they couldn’t have known about how ecology works.
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