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.
Ask if Half-Life 3 is available
Nope.
K, thanks. Bye.
With a three hour awkward silence first
Wouldn’t want to waste their time with small talk. They came a long way.
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.
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.
And thats if rich and powerful people /organisations didn’t catch on that one individual was costing them money/business ventures and have that individual killed.
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.
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.
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.
When we go back in time, we worry about changing the past. But we expect this person from the future to tell us all the stuff so we can fuck around with (for them) things that already happened.
Sports almanac, any kind of history of the stock market, and the history of Power Ball and Mega Millions.
Ok you have 2 hours 40 minutes left. What else?
Dang!! Good point.
Then I think similar to another post. Catch up on huge world events.
I would love to try and direct the future in a better direction but doing so would mess with time. So maybe just do the best I can for my family and friends.
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.
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.
They probably didn’t travel back in time to sit around and answer questions with some random person, so I think you’re on the right track. If I traveled back in time, it’d be to sightsee, or get rich, or something like that. They would too.
Guy from 50 years in the future: “what’s tea?”
Ask why. Then probably work on subversion… because it is seriously doubtful they’ve come back for any good reason.
Depends. How big are boobs?
I just want to know if artificial general intelligence is real, and when that’ll happen.
Oh, and go back to 2011 and buy me some bitcoin please.
You don’t need three hours. Just read their demeanor to see if the future is going to be shit or not.
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.
