A time traveller comes back from 50 years in the future. You have 3 hours with them. What do you do?
Rules:
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.
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.
They will answer to the best of their ability but imagine this is a random person from 2074.
and if we didn’t try to get any details we tried and didn’t work or wasn’t fast enough to try again for a better outcome but realizing I would create a bootstrap paradox I would get really depressed.
Then I would spend the rest of the time. Showing the traveler a good time as my time is much nicer then where they came from and I want to let them enjoy what they can before they goes back.
##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?”
I give them some water, because it is probably pretty scarce and valuable by 2074. Then I ask them if they remembered to bring me the lottery ticket numbers for the big lottery that I win in October of 2024.
Then it depends on whether the future is mutable, or if we’re forced into stable time loops. If time is stable, I’d get some friends. I would never speak to the time traveller directly, but I would text back-and-forth with my friends as they talk to the time traveller. When 3 hours are up, the traveller goes back in time to talk to a different friend in the same three-hour window. (If they’re tired, they can travel back 12 hours and catch some sleep before the next meeting.) It would be an interestingly acausal conversation, but Objective 1 would be finding a more permanent way to bypass the three-hour limit, maybe setting up an AI that will ask good questions of the time traveller. (If they can bring a USB stick with some good AI on it, for instance). We’d also want the future version of Wikipedia, and detailed plans for whatever useful technology gets invented in the future. As well as enough almanac knowledge to get seed money for a future-tech company, and useful news items. I wouldn’t ask about mounting crises like global warming, though, so that my company can do something about it – if I base my actions on knowledge of the future, the future is set. I think.
If the future is truly mutable, though, I just resolve to send a detailed summary of our conversation back in time to a week before I schedule the traveller to come. I get a conversation summary, use it to make the conversation more productive, and then send the new summary back. Repeat until I can take over the world, build a time machine, send a large expedition back to 12,000 BC to do an industrial revolution, and then send an even larger expedition back to the early Universe. When entropy starts to become annoying, go another century before the previous expedition and just accept them as citizens. Repeat until godhood achieved.
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
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.
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.
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.
Map out what stocks to buy and when over the last 40 years, print it out and have the time traveler take it back along with a video of me explaining what to do to become insanely wealthy to my 5 year old self.
I love the idea of this and then thinking of me at 5 I’d think it was funny and ignore it my whole life then find it at my exact age now only to hate my younger self
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