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.
I would ask
how did we survive climate change?
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.
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.
deleted by creator
In a non capitalistic future there would be other answers…
.
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.
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.
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
Why the torture?
I wonder how light-handed you’ll have to be to keep that market, election, and war info accurate.
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.
##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?”
“…”
Ask if Half-Life 3 is available
