THE LONELY PLANET GUIDE TO TIME-TRAVELLING
A powerful ChatGPT prompt for interdimensional explorers

Dave Birss , writer, speaker, creative experimenter
16th February 2023

The last week has been a bit crazy. I’ve just finished filming and editing a LinkedIn Learning course on how to use ChatGPT prompts to help you research and write better. It should be out very soon. So make sure you’ve got your learning trousers back from the dry cleaners.
In the course, I’ll be showing you how to construct an effective ChatGPT prompt. And I’ll be sharing some great prompts with you that will help you do what you do even better.
As part of my preparation for the course, I’ve written dozens of ChatGPT prompts and conducted hundreds of experiments. So I thought I’d start sharing some of the good stuff that didn’t make it into the course.
So let’s talk time-travel.
I never thought I’d become a history nerd
Wherever I live, I spend time getting to know the history of the place. I then become a thorough bore, telling my wife and kids about what happened in this exact place 400 years ago. I’ve become so fascinated with the past, that I’ve now listened to hundreds of hours of The Great Courses history lectures on Audible. I’m currently listing to a 30-hour lecture series on the daily life of the ancient world. And it’s fascinating!
I often wonder what it would be like to visit these historical places at the time. So I created a ChatGPT prompt to allow me to drop in on any destination at any point in history. The prompt asks for a destination and time before going on to write a guide on the best sights to see, the best people to talk to, the food to eat, the lives of the locals and the dangers to look out for.
Doctor Who would have benefited from this big time!
So, here’s the prompt:
It’s pretty big, huh? Well, just be glad some generous geek invented copy and paste. Grab it and slap it into ChatGPT to start exploring.
Or even better, you can just click here to get the prompt filled in already thanks to AIPRM. (If you do, please give it a nice little thumbs up!)
Embark on a ChatGPT adventure
This prompt has been such a joy to use. And I see it being something I’ll play with a lot. In the last few days, I’ve visited dozens of places, including an ancient Mayan civilisation in Guatemala, Spitalfields in the 1700s, Turkey in 10,000BC and my hometown of Glasgow on the day I was born. And it’s been utterly fascinating.
Here’s a sample output for the prompt “The Levant 9000BC”
Pretty good, huh?
Educators need to get smart on ChatGPT
As you can see, this ChatGPT prompt could be really useful for teaching history.
Just imagine the power of exploring different locations around Europe at various periods during the Second World War. Or exploring the impact of slavery by looking at the villages slaves were captured from, the ports with slave ships, the slave markets, the plantations and the cities that profited from the slave trade. Or bringing it further up to date and finding out what life was like for your parents.
But instead, most schools are banning the technology. They see it as a risk rather than an opportunity to teach more effectively.
It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you see it as a risk, it becomes one. But if you see it as an opportunity, that’s exactly what it is.
And I think you know what camp I’m in.