Just something that occurred to me while reading this thread. I thought about asking it there, but it seemed like too much of a hijack. Also, I have a feeling that it’s too stupid a question for GQ or even IMHO, so Mundane Pointless it is, at least for now.
I’ve always thought that if I had a time machine, I would go back and play this week’s winning lottery numbers in advance, and cash in the big jackpot. But it just occurred to me that this probably wouldn’t work. Wouldn’t the lottery be too random? If I go back, won’t random events play out differently? Won’t there be a re-set of the timeline for those events, so to speak, leading to different numbers popping out for the Powerball?
Then again, how random is the lottery? I’m not really sure. Again, sorry if this is a really dumb question. Or maybe it’s super profound. I’m guessing the former though, since that’s usually the case when I can’t tell.
I think if you postulate magic, you can make the rules of the magic anything you like. We can try to construct a hypo “what if we have time travel, but everything else behaves the same”, but that only works until you run into issues like the one you describe. If it’s a plausible fictional technology, you could ask what the most plausible rules are likely to be, but time travel is pretty much magic.
Of course a time traveler could win the lottery. The key is to get just the right information: only the winning numbers, not the idenity of thewinner. If you get the identity of the winner, and that winner is not you, you create a situation in which you are guaranteed not to buy the winning ticket. That could mean that every store you go to ill be out of tickets, but more likely it means you’ll be hit by a bus on your way to the store.
That’s the one that gets you killed without any need. You arouse the suspcion of bookies, who either think you’re cheating somehow or want to know the source of our knowledge. Either way you end up getting kidnapped and flayed.
Lotteries picked by random golf balls buzzing around in a machine might not come out the same, depending on how quantum mechanics really work. Neither might sporting events.
The stock market might be better… not necessarily day-by-day volatility, but there are certainly some situations where company A announces X and then their stocks shoot up, and they certainly had been planning to announce X for quite some time. That should be relatively stable.
Your best bet as far as dependability is concerned is to take back longitude/latitude of previously undiscovered shipwrecks, although I have no idea how you would actually cash in on that.
Another possibility for winning the lottery is to just set up an infinite loop that only breaks when you win the lottery. Then you will, from your own perspective, win the lottery purely by chance on your first try. Again, this depends on how the model of time travel and information works.
This would be a fascinating hypothetical, actually. Suppose that someone accurately predicts the outcome of every single NCAAF, NBA, MLB, NHL, Premier League, NFL, etc. game. Hundreds of games.
People would believe that every single one of these sports teams - every single one - is in on a massive gambling collusion scheme and that it’s all rigged.
What if you went back and quietly deposit small amounts of cash in hundreds of banks and let the interest accumulate for a long time to your present? That won’t affect any events and is unlikely to get you beaten up or killed, or even noticed.
This doesn’t work, because you need to beat inflation, and interest rates don’t do that.
Exploiting the time value of money is tricky. In principle, if you take your cash from today back in time, you’re instantly much richer because everything back then is cheaper in dollar terms. But banknotes are redesigned and replaced periodically, so there’s no banknote that has remained valid for long enough for the intervening inflation to make you rich.
You can’t do it in one bit win, because in sports betting, the amount placed on one team or other changes the odds. And since it’s easy to imagine somebody paying off the athletes to throw a game or cheating in some other way, your win is going to attract attention.
No, to make money gambling through time travel, you play the Powerball or MegaMillions. The process of choosing the winning numbers is transparent, so accusations of cheating are unlikely. You just wait for the drawing to get to a level that work for you, get the winning numbers AND NO MORE INFORMATION THAN THAT, jump back an hour in time and go to a gas station which you know has not been robbed or blown up in that hour.
The more I think about it, the more this strikes me as a good question.
Let’s say you travel back to a specific point in time. When you get there, the complete state of the universe is the same as it was the first “time,” so everything should play out exactly the same from there on, except for changes caused by the following three types of factors:
(1) Actions that you, the time traveler take, and the effects that result (which could be far-reaching and unpredictable—as per chaos theory and the “butterfly effect”). It’s hard to see how you could affect the lottery numbers that came up, though.
(2) If there’s pure randomness, from something like indeterminacy at the quantum level, could this make things turn out differently at a level macro enough to affect things like lottery numbers? I don’t know, but it’s the kind of thing I’d worry about if I were the time traveler.
(3) If there are entities, human or otherwise, who have free will, this would mean they could make different choices this time around, which could have far-reaching effects. And could and would those different choices lead to different lottery numbers coming up? Again, I don’t know, but it’s something to worry about.
Well, hard assets in general approximately track inflation, so again that doesn’t capture the time value of money. Roughly speaking, gold has the same purchasing power today as it had in the past (albeit with massive short term fluctuations, of course).
There are a multitude of ways to use “inside knowledge” about market history to get rich undetectably – take a few thousand dollars worth of gold, go back and quietly buy Microsoft at its IPO.
But absent actual market knowledge, I don’t see any simple way to create wealth using just time.
It might work if you set up a really long-term account and also provide the banker with some useful hints about the future financial market (cf. Mack Reynolds, Compounded interest). It might even pay the electricity bill for running your time machine!
If you’re talkin’ vampires, you’re over thinking it; it’s not time and thoughtful investment that counts, it’s time and mass murder. Hide stuff you’ve stolen from victims really really well, then ‘discover’ it long enough in the future that you apparently could have had no connection to the original murder, and job’s a good 'un.
Combine than with virtually zero living costs (don’t need food, don’t get cold, don’t get sick, don’t have dependants) and you can probably get pretty rich without much effort.
