What’s something you would attempt if you were guaranteed not to fail.

There are many answers to the question above, but if I had to select at least one activity, I would choose one that is a purely personal experience, and one that involves serving others. Firstly, I would love to replicate the 1927 solo flight by Charles Lindberg across the Atlantic from New York to Paris. There is something unequivocal in flying solo, a feat of skill and endurance. The first transatlantic flight done by one individual was a milestone event in aviation history.

Using the same airplane that Lindbergh flew in – The Spirit of St Louis – it would be a remarkably difficult yet rewarding experience.

There had been multiple attempts by experienced aviators to cross the Atlantic solo. None of them succeeded, but each attempt only whetted the appetites of future pilots to achieve the grand objective of flying uninterrupted from one continent to another.

The Spirit of St Louis was a single engine mono propeller, a steel frame covered in canvas. The wings, spanning 46 feet, were made of wood covered in canvas. Thinking about the sophistication of current aviation technology, with our GPS, it is astounding to learn exactly how Lindbergh accomplished his heroic flight.

He was a stunt pilot to be sure, experienced in aerial navigation and acrobatics. This was the age of the daredevil pilot, the acrobatic stunt era of Waldo Pepper and the amazing death- defying aviator. World War One era pilots, while celebrated for their astonishing skills in the air, were gradually declining as commercial air flights were expanding.

Flying across the transatlantic solo was Lindbergh’s way of flying in the face of the inevitable (no pun intended). The stunt aviator had had his/her day, but Lindbergh wanted to demonstrate to the world that his era was not over. What would it be like to immerse oneself in a different era, using the technologies and techniques of that time?

Secondly, thinking about a goal or activity that would serve others, the follow scenario occurs to me. If I was guaranteed not to fail, then it occurs to me to go back in time and prevent a catastrophe or lethal event from happening. It is easy to find examples of time travel scenarios – if you could go back in time to prevent a crime or change th course of history, would you?

If I could, I would go back to July 1994, and sabotage the perpetrators of the worst terrorist bombing in the Americas (at least prior to Sept 11 2001) – the attack on the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association (AMIA in Spanish) in Buenos Aires.

That attack resulted in the deaths of 85 people, and the injury of 300. A suicide bomber, driving a car laden with explosives, carried out the attack. Ever since then, the Iranian regime has been repeatedly accused of being responsible for that atrocity, an allegation Tehran vehemently denies. The purported motive of the bomber was retaliation for Argentina allegedly reneging on nuclear agreements with the Iranians.

I am not from Argentina, and I am not Jewish. I have no personal stake in this matter, except as a human being that deplores violence against innocent people.

I am quite skeptical of the claims of Iranian responsibility for this attack. Why? The connections between the AMIA community centre bombing and the Iranian government are tenuous, if that. Argentina, under the prolonged era of military dictatorships, has a stubborn and persistent malaise of antisemitism. The Argentine generals, ever fearful of working class rebellion, blamed the Jewish people for the evils of Communism, and antisemitic publications were widely available in Argentina for decades.

From the earliest decades of the twentieth century, large numbers of Germans and Jews migrated to Argentina. A nativist, anti-immigrant reaction spawned a nationalistic fervour. In the 1930s, the doctrine of Nazism grew among Argentina’s German population.

In the 1970s the Argentine military junta, copying the tactics of their German teachers, circulated antisemitic conspiracy theories claiming that Jews, in collaboration with Communism and foreign Zionists, were plotting to establish a Jewish homeland in the Argentine region of Patagonia.

There is no shortage of Argentinian antisemitic suspects for the AMIA bombing. The administration of current Argentine president Javier Milei, a version of Trump in South America, routinely accuses Iran of culpability for 1994 AMIA bombing to align his government with the goals of Washington in Latin America.

Milei has recently taken to hallucinating Iranian troops in Bolivia, and Hezbollah militants in Chile, to ingratiate himself into the good graces of the Trump administration. These hallucinations have a definite purpose – by portraying Tehran as an aggressively expansionist state, Argentina bolsters Washington’s escalation of tensions with Iran.

Flying across the transatlantic helped to bring Europeans and Americans together, despite their geographical distance and cultural differences. By preventing a terrorist attack, we can de-escalate tensions, thus paving the way for a world where people’s lives matter, not the geopolitical interests of big powers.