Forgot to add the link… here it is for the sake of future time travellers.
I’m pretty sure that was Heinlein’s personal opinion about the gold standard.
This thread reminds me of the story John Jones’ Dollar. No doubt modern readers will be amused by the fact that in 1000 years, the entire net worth of the Solar System will be only 6 trillion dollars…
Sure you could make some money, but how much did it cost to build the time machine? Imagine how much you’d have to sink into R&D on that thing.
You build the machine with some of the proceeds from the investment that you made a hundred years ago.
(This is why I hate it when Sci Fi authors get into time travel - there is no way around the paradoxes.)
Ah, you just go in circles, buy that $50, go back and exchange it for an ounce an a half of gold, come back, sell the gold, go back, buy more gold, come back, sell it to buy bills… The more bills you pass back then, the more available in the used market today - Until the feds in 1910 notice too many copies of the same bill with the same serial number and even the same rips and scuffs in exactly the same place… There’s a story in there somewhere.
What do we have a lot of, that’s valuable in 1910? Sell it all back there, take the money and buy gold. stop running cash back and waiting for it to flood the market today.
It’s even easier to make money than that. Go out and buy some gold bouillon, as much as you can afford to buy. Set it down on a table for a few days. Then travel back in time over and over again in 10 second increments, grabbing the gold each time you go back. Infinite gold!
But then if you grab the gold, it won’t be there. (Depends how you think time travel works…)
However, if you buy old bills and gold, and sell them elsewhen, all you are doing is the same as any merchant; only instead of taking them from one place to another to sell, you are taking them from one time to another, for a darned good markup.
You could agree to meet yourself at a specific time, over and over, until you had a gang of 20 identical outlaws to rob the stagecoach. Just hope that one of you doesn’t get shot… Or start panning for gold in California a few months before the rush shows up…
What was that cartoon about the guards at the Feuhrer’s HQ who were getting tired and suspicious of whythey shot so many time travellers were trying to kill their beloved leader?
SF has already done that one, too. See “Compound Interest” by Mack Reynolds. It doesn’t appear to be in Project Gutenberg (no doubt still under copyright), but here’s a summary:
The story starts with the beginning of the annual meeting of the board of directors of a corporation. This is to be an unusual meeting, so first they review the corporation history. It seems the corporation began when a man approached a banker in Renaissance Italy with a bag of gold he wished to invest. The investor gives some general guidelines as to how the investment is to be done, but leaves the details to the banker. He then disappears for N (I forget what N is, but I think 50) years.
And so it goes. Every N years, the Mysterious Investor shows up to review the books and give more advice. The advice is usually that country A will be a good place to invest until year X and country B will start to be a good investment locale begining in year Y. That kind of thing. It turns out that all the advice is accurate and with that kind of help, the corporation flourishes and is now one of the richest companies in the world.
OK, it’s now been N years since the last appearance of the Mysterious Investor, so they’re expecting him to show up at this board meeting.
In the meantime, they’ve asked Professor So-and-so about the possibility of time travel being feasible, since they figure the Mysterious Investor is a time traveller. The Professor shows up and it turns out he’s the Investor. He’s here to start the liquidation of the company, since he’s going to need lots of funds to perform the experiments to develop a time travel machine…
There’s also the H.G. Wells novel “The Sleeper Wakes”. (I bet you were thinking of a different one). SOme guy goes into a coma, and wakes up a hundred years later to find that his estate, the foundation dedicated to looking after him and researching his condition now, through the power of compund interest, owns the world.
The story also contains some fantastic and unbelievable elements, like flying machines that dogfight in mid-air and drop bombs on cities below… So it wasn’t a big hit.
Minor nitpick to my own post above: the actual title to the Mack Reynolds story is “Compounded Interest”, just in case anyone is trying to google it.
Bif beat him to it.
Yeah, Gold was a bad choice, as it has outperformed inflation (which is why folks figure it’s a good thing to buy).
Take something like silver: I can’t speak directly to 1911, but I have a 1922 $1 silver coin that weighs an ounce, and I believe they were the same size for quite a while before that. That coin is worth $32 today, so buying 21 of them would cost me $672, which is way less than the $1700 that an ounce of gold would cost.
Take that back in time, put it in the same bank you were putting your gold in, collect the same $1060 you said, but where you have a net loss of $640 working with gold, I have a profit of $388, or more than 50%.
And as someone has since pointed out, buying antique paper currency is even cheaper.
Yes, there is, if you assume multiple universes: You go back in time, and the time you come back to is no longer the past of the time you left; it’s the past of an alternate [del]1985[/del] future you are helping create by your actions. Back to the Future II actually got this close enough to right to be used as a reference here.
That’s also why betting on races or stocks is a bad idea: Alternate histories are not bound by the rules of the original, so once you start messing with them a lot of your foreknowledge becomes knowledge of a future that is no longer going to happen.
Rather than deal with actions that obviously didn’t happen in my own remembered timeline to get rich, my plan would be to go back in time and either watch or plant a tracking device on significant presently lost treasures.
If the lost gold of the Aztecs or whatever has still never been found, me finding it in the present, after the invention of a time machine, shouldn’t alter anything up to that point.
Of course, you might discover some other time traveler there, if the reason it hasn’t been found is another time traveler beat you to it.
And don’t step on any butterflies.
Yeah, but alternate universes aren’t time travel.
There could be a parallel universe out there that is exactly like ours, but the big bang happened 100 years later, so if you traveled to that universe it would be 1911.
And if you went there and exterminated your ancestors, that would simply prevent that universe’s version of you from being born, but wouldn’t create a paradox.
But time travel is different from parallel dimensions. Time travel is, by definition, travel into the past (or future) of your own universe.
And yeah, it is very rare for fiction to handle that well.
I once did a chart to help me track the various universe in the Back to the Future movies, and it left me with several questions, the most memorable of which was: What happened to the Marty McFly who grew up with a successful father? I mean, he got in the Delorean, he took it up to 88mph, the time machine activated, and he went … where? Does he go back and mess with his parent’s first meeting and wind up living with the family Marty had at the start of the movie? Does he go into another universe not presented in any of the films? Whatever it is, isn’t it kinda sad?
I still say both Martys faded into each other. The only problem with that theory is that it should have thus happened at the dance, but Marty is surprised by his life when he gets back.
Depends on how time travel is handled in the story.
Again, depends how you think time travel works - a lot of stories (like Back to the Future) seem to be based on the simple premise that you can change the past, but it changes the future; which changes anything that is not sitting in the past. So a person going back to past would stay the way they are, even though the future had changed; anything in the present does not change even if it is from the future.
Of course, BttF plays games with this, plays loose with its paradigm - McFly fades from a photo as the probability of him being there diminishes, but whe his “sucessful dad” future is confirmed, he still has “office drudge loser dad” family memories. (which should make for some interesting times; wouldn’t the rich kid be dating the hot blonde from his school instead? At the very least he won’t have a clue what their first date was, since it wouldn’t be at the Burger drive-in this time…) Should Hollywood writers be called out on inconsistency or not?
A cute variation on this is Time Cop, where old-from-the-future-bad-guy watches Jean Claude van Dam pound on young-and-now same bad guy. JCvD lands a scarring blow, then the old scar suddenly appears on old-guy’s cheek.
Another variation, though of limited entertainment value, is “you can’t change the past”. the plotline goes something like “Time traveller walks into a door and so knocks himself out, wakes up too late to stop Lincoln’s assasination”.