sillyThe 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?
April 22 2010, 10:19:19 UTC 7 years ago
For mankind... tricky. 24 hours is not a lot of time to really convince most of history's movers and shakers to alter their policies/paths or accept either entire new bodies of knowledge or predictions about their own future. Photographing everything in the Alexandria Library, as per upthread, might be a good option. And candidly, I would very likely be using part of the investment/betting billions for humanitarian purposes when I returned to 2010, so that could be at least partly a two-fer.
April 23 2010, 06:29:12 UTC 7 years ago
April 23 2010, 11:32:13 UTC 7 years ago
Still, with more than 24 hours, all kinds of things might be accomplished. And even in 24 hours, many things might be possible - IF I could find precisely the right people: those in a position to do something and able to be very rapidly bribed with information.
For example, being able to find someone who worked at the Library, giving them extremely profitable information they could verify in a few weeks/months, then returning to offer them similar information if they arranged to have certain percentages of the Collection all in one place at the one time for cleaning, maintenance, checking, or similar, over a period of months or years. Having five percent of the Library arranged in one or two rooms and toting a multigigapixel camera setup would allow that segment to be photographed in only a few minutes. Blip forward three months or so and capture the next five percent, and so on. Five years down the track, hand over the promised information.
There might even be a few hours left over to do the same for other famous information archives, or at least take two-second terapixel exposures of a couple hundred cities and battles throughout history.
If I wanted to go back and grant modern knowledge to ancient civilisations, on the other hand, I'd have to find some method of massive bandwidth transfer using local materials. If I could use a few minutes initially to do the "impress a local with future knowledge, make them rich and tell them to prepare X for a certain date in the future" routine, could I perhaps rig up some kind of high-speed printer which used local papyrus and seared information into it with a laser array? I might be able to thereby pass stupendous amounts of scientific knowledge on to Egypt or Rome - or at least someone willing to travel there and procure the necessary materials. I'd see if I could brain-dump appropriate language translations, medical knowledge, public health information, physics, chemistry, environmental science, and a pile of mechanical materials data and the rigorous use of the scientific method, along with hints along the lines that widespread public literacy, health, and access to knowledge tended to make a nation strong.
If I could, I'd even rig it so that whoever I had co-opted to supply the papyrus would have enough resources to have the resulting mountain of strongly checksummed data manually copied out and checked multiple times, then shipped to appropriate corners of the globe and recopied onto more durable material at the destination.