I’d go back to the 1970s, the dawning of personal computer growth in it’s beginnings. I’d take every single idea and patent from today and collect them all in a multiple series of binders. I would spend weeks holed up in some apartment, jotting notes, re-directing credits to me.
I would be the founding father of hundreds of technological inventions, way before they were even thought up. Flash Drives? My idea. Compact Discs? My idea. SSDs? My idea.
Everything will be my idea and I’ll be biding my time, pitching ideas and profiting off of the patents that I sell and my ideas alone, with little to no work involved. By the turn of the 2000s, I’ll be unfathomably recognized and wealthy.
Probably audition for the Electric Light Orchestra
your mission, should you choose to accept it: 1983. CBS is going to tell you that you only get one disc for your double LP. a deflated Jeff Lynne is just gonna slap A1 on the first side and a few random tracks on the second and be done with it. you cannot let this happen under any circumstances. everything wrong with the world in the last half-century? it all starts with Secret Messages not ending with Hello My Old Friend. if you can fix that, you can save us all
if you can also convince him to move Loser Gone Wild to the b-side it would greatly help the flow and pacing of the album but that did not have nearly the same level of impact on the space-time continuum so we’ll just file that as a “nice to have”
I would audition for their string section, which means that by 1983 I’d already been sacked! Nevertheless, I’d try my best to make the Time double album be released!
time-traveling to save Time, it’s poetic!
I love the contrast between this and OP’s comment.
Dude, you’re overcomplicating things. Just bring a modern PC to 2009 and mine a couple hundred thousand Bitcoin.
That would stand out a lot. Probably better to just bring a couple hundred dollars and buy bitcoin when it was worth practically nothing.
I’d go back in time and give my younger self a sports almanac telling him to place bets with it.
That’s as a dumb an idea a a screen door on a battleship
Alight, alright. Now why don’t you make like a tree and get out of here?
I’d mail my younger self a list of dates when I should invest in various stocks, and when to sell.
I’d go waaaay back and try to find the Ancient Civillizations. Including and l predating the Sumerians. I’d love to see what they were like, how similar to us now, and how they were better.
I’d also like to spend a night in 80s goth scene London.
Also I’d wanna go back and see some BIG TREES.
You’d probably kill those civilizations off entirely with the germs and viruses you bring back.
What is this, Endgame?
Smart Hulk would surely see this as a win.
I like the idea from Hot Tub Time Machine of going back before various things got started and just “create” it myself. KolaBook. Koogle. Kolanaki and the Heartbreakers. 😎
Go Back to pre-civilization times and find a nice tribe to chill with
Go back about 70,000 years ago to Kenya and have sex with stone age hookers for trinkets, knives etc. Fathering several children.
Attention humanity: I have made you in my image.
I think the most good I could do would be to go back to the mid-1700’s colonial America, probably a center of education like Philadelphia, Boston, or New York. Patient a couple of simple but yet-to-exist technologies like the addiator calculator, rifled gun barrel, etc, but especially the optical telegraph. I would try to leverage these devices/systems into myself joining the Continental Congress as a representative. The optical telegraph is 100% technology that was possible, but not in existence and one that I think could have had unforseen relevance to the founding of the United States. Imagine if long distance, nearly instantaneous communication had existed when the Constitution was being written… think about the implications of that for communication privacy protection. Might even be able to convince the founders to include such a system to be part of the constitutionally mandated post office. I think all it would take would be to point out how important communications had been in the War of Independence: “imagine Savannah has been attacked by Spain. It would take several days for a place like Boston to be alerted to that event… with the optical telegraph the whole nation would know within a matter of a few hours.” After all that, I’d probably try to help get germ theory off the ground and write rebuttals to push back on the various scientific racism theories floating about at that time.
