If anyone wants a specific goal, have it be either
- Earn a Nobel Prize by age 18
or
- Become a billionaire by age 18
For the sake of the scenario, assume the following:
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If anyone learns that you are mentally from the future, you immediately have an aneurysm and die. You somehow just know this and therefore must keep your true identity secret.
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You wake up as a random 10-year-old specifically in 2002, not your 10-year-old self, and not the age you actually were in 2002.
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You live in the same country, speak the same language(s), and are the same ethnicity as your old self. Your biological sex matches your gender identity (flip a coin if you are enby).
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You have 2 parents and 1.5 siblings. Your family earns exactly the median income for your country.
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The person whose identity you now inhabit left a diary. You have no other knowledge of your new identity beyond this.
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If you try to look for your old family, you learn they had a different child in this timeline who is the same age as you but is not you. They will not believe any attempt to convince them you are related.
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The USB drive is compatible with any standard USB Type A connector. It is just large enough to fit all of Wikipedia, including hosted media and files, and the drive is read-only. The drive cannot be reformatted.
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Stock market trends remain generally consistent for 5 years. After that, assume the butterfly effect will start to skew the results, so you cannot predict what will happen after 2007. Sports become too unreliable to bet on with 100% accuracy after 1 year.
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I feel like I shouldn’t need to clarify this one, but no grooming kids. Assume there is a magical force that prevents you from dating anyone until both you and they are at least 18, and no one is attracted to you unless they would also feel okay dating someone who is your mental age.
EDIT - Additional clarifiers, if this helps:
- The USB drive is not based on 2002 technology but is fully compatible with it. Assume it uses a novel architecture that can repurpose itself to be compatible with whatever system it is plugged into, as long as it fits the correct type of USB port.
Pretty horrifying scenario, my wife would be 21, I would be 10.
Anakin? Is that you?
I would just be happy to have a re-start at life and a chance to make better choices. Enjoy simpler times, get a head start on hobbies and passions, see my favorite bands that are no longer around :)
Eventually I would invest in things which would earn me a safety net and extra income (hard to do that as a 10 year old), but not in companies that go against my values. I don’t need to get rich but I would like enough to be able to benefit my loved ones and community. Not the most ambitious, but practical.
I was in college in 2002, so I would go there and tell myself what is going on. That shouldn’t break the rules since nobody but me would know what was happening (just a different version of me). Working together with a blueprint of the next two decades, it would be trivial for college me to make money in the stock market. I would raise as much money as I could before the 2008 housing bubble bursts so I could buy up a lot of property cheap.
From there I could use the information on close elections to politically swing things the way I want. 20 year old me would practice writing so I could get into writing newspaper editorials, building my reputation as someone who has exceptional ability to predict political and social trends. This reputation would give me a foothold to get to speak to and advise people in power, further allowing me to shape the direction of politics. With this money and influence, I could make sure COVID was handled properly, that the war in Ukraine never happened, and that climate change was addressed with the seriousness it deserves. I could save hundreds of millions of lives and nobody would ever know.
2002… uff, that would be hard. As a ten year old there is so little you can do!
I guess I would steal an identity and get some ground breaking research out on a quicker time scale. In particular trying to get ahead of the climate deniers. I would invest in some whatevers that made it big as soon as possible, then during the 2008 crisis, then Bitcoins.
I would find it impossible to not look for my friends and family, even just stalking them from afar. That would probably drive me insane.
I’d use my wealth to lobby hard for climate justice and climate research. Probably still hide my true identity. I’m not American, so I would need to think really hard if preventing Trump is worth it, but I would lobby for a quicker energy transition and for a better social net. I’d assume with the knowledge I have at hand, I could even tweak the end result of the 2008 crisis… but that would be a massive butterfly to introduce.
On a global scale, I would think that some properly timed interventions in Africa could have dramatic impacts both socially and ecologically, but I’d have to study more to figure that out.
2002… uff, that would be hard. As a ten year old there is so little you can do!
Yep, that’s the catch! You have the knowledge, but who’s gonna let a 10-year-old open an investment account? Or who’s going to believe that a presumably middle-of-the-pack 4th grader suddenly unlocked the secret to mRNA vaccines?
I’m with you, I think identity theft is probably the easiest way to start out (especially back then when it was so widespread, and not as many people knew what to look out for) but it becomes one more secret to have to keep covered up that can screw you over later if found out.
Just spend 8 years planning. By the time you’d be 18 you’d still have 15 years of events before your knowledge caught up. I’d expect the trickiest part of it all would be making sure whatever you do doesn’t alter the timeline. One mistake and it won’t matter what you know if the course of history changes.
The billionaire one is kinda easy
Sports betting to get your base funds up to a decent level then buy the shares in the successful tech companies post dot-com crash. Wouldn’t hurt to buy some gold and bitcoin too.
Sports betting would continue helping you live a lavish lifestyle until all the investment income gets to a good level.
If you do well enough, you should be able to amplify what you’ve already made to acquire an absurd amount of wealth on the subprime mortgage crash in 2008.
Bitcoin wasn’t big by 2010, so you couldn’t make much money that way.
Impossible to read a USB stick from 2025 in the year 2002.
Impossible to read a backup of Wikipedia from 2025 in the year 2002.
Story over.
I don’t know about the formatting of Wikipedia but SD cards were on the market in 2002, so a micro SD card in a flash drive adapter would be possible, no?
People in this thread are grossly overshooting when they’re assuming various technologies became available. USB flash drives absolutely existed in 2002. Not very big ones, by modern standards, but I personally owned a one gigabyte USB 2.0 drive in 2002 for which I paid many dollars. It allowed me to retain my title as king of the campus for several months.
My computer hard drive was 8 gigs at that time, so I totally get that an era appropriate flash drive that could hold Wikipedia wouldn’t be possible. I was assuming that it would be a flash drive from the future (or present depending on perspective).
I can mount an old drive made in 2002 right now, formatted in a 2002 era format, and put text files on it, compressed with tar and gz from 1990 if need be.
I assume that is the hardware we have to work with in this scenario.
Now try to save wikipedia on it.
(btw it wasn’t text files, it was a backup)
We can assume whoever was smart enough to create a machine that can transport your consciousness in the past so it can inhabited that of a random child (murder btw), was also smart enough to transform the usb data into something that could be read and used in 2002.
A backup can mean many things. One interpretation is as text files, which works.
Text content of wikipedia is 24GB compressed.
USB drives in 2002 could hold up to 256GB.
This isnt hard man
USB drives in 2002 could hold up to 256GB.
MB :-)
Ah, sorry this is me being actually stupid. I was looking up normal drives. My apologies.
Yeah we’d have to filter this a bit.
I don’t know why I was expecting there would be any discussion in here other than NOOOOOO wojacking about technical feasibility rather than what you’d do with the knowledge
On that note, I’ve often wondered how big text-based Wikipedia would be if you pared it down to the most accessed articles, and cut out the articles on, say, the highest-scoring curling players from Zimbabwe in 2007.
Found the kill joy
too bad :-)
I’m not sure hope my reply ended up in that comment of yours
I doubt even the max number of USB 1.1 devices per bus can hold the size of current Wikipedia. (Quick Google shows ~4TB usb3.2 drives. And 127 individual devices. Gives you Max 508TB. In 2023 the size of everything in Wikipedia was ~430TB. )
For the sake of the scenario, in addition to the details listed in the body of the post, assume the USB drive is type A and is readable by any PC with a USB type A connector, regardless of generation. It can also be read regardless of file system.
There’s an inherent supernatural element to the premise, so assume “it just works.” There can be a specialized browser on the drive as well if you feel like you wouldn’t be able to make use of the raw HTML files.
No assumptions are even required because this commenter is simply flat out wrong. See the breakdown here, or TL;DR: It would be trivial to mount a drive up to 2.2 TB (not GB, not MB…) using 2002 hardware.
I think a bigger assumption in this scenario is that if you’re reborn as a random 10 year old holding a USB flash drive, you’ll zap to a place on the globe with ready access to a recent computer.
Yep. My household in 2002 had a computer, but that’s because I had a parent who worked in IT. Most people I knew at the time didn’t have one. By 2002, ~40% of the United States still did not have access to a computer at home, though the gap would keep closing year over year.
But that’s just data for the United States. Other countries may have had lower rates of adoption at that time, and in a scenario where you would be less likely to wake up in a random household with a computer, it would require a bit more thinking to figure out how to get access to one.
I’d probably look to schools and libraries as a place to start. If that’s not an option, then it’d be figuring out how to befriend a local rich kid who might have a computer. Otherwise, the USB is effectively a paperweight for some time and you’re left only with your memories of the future for guidance until computer access becomes more available.
Oh jeez I grew up with an engineer father and a mom who did punch card programming back in the day and just kinda assumed most people had a computer in the 90s
inherent supernatural element
ok now you killed me :-)
I guess more accurately I killed whatever 10 year old you magically mind swapped with, haha.
That brings to mind how the fuck most of us are going to avoid spending a nice long time in mental health treatment for the sudden change of personality and loss of memory
This is, I’m sorry to say, baloney.
In 2002 Windows XP was already out and natively supported NTFS volumes. So did Windows 2000. XP even supported ExFAT volumes with a patch which was released in April 2001. If you’re a Linux nerd, ext2 or ext3 could easily handle the partition and file sizes required. ext2 had already been available for decades at that point and ext3 was released in 2001 and readily available by 2002.
Without media, the current Wikipedia (according to itself) is a hair over 24 gigabytes not including images and media, which’d fit on a 32 gig flash drive that, while it would be absolutely amazing to 2002 users just based on its sheer usable volume, would handily accept a bog standard NTFS partition readable on any XP or Win2k machine.
There were no flash storage based drives bigger than one or two gigs in 2002, but there were plenty of external USB hard drives in that era that readily exceeded the 4 gig FAT32 partition size limit. I know this well because I was there at the time, and I owned several of them. You had to manually format them as NTFS to be able to use the entire capacity, but they absolutely did work over USB… Just not if you bunged them into a Windows 98 or ME machine. A modern flash drive would be no different. In all practicable terms you could mount a volume up to 2.2 terabytes in XP/2K if it were formatted NTFS without having to engage in any chicanery or third party tools.
Including media the entirety of the Wikimedia Commons is something like 420 TB, which would be a challenge even today to load onto a single USB flash drive. If you were going to include the media (images and videos) these would probably have to be downscaled significantly in order to fit on any single portable drive, even current ones.
The text content of Wikipedia would be no problem whatsoever. USB 3.0 didn’t exist yet, though, so at best you’d be chugging along loading everything at 2.0 speed if you had a compliant board and all the correct drivers for it (and were running at least Win2k service pack 4). You’d want an HTML dump, not one of their database dumps, because running the current Wikimedia software and database versions would be a challenge for sure. But a browser from 2002 shouldn’t trip up on any Wikipedia content except perhaps any .webp images (2010), or h264/h265 video content.
You’d have a much bigger problem if OP warped you and your USB drive back to 1998 or worse, 1995.
There are ways you could allow it to work, but straight out of the pack it probably would not. Also consider GPT partitions as a likelihood which weren’t around. You’d also have to flip the bit ahead of time in diskpart to treat it as a hard drive without quick removal for xp to handle it correctly I believe.
Quick removal isn’t a big concern since the drive is read only. You might crash anything with an open file handle, but you don’t have to worry about data corruption.
Straight out of the pack it would probably be factory formatted as ExFAT. If you had the correct patch on a Windows XP machine (KB955704) it would literally be plug and play.
MBR’s volume size limit is 2 T(i)B. You don’t need GPT for these types of storage sizes.
Ah I just tried out a new 64gb stick and you’re correct. I thought it would be EXFAT, but thought they were gpt by default. That appears to be untrue for the majority of drives according to a Google search too.
That’s the impossible part?
If I’m a 10 year old in 2002, first thing I do is go play some Melee.
This is truly the way.
Throw it in the trash, so Biff finds it and ruins the timeline.
Well, my immediate problem is the general lack of memory and personality change (can’t really rely on a 10 year old’s diary.) So… I’m probably going to need some sort of convincing injury to blame.
After that is the hard choice. I could toss the USB and just live. But the nature of the situation suggests I’m supposed to do something. At minimum I’d want the means to investigate the scenario. Running away has merits, but this sounds like a safe, stable situation, and it seems wrong to abandon the family this kid belonged to.
I’ll need a side hustle that works for a 10 year old… maybe trading cards or something along those lines. The money does not matter as much as the hustle and laying the ground work for an early interest in business and money making schemes. After that, retail arbitrage, then a bigger payout. Cashing in a big prize for a discovery or winning the lottery would draw too much attention, but sports betting could work. Then use that to move into financial markets. Moving slowly but setting things up to ramp gains by 18. I know that misses the goal, but doing it earlier depends entirely on the family situation. 20 is probably more doable.
I’d go befriend my brother. I like that dude.
I probably start voicing concerns about the housing situation in 2006 then bet everything shorting it in 08. From there I buy a foreclosed house study electrical engineering and attempt to get a solar panel startup going cooperatively in the hopes of pushing 2014 Obama to focus on full renewables.
I don’t need a lot of money, I need a future.
2002? Damn, too late to warn everyone about 9/11.
Good luck convincing anyone of such an event as a 10yo
Maybe. But is it too late to convince Bush that Iran/Iraq doesn’t have WMDs?
He knew they didn’t.
Yeah, I picked that year for a reason. I was going to go with 2000 at first, but thought that people would feel too inclined to have stopping 9/11 be their first priority, thereby sending the world down a radically different trajectory.
Was thinking similarly regarding the stock market situation. I wanted to accommodate a window for people to game the stock market with prior knowledge, but wanted to leave everything after the 2008 global financial crisis a mystery, so capped its predictability to 2007.
Probably throw it through the wash on accident. First week.
Step 1: become obscenely rich, at least like 300B before 2016.
Step 2: use my wealth to prevent Trump from becoming president(get fucked pedo looser!), Also gonna uncover the whole Trump Epstein thing early and get Epstein to testify in court against Trump if possible and put that asshole in jail for the rest of his miserable life.
Step 3: lobby for the following with the rest of my money:
- ranked choice voting
- public transit
- a proper healthcare system that doesn’t fuck everyone
- make democracy in the us stronger any possible way I can
- accelerate green energy transition
Step 4: retire in a comfortable sized house with some cats.
At least that would be my plan, but I feel like unintended consequences would probably fuck me over.
The years of buildup to you getting 300B before 2016 would alter the course of history though, making all your knowledge useless after you’ve amassed whatever amount changes history. You’d be hard pressed to make financial gains before you’re 18, so you’d amass 300B between 2010 and 2016. At some point early on you’d draw too much attention and change history enough to have no idea what’s coming.
The pedo shit already happened in the 90s, no chance of that changing
So what you’re saying is that I have 14 years to kill him
And it’ll be easy to get near him because you’re a kid
I just spit my coffee. Needed that laugh.
How fucked up is it that I needed your comment to understand the comment of who you replied to? Jesus
I first thought: hmm okay, I guess being a kid get adults guard down lets you freely go around to do things they don’t expect like (hypothetical speaking) a murder
Then I read the comment below, someone said “needed that laugh”, and I was like, huh, what’s so funny?, then… it hit me… it hit me like epstein’s private jet crashing into me
💀
Or just get rich and buy the election to win it yourself.
I’m not insane enough to want to be President
