Seanan McGuire (seanan_mcguire) wrote,
Seanan McGuire
seanan_mcguire
  • Mood: silly
  • Music: Glee, "Like a Virgin."

Taking the time machine for a spin.

Pop quiz time! Aliens (or mad scientists, or whatever) appear before you with a time machine, and tell you that you get to make two trips backward: one for your own personal gain, and one for the good of all mankind. Each trip can consist of several "hops" (so you can start by traveling back ten years, and then move forward two years, etc.), but can only include one backward hop, and can last for no more than twenty-four hours.

The rules:

1) You can bring anything you want to the past, but you can't leave anything behind. So you can't bring back the polio vaccine and start treating people. It wouldn't work.

2) You can't take anything forward with you, either, except for information. So you could, say, travel back with a copy of a book and a pen, and have the book signed with that pen. Or you could bring a camera and take pictures. But all things must be somehow made from materials you carried with you.

3) You can't get sick in the past, but you could be eaten by a T-Rex. No one native to the time periods you're visiting will notice anything odd about you.

For my personal use, I would pack a bunch of digital cameras, Flip video recorders, and a gene sequencer, and hop back to Messina in 1347. I would then document the Black Death in ten year jumps, with lots of photographs and recordings of people trying to breathe as they fully expressed the virus. And then, when I got back to the present, I would drive the CDC insane...but I would finally know for sure.

For the good of all mankind, I would hop back to the pre-tape losses BBC archives with a tape-to-DVD portable recording rig (and a technician), and get copies of all the missing Doctor Who serials. Upon returning to the present day, I would probably also get knighted.

So what's your personal use? And what's your use for the good of all mankind?
Tags: party games, silliness
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  • 120 comments

markbernstein

April 22 2010, 03:03:09 UTC 7 years ago

Personal is fairly easy. I'd gather about $10k in U.S. currency from 1967 or earlier. Jump back to 1967, and use the money to set up a trust for my 11 year old self, investing the money in the stock of a company called Berkshire Hathaway. I'd also try to find a way to meet with and talk to my 11 year old self, and give him a couple of very specific and personal pieces of advice to help him deal with the hardest of the years ahead. Plus, I'd let him know about the trust.

(Berkshire Hathaway? That's Warren Buffet's holding company. If I remember correctly, $10K invested in 1967 would be worth about $80M today.)

Good of the world is a complex notion, and I don't know enough about history to have a whole lot of faith in my judgement. Maybe I'd go back to Dallas in 1963, and phone in some sort of fake threat to keep JFK out of that motorcade. Or, following your example, I'd take back a small but really high quality audio recording device, and hit New Orleans a few times in the 1925 to 1930 time frame to get as much as I could of Louis Armstrong in live performance.

oreouk

April 22 2010, 08:53:20 UTC 7 years ago

I thought of that, but you're not allowed to leave anything behind in the past that you brought from the future, so you would need to find someone in the past that you could convince to do this and share the proceeds. Or do that thing where you go back with a small amount of money just before some sporting event that had a really odd result, bet, collect the money and then invest it - it wouldn't matter if your original money couldn't stay behind because the money you won could remain.

markbernstein

April 22 2010, 12:31:34 UTC 7 years ago

Ah, thanks, I missed that rule. Those are good ways to deal with it, though.