Rules:
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The time traveller is able to travel backward and forward through time (max forward is 2074) and they can only transport things that can fit in a small backpack.
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You can choose when the 3 hours begin but it has to be in 2024 and once it has begun the timer can’t be reset or stopped.
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They will answer to the best of their ability but imagine this is a random person from 2074.
Ask if Half-Life 3 is available
Nope.
K, thanks. Bye.
With a three hour awkward silence first
Wouldn’t want to waste their time with small talk. They came a long way.
First couple of minutes would be nice to catch up with world events. I would take some time to find money making strategies, like learning what to invest in, or what about to buy. If the person has any knowledge about some revolutionary technology, it would be nice to learn about it. Maybe we could use the knowledge to advance mankind. I would also want to learn about things to watch out for. Maybe I should move to some other country because the one I’m in goes to shit.
The fun thing about this is if you use it to advance technology then 50 years from now technology will be even more advanced allowing you to advance things even further, depending on time travel rules of course.
If I get to ask them to bring something, I guess all the major world news and science media of the previous 50 years on a hard drive would come in handy. I’d use it to bankrupt all the billionionaires and bring peace and prosperity to the world.
The power you held would consume you, and you would become the most powerful, rich, and corrupt being the world has ever seen.
That’s almost certainly true. But I’d give it a go.
And thats if rich and powerful people /organisations didn’t catch on that one individual was costing them money/business ventures and have that individual killed.
He can travel back in time so I’m going the other direction with this.
I have about six hundred ounces of silver bullion.
So I’d send him back to around 2010 when silver was going for thirty bucks an ounce and Bitcoin was going for a buck a coin.
Cash out silver, buy Bitcoin, bring me the wallet.
This could be done a little more efficiently with a stop on whatever year Bitcoin was over sixty thousand, but even at today’s rates, I would instantly have several hundred million dollars. I wouldn’t even mind paying the taxes on that.
Why get future information that’s going to take time to manifest itself when I can cash instantly?
Edit: Six hundred ounces of silver would physically fit in a backpack, but the weight would likely tear it to shreds. I’d have time for him to make multiple trips so he doesn’t destroy his backpack or his spine.
To shreds you say?
How’s his wife holding up?
To shreds, you say?
Not sure what you’re getting at there, but yes.
I took two hundred ounces on a plane once. Even though that’s only about fourteen pounds, it’s in such a dense area, that it gave my reasonably sturdy duffle bag a tough time at its seams.
Ooohhhh. Thanks for the clarification
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It should be possible to get the boot strap paradox out of the way and establish a stable time loop in which case the traveler just hands me a storage device full of everything I need to know to make a lot of money and establish a time travel research organization that will 50 years later send the traveler back to me.
50 years?
I would ask them how we survived the chaotic weather, massive parallel famines, collapse of trade & technology, and lethally high wet bulb temperatures of climate change.
Plus, there is also the high likelihood of all these causing a massive drop in human population that compounds the irreversible and permanent collapse of human civilization. To the point where any high tech is increasingly unlikely to exist.
People in time travel movies always talk about going back in time and accidentally changing one small thing that reverberates into an immensely large change today. In real life people never talk about making a small, deliberate, positive change today in their own life timeline for an immense positive change in their future.
The one thing we learn from history, is that we do not learn from history.
I guess that’s why we dream of time travel – so we can just go back and do those small things, instead of picking up a pile of history books and reading about what the Romans or Chinese (or whoever) wrote about what they wish they had done (and then maybe doing it). It’s a technology that lets us pretend to be wise and have made the right choices all along – a device that lets us escape regret.
To be fair though, reading some small fraction of those history books is quite a time investment for most people, and we seem to need those lessons (and be wise enough to take them to heart) at the exact time in our lives when we don’t have any free time to learn them. I’m feeling this personally a lot right now. It’s like we all learn why our reach exceeds our grasp just barely too late to really do much about it, except maybe read the stories of how that happened to everyone else, and know we are in good company.
When we go back in time, we worry about changing the past. But we expect this person from the future to tell us all the stuff so we can fuck around with (for them) things that already happened.
Sports almanac, any kind of history of the stock market, and the history of Power Ball and Mega Millions.
Ok you have 2 hours 40 minutes left. What else?
Dang!! Good point.
Then I think similar to another post. Catch up on huge world events.
I would love to try and direct the future in a better direction but doing so would mess with time. So maybe just do the best I can for my family and friends.
Gonna have to go the Bill and Ted route.
I’ll figure out what I need in the next 50 years and let him know there. Now the time traveler can just tell me whatever I want to have wanted to know.
“ok Ted, we have to remember to come back and put this key here when we’re the good future us’s”
Smart.
Kill them and steal their time machine.
Why kill them? Just ask if you can use the time machine, they’ll probably say yes. Otherwise you can steal it, but no need to commit murder.
Time travel without killing? The Master does not approve… Just look at his face!
Well, if they are over 50, then how could you have killed them if they are still alive?
That’s going to be a headache for the courts, to say the least. The real victims of time travel are the bureaucrats.
##3. They will answer to the best of their ability but imagine this is a random person from 2074.
Oh, I love this rule. Everyone is planning on asking this guy how time travel works and detailed accounts of world history, but if the brain drain we’ve experienced as a society is going to continue, how exactly do you expect an average person half a century from now to answer?
I’m imagining this exact scenario playing out but instead we are the time traveler, returning back to 1974.
“Oh wow, so can you explain all the geopolitics of the next fifty years?”
“…”
“And this ‘Internet’ thing you speak of? It sounds amazing! How does it work?”
“…”
“I’m also very excited to learn about these ‘smart phones’, they sound very powerful. Could you describe how they’re built?”
“…”
Yeah I was sort of expecting someone who tried to play into that aspect but I’ve still been getting good answers anyways.
I’ll fucking torture them and steal their time machine. Go forward in time myself collect all stock market data, all the research paper published, all the politicians who got elected, details on all the wars that happened, details on all the influential people, etc. And then go back as far as possible and establish a secret society with me at the helm of and achieve complete world domination …ultimate rice pudding… Shout out to exurb1a
Why the torture?
I wonder how light-handed you’ll have to be to keep that market, election, and war info accurate.
I ask them about the history of time travel and either listen to them, or accept the recording they give me, and carefully record it myself. Then I ignore them and try to metagame time travel, assuming they’ve set up some form of time loop.
The first step is to buy lottery tickets (with choices based on a quantum RNG), and if I win, buy more lottery tickets until I have an arbitrary amount of wealth. If I’m in a time loop, there will exist an iteration where I win all attempted lottery instances (note that only non-deterministic RNGs will work for this, like the one I have on my desk). I then use that wealth and my foreknowledge to adjust the future history of time travel such that I exclusively control the technology. Then I send someone back in time with the recorded history (now incorrect) of time travel.
That ought to destabilize any loop they’re trying to set up after a finite number of iterations, and wrap my loop around it. If you’re a time traveler looking to prevent me from doing this, I accept cash, money, and filthy lucre. Just make sure the dates on the bills make sense for this period.
Ask if they’d like a cup of tea and tell them I’m really sorry we fucked up the world. Then I’d leave them be, to enjoy the 3 hours they can spend here.
That sounds nice.
Edit: The tea part not fucking up the world.
Guy from 50 years in the future: “what’s tea?”
They probably didn’t travel back in time to sit around and answer questions with some random person, so I think you’re on the right track. If I traveled back in time, it’d be to sightsee, or get rich, or something like that. They would too.
