A time travelers dilemma: where to store vintage documents for hundreds of years

In My Humble Opinion
81

I like this, but see two problems:

  1. What are you using to fund the endowment?

  2. How are you taking control of it in 2025 so you can get the documents?

  3. Ok, 3 problems - who is keeping the foundation active/solvent in the intervening years?

82

  1. Some other time-travel dodge. We really want the documents, for some reason, but we can still do things like go to Deadwood before anyone discovered gold there, and pan a lot of gold ourselves.

  2. Some sort of inheritance scam. Prior to the electronic age with ubiquitous identification systems, it would have been pretty easy to create fake people, and have them inherit ownership of the foundation, and then pass it along. Like what they did in Highlander or Shawshank Redemption.

  3. Lawyers. Hire a law firm you know will be around a long time, and have them do the day-to-day details on maintaining the foundation. Explain how the foundation is based in Farawayastan, and so all business will be conducted by mail. Every few years, arrange for letters to arrive with new instructions. Every generation or two, have them transfer the account to a new law firm, so that no one has enough time to get too suspicious of this mysterious foundation.

83

Solid responses, but per the OP you may not have the funds for multiple trips until you’ve actually done the multiple trips to create your fortune.

84

That’s why Trip #1 is to Deadwood.

Validating old documents might be pretty hard, but gold is always gold. :smiley:

85

In the spirit of the OP (where he’s trying to smooth over provenance issues), where did you tell the investigating authorities you got the gold? Enough to purchase plutonium for 10-20 trips to manage the foundation seems like a significant enough amount that you’re likely to get questions about it?

86

I feel like, if I could do that in the first place, the rest would be easy.

87

Seed money comes from Powerball. Wait for a huge payout that nobody won, write down the winning numbers, and go back a day. You’ll be blowing your life savings on a time travel trip to earlier in the week, but after that money comes in you’re set to call up some Libyan terrorists and negotiate for the plutonium.