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.
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
Autopsy innit
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.
Ask why. Then probably work on subversion… because it is seriously doubtful they’ve come back for any good reason.
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.
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.
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
Removed by mod
3 hours from whose perspective? Time limits are rather complicated when you have time travel.
Yours.
(assuming the time traveller cooperates)
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 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.
##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 would ask them to bring me newspapers or hard drive with even more news/data on sports and stocks. Is there ever any other answer?
I would also ask them to keep to their personal bubble because they likely have germs I have no immunity to and vice versa. We don’t need covid-2074 decimating the present day.
In a non capitalistic future there would be other answers…
In which case the newspapers brought back would tell me that and I could strategize for what sort of non-capitalist future it is.
Headed towards a Star Trekkian post-scarcity economy? Or a post-doomsday device anarchist hellscape? Anything in between? I would still like to know.
Ask if Half-Life 3 is available
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.
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.
