Would you also have the 100 years worth of knowledge? Cause if I went back to 1921 with that amount of money and the history knowledge I have…wee doggy!
Anything cool? Huge tracts of still relatively unspoiled land, all the lakefront and//or beachfront you wanted, and the opportunity to help keep it that way?
Way cool. Way, way cooler than any gadget you could imagine.
And think of the unrecognized-at-the-time musicians you could set up a place to play for, and listen to the results of mixing them together, and getting this recorded – crappy recording techniques, sure, but a whole lot better than nothing. And you’d be hearing it live, of course.
Yeah. Do you stand a chance of preventing the Holocaust, or any of the other massive tragedies of the 20th century?
How about of funding medical research and moving accurate knowledge ahead faster?
(Come to think of it, if I’m supposedly arriving there in my current health condition, I’m going to need that in a tearing hurry. I’d have a pretty good chance of at least several functional and reasonably comfortable years even without, though; and of course no absolute guarantee of getting them anyway IRL.)
I strongly disagree with some of you. I think someone who lived 60+ Years from 1960 on would not find satisfaction in 1921 onward. It would be quaint to visit for a while but I bet most of us would hate it eventually.
And one person with the knowledge of future events with no evidence of them except their memory is not enough to change anything.
Well, a person with knowledge of future events and a billion dollars could change a hell of a lot. You don’t have to prove to anyone that Hitler going to turn into a murderous dictator, you just have to give them enough money to make sure this random Austrian nobody meets a bad end in a dark alley. Or buy him a full ride scholarship to the art school of his choice.
It was not a boring time at all. I’m currently reading a book by a man in 1931 reminiscing about the previous two decades in Paris. It sounds wonderfully exciting to me. People have always found ways to have a good time without TVs and other parephernalia. I’d love to visit places before they were so built up and over-developed.
The next war might have happened anyway, even if Hitler died of his wounds in WW1. He wasnt the only one aggrieved by the outcome. Much of Germany thought they got a raw deal from the peace settlement and that they deserved a much better one.
By 1921 the Hitler ship had sailed. You weren’t going to prevent it.
And it’s interesting that some of you claim you wouldn’t be bored with 1921 while posting on the internet. People that were born in 1860 weren’t bored with 1921, but we would be within a short period of time. Even with a billion smackeroos.
And think about necessities such as health care. My friend had a heart attack last year and needed 3 bypasses. Had he been in 1921 he’d be dead.
My overall point was, you are far, far better off being middle class in 2021 than a billionaire in 1921.
I think I’d agree with this.
Okay, while my knowledge of Adolf Hitler’s early career may be incomplete, you understand the principle I’m trying to illustrate, right?
And a billion dollars? A billion 1921 dollars, yet.
I could, if nothing else, change the fate of a whole lot of coastal and river frontage; and a lot of individual people.
I remember a whole lot of years when I wasn’t posting on the internet. In most of them I wasn’t bored. And in the years when I was often bored, it wasn’t because of lack of the internet.
Gershwin, Copland, et al are wildly overrated. They had some genuine talent, but (for the most part) they squandered it in idiotic, atonal ways.
You’re not getting the concept.
During those years the internet (and television, microwave ovens, jet airplanes, etc) existed and some simply chose not to use them. But they were always still there for them to use whenever they wanted.
Compare that to now being trapped in 1921. You know about such devices and conveniences, and used most of them your entire life, but now have no way of using them whether you want to or not. And at least half a century will pass before any of them are even remotely available, even to a billionaire. Hopefully during that time you won’t get sick and need medical technology that doesn’t exist.
I stand by my claim that you are better off being middle class today than being a billionaire 100 years ago.
And, BTW, there was no chicken clause on my scenario. There was no “Pete was right, this sucks” and you get to come back. Once you are there in 1921 you are there to stay. Only way back is to live 100 more years.
Are you kidding? One person in 1920 with knowledge of future events could control the world, starting from scratch.
First of all, you could get paid a fortune as a technical specialist in whatever field you happen to know. You could raise money by investing in the companies just starting out that you know are going to be huge. You could short the 1929 stock market crash. People would pay you a fortue to help them with everything from product design to stock picking.
If you need more money, you could ‘write’ every famous post-1920 song yourself, and become known as the world’s greatest song writer. Invest that money in the stock market, knowing exactly what to pick and what to avoid.
It wouldn’t take long to be the richest person in the world.
Then whatever your own specialized knowledge is, you could leverage it like crazy. An aeronautical engineer from the future in 1920 would become the best aircraft designer ever. A plumber or electrician from the future could help modernize practices and save costs for the firms at the time, earning a bundle. Even if you weren’t technically inclined you could probably make a fortune ‘inventing’ simple labor-saving devices that didn’t exist in 1920.
Then there is sports betting, betting on political races and world events, etc.
The big problem is that you would actually make changes to the world so quickly that it would begin to deviate from ‘your’ future, diluting your ability to predict what’s going to happen. Maybe the fact that you helped design monocoque airplanes in the 1920’s changed the nature of aviation in a way that prevented WWII, and the whole world became radically different after 1945. Or your investmet in some company like IBM kept someone else from investing, and that person’s profits would have changed the world in a different way and now won’t. You won’t know.
But there would always be huge advantage to be gained from knowing any amount of the future.
See the time travel documentary “Back To The Future 2” for this scheme.
No argument there, and indoor plumbing is convenient. But, that was not the question - ‘was it a bad time’ for those who were there? I don’t think it was. It was a time of rapid change and opportunity. Photographs of my parents youth show dirt streets, wood clapboard houses and a horse drawn school bus, but somebody owned a 1927 American Rolls Royce Roadster. They weren’t primitives. They saw the future unfold. Steam trains, electricity, paved roads and flying machines became realities. Things were bad, but they were rapidly getting better.
My father joined the Navy and saw the world. He participated in the creation of Naval air power. He fought in the Aleutians and South Pacific and when it was over he retired to a farm in the poorest county in Oklahoma. The 1930s life style wasn’t all bad and I don’t think he was ever bored…
You’re not getting the concept that different people have different priorites. I’d find it rather a relief, actually.
What I would actually miss would be clothes washing machines, circa at least around 1950. But then, if I had a billion dollars, I could hire people to wash my clothes (which was what a lot of people actually did at the time, including many who had a whole lot less than a billion dollars.)
It would be moderately annoying to have to wear clothes I’m not used to wearing. But I suspect a person with a billion dollars, even if female, could get away with at least something I’d find comfortable.
It might suck. But if it sucked, it wouldn’t be for the reasons you’re giving. You, personally, might be miserable without the internet, and television, microwave ovens, and jet airplanes; but not everyone would be.
You want to say it would be awful if you were black, if you were poor, if you were trans and couldn’t even find a name for it, if you were diabetic? Fine. Awful because there wasn’t any internet? Get real. That’s trivial. (The overall effect of the internet on modern society isn’t trivial, but any individual person’s access to it is.) Awful because you think the music was all bad? That one isn’t even trivial, it’s just wrong.
And plenty of people might well think that what you could do with a billion dollars in 1921, even if you got only a few years to do it, would be well worth trading a few extra years for. Nobody’s going to live forever anyway; especially if their health’s already bad. Even if all I could have done was to get my great grandmother out of Russia so my grandmother could see her again, and maybe a handful of who should have been my relatives out of Poland in time? Worth it.
It wold suck for a zillion different reasons. I just gave a few. And it would double extra super suck for someone who wasn’t white, christian, straight, etc even with a billon dollars.
I don’t think some of you appreciate the differences between today and 100 years ago. And I think it’s obnoxious that you insist you could do without modern conveniences and technologies for 50+ years while currently employing such things every minute of every day. You might be able to do it initially, but quite soon you would hate the situation. Have fun trying to explain 21st century medicine and technologies to even the smartest folks in 1922. Even with your billion bucks.
At this point this thread is showing me very much the downsides of this particular bit of technology; which I’ve already done without for 50+ years of my life. Admittedly, even then I ran into people who claimed with no evidence to know better what’s in my head than I do. Nothing new about that. And also clearly no sense in my continuing in this discussion.
More mitigation than huge changes. With that amount of money, and the historical knowledge I have, I can do quite a lot mitigation.
There are books, very nice houses, and trains and ships for travel. I would not be bored, it would be a much slower time, but there would be much to do.
Until you have a medical issue in 1931 and die from something that would have been treated as outpatient today. Just that issue alone would prevent me from taking the deal.