It probably wasn’t literally one person but you could find King Tut’s tomb before Howard Carter.
This was the premise behind the story “A Sound of Thunder.” But this assumes a changeable past (and therefore a changeable future), and there is hardly consensus on that. However, you have to make so many fanciful assumptions just to describe travel to the past in the first place that I guess you can stipulate any rules you want.
Buy Ameythest.
Go back to 1600s, (ameythest more valuable than diamond) swap ameythest for chamber pots.
Come back to present times
Profit
This is what always blows my mind that people don’t consider when they think about changing the past. Look at something as relatively simple as someone being born. There are how many *millions *of sperm in every ejaculation? And just one of those fertilized the egg to make the exact person that was born roughly nine months later. So if things are even a teensy-tiny bit different, the odds are probably pretty overwhelming that someone completely different will be conceived instead.
Yes, but something different didn’t happen, what happened happened. That is one view of time travel. Time travel that can create paradoxes must be impossible, because reality can’t have a logical contradiction. So traveling back in time to kill your father before you were conceived must violate laws of physics. (Discussed in the recent book “From Eternity to Here” by Sean Carroll.)
You could go back in a stepwise fashion, exchanging your currency for something older at each step along the way. That is, it’s not necessary to stock up on 1930 dollars for a trip to 1930. Just scrounge up currency from, say, five years ago, and then stop in 2005 to exchange for older currency. Repeat until you reach your destination. At each stop, buy some used clothes from consignment shops along the way, and your clothes wouldn’t look out of place either.
Right, which is why I specified a form of time travel that allowed you to influence the past. To quote, with emphasis, “This is what always blows my mind that people don’t consider when they think about changing the past.”
Use a modern color printer and print up a few sheets of whatever paper currency you need.
It’s highly unlikely you would get caught, especially if you only needed a few bucks to gamble with, and didn’t make like 1 million dollar bills.
Without modern technology, a typical color print counterfeit would be nearly impossible to detect more than 80 or 100 years ago.
That is an excellent example and one that I have thought of as well.
Let’s try an incredibly simple exercise to illustrate this point. Promise me that you won’t read the spoiler until you have done this in even the most basic way because it is that easy. This is for the males that expect to have children in the future.
Cross your legs or just casually squeeze your thighs together. Do you know what just happened?
If you followed my directions at all, I just changed who your future kids will be and all of world history from this point forward just by typing this on a message board. Scary. That is the way chaos theory works.
Even if the chaos factor is ignored, it would not be possible to parley a couple dollars into millions betting on horses in a couple months, you would have to grind it out with moderately large bets over a period of time. There are two types of betting, fixed-odds and parimutuel.
Fixed-odds betting was the earlier form where a bookie would determine the odds at the time of your bet with him. He would use his accumen to determine the odds offered at first, then adjust them as the bets come in. Example: He figures a horse has a one-in-twenty-five chance of winning a race. He might offer twenty to one odds on early bets. Then, say the favorite drops out due to lameness. Now your horse has a one in fifteen chance of winning and people start clamoring to bet on him. Well, their bets are going to be at say, twelve to one, not twenty.
So, you’ve bet and rebet your original investment up to $100,000 and swagger in with to lay it on that 40 to 1 shot you know is going to win today. You’re not going to get that bet down at 40 to 1. If he covers it at all, the bookie would offer it at 10 or even 5 to 1, still a profit but not so much as you think. And that doesn’t factor in answering pointed questions from large men with no necks.
With parimutuel betting, the situation is even worse. Introduced in North America about 1926, in parimutuel betting the odds are determined by the bettors themselves. All of the money is put into a pool, the track rakes off a percentage – typically around 20% – and the remaining money divided among the winning ticket holders. A popular horse will have a lot more people holding his number so everyone gets not so much. Those lucky few who believed in an unpopular horse divvy their prize into far fewer, far larger shares.
So, you show up at a track where your 40:1 shot is running. There’s $100,000 in the win pool and only $2,000 of it is on your guy. Your drop your $100,000 and walk away with a fistful of $100 tickets. Now there’s $200,000 in the pool, $102,000 on your guy. He wins, and the $160,000 left after the rakeoff is parceled out, roughly $156,800 to you and $3,200 to those who held the other tickets. Not bad for an afternoon’s work but hardly the $4,000,000 you were figuring on.
I think I like the peppercorn idea the best.
Do you have to put any money up front to sell short? You could just borrow some stock you know will tank, sell it while it’s still hot, and then buy it back cheap to repay the loan.
Yes, you do, back in those days you might have got away with 10% on good credit.
I’ve heard of buying stock on margin, but I thought that was what you did when you expected the stock to go up, not down.