# If you could travel to the year 1820, how could you prove you were from the future? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [June 2, 2020, 4:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-you-could-travel-to-the-year-1820-how-could-you-prove-you-were-from-the-future/854931 "2020-06-02T16:03:34Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 10
**Author:** ![iamthewalrus\_3](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/258eb7/32.png) [@iamthewalrus\_3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/iamthewalrus_3)\ **Post date:** [June 7, 2020, 9:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-you-could-travel-to-the-year-1820-how-could-you-prove-you-were-from-the-future/854931/181 "2020-06-07T21:46:19Z")
> [@Pantastic](#): > > And I will note that you’ve neglected to answer the 1980 software developer piece again. What software are you going to write with your vague knowledge of what happened later on, familiarity with C (but unfamiliarity with the hardware of the time) that it going to make you make you a lot of money or revolutionize the industry? Did you mean to ask **XT** this question, or did you get the two of us confused? I answered with a few specifics in post #171. What kind of familiarity with the hardware do you think I’d need that I couldn’t learn by reading about it in the 1980s? Obviously knowledge of the past is relevant to success in the past. But knowledge of the past was _available_ in the past! You seem to be _vastly_ overestimating how important it is. “You’d never be able to catch up to the guys who were hand-coding assembly on a PDP-11 with just the distilled knowledge of decades of software development best practices and experience using hundreds of commercially successful pieces of software” is an absolutely _bonkers_ take in my opinion. Again, I don’t think this argument is a very strong one in favor of my claim that I would also be successful in 1820. “Take someone with specific skills in an industry and send them back a few decades when that industry exists” is the most softball version of this hypothetical I can think of. But if you still think it wouldn’t matter, man, I don’t know. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [June 7, 2020, 10:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-you-could-travel-to-the-year-1820-how-could-you-prove-you-were-from-the-future/854931/182 "2020-06-07T22:20:22Z")
Agreed; any halfway competent computer programmer should thrive in 1980. ---
**Author:** ![UltraVires](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/ecccb3/32.png) [@UltraVires](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/UltraVires)\ **Post date:** [June 7, 2020, 10:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-you-could-travel-to-the-year-1820-how-could-you-prove-you-were-from-the-future/854931/183 "2020-06-07T22:57:43Z")
> [@RivkahChaya](#): > > RE: Reagan getting shot-- you might get yourself arrested as a conspirator. Especially if you spelled Hinckley right. Point taken, but I think that pushes against the hypo a bit. I mean the butterfly effect could cause all sorts of issues. It’s amazing how many millions of small things had to happen exactly the way they did for you and me to be right where we are at this exact moment. Even a time traveler’s presence could massively change future events. I might meet someone, fall in love, she doesn’t take the job in the next state over, and the job is taken by a guy who left his old job which is filled by someone else who didn’t take the path they originally took, etc. It’s really fascinating. I would bet that if a person was transported in time back to 1980, walked into a 7-11, bought a coke, walked out and was transported back to 2020 you would see thousands if not more people who were not born, were still alive, businesses existing that didn’t, some that did which no longer exist, etc. ---
**Author:** ![eschereal](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/eschereal/32/18939_2.png) [@eschereal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/eschereal)\ **Post date:** [June 7, 2020, 11:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-you-could-travel-to-the-year-1820-how-could-you-prove-you-were-from-the-future/854931/184 "2020-06-07T23:22:07Z")
> [@UltraVires](#): > > … I mean the butterfly effect could cause all sorts of issues… The butterfly effect is utter bullshit. ---
**Author:** ![UltraVires](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/ecccb3/32.png) [@UltraVires](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/UltraVires)\ **Post date:** [June 7, 2020, 11:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-you-could-travel-to-the-year-1820-how-could-you-prove-you-were-from-the-future/854931/185 "2020-06-07T23:22:52Z")
> [@eschereal](#): > > The butterfly effect is utter bullshit. How do you know? 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![eschereal](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/eschereal/32/18939_2.png) [@eschereal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/eschereal)\ **Post date:** [June 7, 2020, 11:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-you-could-travel-to-the-year-1820-how-could-you-prove-you-were-from-the-future/854931/186 "2020-06-07T23:24:18Z")
> [@UltraVires](#): > > How do you know? 🙂 I met this guy who lived in a blue box … ---
**Author:** ![Tusculan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/ecd19e/32.png) [@Tusculan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tusculan)\ **Post date:** [June 8, 2020, 6:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-you-could-travel-to-the-year-1820-how-could-you-prove-you-were-from-the-future/854931/187 "2020-06-08T06:45:14Z")
> [@](#): > > What kind of familiarity with the hardware do you think I’d need that I couldn’t learn by reading about it in the 1980s? > > Obviously knowledge of the past is relevant to success in the past. But knowledge of the past was _available_ in the past! You seem to be _vastly_ overestimating how important it is. > > “You’d never be able to catch up to the guys who were hand-coding assembly on a PDP-11 with just the distilled knowledge of decades of software development best practices and experience using hundreds of commercially successful pieces of software” is an absolutely _bonkers_ take in my opinion. Fully in agreement. I lived through the eighties witnessing and doing programming. Most programmers were (and are!) self-taught in practice, and assembly PDP-11 programmers never became rich. Rather you needed to get in with the up and coming personal computers and games, at the right moment. Software in the eighties was the one industry where you could enter without any qualifications and get rich as a solitary individual with mostly just your wits. (only you’d need to link up with a marketing genius like Gates or Jobs). Knowing about the development curve would be a great benefit, as you could thereby get in or out the right field at the right time, and could avoid some mistakes (game computers in the early eighties and the crash around 83, IBM PC mid eighties, rise of spreadsheets and Wordperfect, move to windows end of the eignthies). You coult try to become a Microsoft employee. But of course this is far removed from the OP… ---
**Author:** ![Quercus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/q/7ab992/32.png) [@Quercus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Quercus)\ **Post date:** [June 8, 2020, 12:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-you-could-travel-to-the-year-1820-how-could-you-prove-you-were-from-the-future/854931/188 "2020-06-08T12:08:18Z")
> [@UltraVires](#): > > … shortly after his inauguration he would be shot by a man named John Hinckley because he thought it would make actress Jodie Foster fall in love with him. Reagan would live, but his press secretary James Brady would be seriously wounded by a gunshot to the head. That’s all 1981 of course. I wonder if that’s making \*\*pantastic’s \*\*point for them. ---
**Author:** ![iamthewalrus\_3](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/258eb7/32.png) [@iamthewalrus\_3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/iamthewalrus_3)\ **Post date:** [June 8, 2020, 4:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-you-could-travel-to-the-year-1820-how-could-you-prove-you-were-from-the-future/854931/189 "2020-06-08T16:37:30Z")
> [@Tusculan](#): > > But of course this is far removed from the OP… Absolutely, and I think the takeaway is that **Pantastic** and I aren’t going to see eye to eye, since we don’t even agree on the variant that’s stacked in favor of my argument. So it goes. ---
**Author:** ![Pantastic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/3bc359/32.png) [@Pantastic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pantastic)\ **Post date:** [June 9, 2020, 3:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-you-could-travel-to-the-year-1820-how-could-you-prove-you-were-from-the-future/854931/190 "2020-06-09T15:02:59Z")
> [@Quercus](#): > > That’s all 1981 of course. I wonder if that’s making \*\*pantastic’s \*\*point for them. It does highlight the difficulty in picking a specific year; even when someone remembers a bunch of specific names and dates, they might not be convenient for when you land. If you’re trying to convince someone that you’re from the future to get yourself established in the time line, the ‘1980’ scenario is going to require you to get along for a year and a half before the predictions to play out and the person might believe you’re from the future, it’s not something you can quickly do as part of your ‘getting established’ time. Firm, detailed predictions (not ‘unrest in the middle east’ style stuff) are one thing that could really convince people you’ve got future knowledge, but for anyone who isn’t a historian or enthusiast of the time period, they’re going to be difficult to do any may take a good while to pan out. In all of the scenarios, surviving free for long enough for predictions to play out can be difficult. In older times, you might just come off as a weirdo who can’t speak the language, and end up starving or in an asylum even if you don’t talk about time travel. In the 1980 scenario, although your speech should be fine you’re going to be a person with one set of borrowed clothes, no money, no ID, no SSN, no credit history, no references, no education history, and no family to fall back on - or worse, you’re going to be some jackass who’s impersonating the ‘this timeline’ you. A way to immediately convince people ‘I’m from the future’ would certainly be safer. ---
**Author:** ![Pantastic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/3bc359/32.png) [@Pantastic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pantastic)\ **Post date:** [June 9, 2020, 4:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-you-could-travel-to-the-year-1820-how-could-you-prove-you-were-from-the-future/854931/191 "2020-06-09T16:56:56Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > Agreed; any halfway competent computer programmer should thrive in 1980. What exactly is ‘thrive’ here? Once the programmer gets past the initial difficulty, does it qualify as ‘thrive’ if he goes off and gets a regular job and leads a successful life? Or if he goes to work at a company he knows will make it big later, like Microsoft, takes stock options and ends up rich? Because I’d consider either of those ‘thriving’ in the normal sense, but I don’t consider either of them to be using future knowledge to invent things decades before they came about, or to be heading a startup tech/software/etc company and being 20 times more likely to succeed than a savvy person from the same time frame. THAT is the piece that’s in dispute, not something like ‘could a programmer do well for himself dropped back in time’, and I don’t see how you’re actually going to do that without either explicit preparation and research or happening to be an enthusiast or historian for the time period (which is specifically disallowed in the hypothetical). - There’s going to be an initial roadblock of having no money, no ID, no SSN, no birth certificate, no family, no work history, no education history, no credit history, or anything else to establish him as a valid person (Or worse, it looks like he clumsily copied it all from an already existing person, namely his younger self, so he appears to be a dumb con artist). I’m presuming the programmer sorts that part of the story out fairly easily even though it could realistically be quite hard, as it’s not really what we’re looking at here. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [June 9, 2020, 5:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-you-could-travel-to-the-year-1820-how-could-you-prove-you-were-from-the-future/854931/192 "2020-06-09T17:11:27Z")
I mean that the programmer could successfully implement software and techniques that were a decade or more ahead of their time. They’d have the knowledge to do that for multiple decades ahead of their time, but then you start running into hardware limitations. There would be some significant obstacles: For instance, the time-travelling programmer would need to learn to be a lot more frugal with storage, both ephemeral and persistent. That’s why it would still need to be a halfway-competent programmer. But it could be done. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [June 9, 2020, 5:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-you-could-travel-to-the-year-1820-how-could-you-prove-you-were-from-the-future/854931/193 "2020-06-09T17:11:42Z")
I mean that the programmer could successfully implement software and techniques that were a decade or more ahead of their time. They’d have the knowledge to do that for multiple decades ahead of their time, but then you start running into hardware limitations. There would be some significant obstacles: For instance, the time-travelling programmer would need to learn to be a lot more frugal with storage, both ephemeral and persistent. That’s why it would still need to be a halfway-competent programmer. But it could be done. ---
**Author:** ![Thudlow\_Boink](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thudlow_boink/32/320_2.png) [@Thudlow\_Boink](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Thudlow_Boink)\ **Post date:** [June 9, 2020, 5:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-you-could-travel-to-the-year-1820-how-could-you-prove-you-were-from-the-future/854931/194 "2020-06-09T17:32:11Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > I mean that the programmer could successfully implement software and techniques that were a decade or more ahead of their time. Such as…? ---
**Author:** ![Pantastic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/3bc359/32.png) [@Pantastic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pantastic)\ **Post date:** [June 9, 2020, 5:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-you-could-travel-to-the-year-1820-how-could-you-prove-you-were-from-the-future/854931/195 "2020-06-09T17:52:37Z")
Hmmm… I didn’t see this one when I wrote my last round of responses, and didn’t spot it when I refreshed: > [@iamthewalrus\_3](#): > > It boggles the mind. The first thing off the top of my head is that I can write a modern hypertext implementation close to a decade before most people had seen one. I can also write clones of the last four decades of hit computer games and personal productivity software. I can write a semi-decent description of the ARM instruction set. This is exactly why I asked for specifics. The first hypertext implementation was written in 1967 and there was a scholarly community using a successor to it in 1976, four years before the travel date. The fact that ‘most people hadn’t seen one’ doesn’t change that the technology existed two decades before you’re going to invent it ‘early’. And writing a modern implementation is likely going to not run well on the much weaker hardware available at the time, so I don’t see anything amazing coming from that. I don’t see how you expect to make money trying to clone productivity software - lots of people were already doing that, and I don’t see how knowing the features that get added in to productivity software in the future would help much back in the day. If you’re going for feature-heavy, you’re going WAY outside of what the hardware available could handle, and the core stuff (basic word processing, spreadsheets, and the like) was already there. And if you’re trying for narrow improvement, I don’t believe that someone from now is going to know enough about specifically what people in the 1980s wanted to make narrow improvements. Bear in mind that the core of these goes back well before 1980 - there were early spreadsheet-like programs in the 60s, and recognizably modern spreadsheets in the 1970s. Stand alone word processors were around since the 1960s, and word processing programs on computers also by the late 1970s. Just trying to do ‘a spreadsheet’ isn’t new. I also dispute the claim that you have enough information in your head to just write clones of four decades worth of games. I’m sure you’ve got a general description of successful games memorized, and maybe remember the gameplay of a few specific games, but you don’t have everything to clone a game. And successful games are mostly about the specific implementation (or licensing and heavy ad campaigns), not the broad idea - for every blockbuster title there are a ton that fail. Also, you’re definitely not doing this on your own long - in the 80s a lot of games were still one-man operations, or close to it. But once you move into the 90s and especially 2000s, you are moving way outside of the territory where one person slaps out a major title - Doom (1993) had a dozen people working on it, Civilization (1991) a similar amount, and World Of Warcraft (2004) had more than a hundred people (Credits list 566 people). Once you’re talking about pulling in dozens or hundreds of people to create engines, graphics, gameplay, text, and so on, you’re not really getting a competitive advantage over the people already out there doing it. And I don’t think you’re going to make any of these significantly earlier - home PCs didn’t have the processing to run something as complex as Civilization in 1981, or graphics capability to run a Doom-like game in 1983, and in 1993 there wasn’t the network infrastructure to support a large graphical MMO like WOW. I have no idea how a semi-decent description of the ARM instruction set does much. From what I can tell, the basic idea of ARM was around in 1980, and the hard part is not the ‘semi-decent description’ but the actual implementation in hardware and software, and selling that implementation to other people. This all just seems like a lot of wishful thinking. > [@](#): > > I’m aware enough of as yet undiscovered talent in the industry I could align with. Page, Brin, Ive, Cook, Carmack, Zuckerberg. Knowing just _one_ of those names and where they went to college is a well-defined path to wealth and influence. “Getting in with someone you know will be successful to ride their coattails” is a valid way to make money. But it’s not using your knowledge of future tech to implement that tech early and make yourself rich doing so, so it’s not what I was talking about. And it really seems to support my claim that I’d put my money on the person from the ‘correct’ time leading a company rather than yours that you’d expect the person from the future running a company to have a 20:1 advantage. > [@](#): > > Also I’d be curious what you think about my cite on the vacuum pump. Looks to me like a vacuum pump sufficient to manufacture Edison bulbs was absolutely within the tech of the 1820s. I think the fact that lots of really smart scientists and inventors wanted better vacuum pumps and spent money and time trying to make better vacuums for a variety of reasons but weren’t able to speaks for itself. And the brazen confidence without facts to back it up is a big reason why my money is against the ‘future inventor’ - I expect the people trying to make it big by being back in time to be similarly overconfident in their abilities and dismissive of the intellect of people at the time. > [@](#): > > I mean, doesn’t the fact that of the maybe 1 dozen or so ideas I threw out with a few minutes thought, one looks like a pretty good path to major success support my theory really well? In ten minutes I thought of something I could do decades early? How many feasible ideas could I come up with given a few days or months of thought? No. You came up with a dozen ideas with a few minutes thought, and only one of them was actually a useful way to do something early with future knowledge. If you were trying to convince people of your future cred (like the thread title), you’d be batting 1/12 and would seem like someone just tossing ideas around until one stuck. If you had the notebook with a ton of ideas mentioned earlier, most of them would be crap and (unless someone happened to hit the right one) would probably lead to the notebook being ignored. If you were implementing these ideas, one of them would be pretty good, and 12 of them would be monumentally expensive failures (the light bulb one requires a ton of investment in a ton of technologies). ---
**Author:** ![RTFirefly](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/c77e96/32.png) [@RTFirefly](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RTFirefly)\ **Post date:** [June 9, 2020, 6:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-you-could-travel-to-the-year-1820-how-could-you-prove-you-were-from-the-future/854931/196 "2020-06-09T18:55:03Z")
I’d go the same route as a few other people here have done: talk with mathematicians, find out what’s already known, and give them some previews of coming attractions, so to speak. I’d be considerably less adept at this now than I was 25 years ago, when I was still a math professor. But I could probably recollect enough to be convincing. ---
**Author:** ![UltraVires](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/ecccb3/32.png) [@UltraVires](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/UltraVires)\ **Post date:** [June 9, 2020, 7:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-you-could-travel-to-the-year-1820-how-could-you-prove-you-were-from-the-future/854931/197 "2020-06-09T19:33:24Z")
> [@Quercus](#): > > That’s all 1981 of course. I wonder if that’s making \*\*pantastic’s \*\*point for them. Does the OP suggest I need to prove I am a time traveler immediately or within a day or a month? That would indeed be a tall order. ---
**Author:** ![iamthewalrus\_3](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/258eb7/32.png) [@iamthewalrus\_3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/iamthewalrus_3)\ **Post date:** [June 9, 2020, 11:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-you-could-travel-to-the-year-1820-how-could-you-prove-you-were-from-the-future/854931/198 "2020-06-09T23:10:42Z")
> [@Pantastic](#): > > Also, you’re definitely not doing this on your own long - in the 80s a lot of games were still one-man operations, or close to it. But once you move into the 90s and especially 2000s, you are moving way outside of the territory where one person slaps out a major title > [@](#): > > “Getting in with someone you know will be successful to ride their coattails” is a valid way to make money. But it’s not using your knowledge of future tech to implement that tech early and make yourself rich doing so, so it’s not what I was talking about. I think you’re very good at coming up with reasons why this might not work, but I’m unconvinced that any of them would be nearly as relevant as the skills and techniques and knowledge I’d have available. The above two quotes are a great example of why I find a lot of your critiques empty: I apparently couldn’t be successful at this endeavor because I couldn’t do it alone, but _also_, it’s cheating and doesn’t count if I team up with someone who I know is good at this. ¯\_(ツ)\_/¯ Also I notice that you just skipped right over the list of algorithms that no one knew about, one of which launched one of the largest companies in the world. Again, software in the recent past is a _terrible_ field for your side of this argument. It’s a field that’s advanced very rapidly in the past several decades, where advances that required groundbreaking genius to create can be easily implemented by a competent craftsman a decade later, and where credentials provide almost no barrier to entry. I’ll let you have the last word if you want. ---
**Author:** ![dtilque](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/d6d6ee/32.png) [@dtilque](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dtilque)\ **Post date:** [June 10, 2020, 12:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-you-could-travel-to-the-year-1820-how-could-you-prove-you-were-from-the-future/854931/199 "2020-06-10T00:41:07Z")
If you want something to invent, the light bulb is not the best thing. Much easier would be the Bessemer process. The basic idea is simple: pour molten cast iron from one container to another, blast it with a stream of air while it’s being poured. It wasn’t discovered until 30-some years later, but there’s nothing preventing it from being done in 1820. OK, if you want to do it in large industrial quantities, you need steam engines to move around the very heavy containers of iron, but it could be done in small quantities by hand without any problem. ---
**Author:** ![Velocity](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/velocity/32/18006_2.png) [@Velocity](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Velocity)\ **Post date:** [June 10, 2020, 12:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-you-could-travel-to-the-year-1820-how-could-you-prove-you-were-from-the-future/854931/200 "2020-06-10T00:46:36Z")
Maybe many Dopers here are unusually skilled or work in the engineering/tech trades, but the vast majority of people, transported to any past time, couldn’t create a light bulb or anything. They would have never disassembled such a thing before or seen its blueprints. They certainly wouldn’t know things like the Bessemer Process off the top of their heads. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-you-could-travel-to-the-year-1820-how-could-you-prove-you-were-from-the-future/854931.md?page=9) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-you-could-travel-to-the-year-1820-how-could-you-prove-you-were-from-the-future/854931.md?page=11)