# 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:** 9\ **Page:** 11
**Author:** ![TruCelt](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/trucelt/32/523_2.png) [@TruCelt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TruCelt)\ **Post date:** [June 10, 2020, 9:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-you-could-travel-to-the-year-1820-how-could-you-prove-you-were-from-the-future/854931/201 "2020-06-10T21:07:44Z")
I’d have an easier time convincing them I was from the past. ROFL! I can make crochet lace, and do tambour embroidery, both of which would earn me a comfortable (for the times) living in the US or England of 1820. Other fiber arts as well but those would be the most remunerative. If I could make my way to Ireland, I know who to find, and a few secrets about the landscape, the family farm, and the people, that would be enough to convince them I was family. They’d take excellent care of me. As for how to convince them? It’s down to the dental work, as has already been said. I have caps in both metal and ceramic, so I can even show the progress made in the 20th and 21st centuries. I also have multiple surgery scars, which few people of the time could have survived. But if I were going to convince people I was from the future, it might just be for the purpose of lying to the English, and telling them their civilization fails unless they leave the Irish the hell alone. 😉 At that point I would fade away, as without the British troops my Grandfather never emigrates, and my Mother never meets my Dad. ---
**Author:** ![JohnT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johnt/32/15048_2.png) [@JohnT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JohnT)\ **Post date:** [June 10, 2020, 9:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-you-could-travel-to-the-year-1820-how-could-you-prove-you-were-from-the-future/854931/202 "2020-06-10T21:43:07Z")
> [@Velocity](#): > > 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. “Put your lips together and… blow”, amirite? ---
**Author:** ![clairobscur](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/839c29/32.png) [@clairobscur](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/clairobscur)\ **Post date:** [June 11, 2020, 4:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-you-could-travel-to-the-year-1820-how-could-you-prove-you-were-from-the-future/854931/203 "2020-06-11T04:42:27Z")
> [@Little\_Nemo](#): > > I think you’re going the opposite way and overestimating science in 1820. This was an entire generation before Semmelweis tried to convince other doctors of the antiseptic theory and they refused to listen to him. And Semmelweis was a doctor from a recognized university and he had data he had gathered from his medical practice to back his theory up. Semmelweis was a nobody, and there was no evidence that he hadn’t just made up the data he presented. Finally he had no “antiseptic theory” to propose or for that matter any explanation for his alleged observations. Being a doctor from a recognized university isn’t a guarantee of anything. So was the guy who linked autism and vaccination. ---
**Author:** ![clairobscur](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/839c29/32.png) [@clairobscur](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/clairobscur)\ **Post date:** [June 11, 2020, 4:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-you-could-travel-to-the-year-1820-how-could-you-prove-you-were-from-the-future/854931/204 "2020-06-11T04:49:06Z")
> [@UltraVires](#): > > If someone told me that in June, 2019 and I’m sitting here in June, 2020 and listen to a recording of what he said, I’m probably convinced. The problem for 1820 is that we have no real recollection of those events. And the guy from 2120 probably won’t know that there was a COVID epidemic around 2020. Assuming that he does, he most certainly won’t know any of the convincing details you list. ---
**Author:** ![clairobscur](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/839c29/32.png) [@clairobscur](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/clairobscur)\ **Post date:** [June 11, 2020, 5:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-you-could-travel-to-the-year-1820-how-could-you-prove-you-were-from-the-future/854931/205 "2020-06-11T05:07:47Z")
> [@UltraVires](#): > > 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. It doesn’t even take that much. Any man about to father a child whose life you’ll affect will have a different child. For instance, someone will read an article about you in the newspaper. As a result he will act slightly differently while reading, move slightly differently, so his spermatozoides won’t be exactly as the same place. Another one will win the race later that night, and a different child will be born 9 months later. And of course, the existence of these different children will similarly impact the life of many others, who by behaving slightly differently as a result will impact the life of more, etc… I would guess that by 1830 already no child born in our timeline will be born in this alternative 19th century. ---
**Author:** ![clairobscur](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/839c29/32.png) [@clairobscur](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/clairobscur)\ **Post date:** [June 11, 2020, 5:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-you-could-travel-to-the-year-1820-how-could-you-prove-you-were-from-the-future/854931/206 "2020-06-11T05:36:14Z")
I guess that telling scientists and scholars about everything I know would eventually (and probably relatively quickly) prove my claims, as they could explore the ideas I mention. Look into making a daguerreotype, for instance. The problem seems to be listened to by scientists and scholars in the first place, as the time traveler is likely to for instance end locked in a poor house, and I’ve no idea of how one could convince people working there As suggested by some people, I’d guess that the person most likely to be convinced would be a dentist. But if my clothes don’t follow me, I’m not sure why my fillings and crowns would. ---
**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 12, 2020, 1:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-you-could-travel-to-the-year-1820-how-could-you-prove-you-were-from-the-future/854931/207 "2020-06-12T01:38:39Z")
> [@Thudlow\_Boink](#): > > Such as…? As for me, I would make my way into the Unix community and convince them that, in the future, people would have handheld devices with tens of gigabytes of internal storage (my mid-70s computer science teacher spoke along these lines, that full-fledged computers would be the size of pocket calculators, though he was off by ten or fifteen years) and that the traditional hierarchical organization method would ultimately prove unsuitable for users. I would doggedly insist on them developing a paradigm for a categorical storage structure, where a file could appear in multiple places and the user would condense the list through category filtering, so that that one particular file would not be buried in fifteen levels of subdirectories but could be reached from several different directions. ---
**Author:** ![Pantastic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/3bc359/32.png) [@Pantastic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pantastic)\ **Post date:** [June 12, 2020, 5:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-you-could-travel-to-the-year-1820-how-could-you-prove-you-were-from-the-future/854931/208 "2020-06-12T05:54:42Z")
> [@iamthewalrus\_3](#): > > 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)\_/¯ Not what I said at all. You clearly can’t just spit out clones of and productivity software and popular games with what you remember off the top of your head, because writing those things took either way more than one person or (in the one-person-shop-era) extensive specific knowledge that you don’t have. It’s simply unbelievable that you have that degree of data about multiple software packages from decades ago completely memorized. The sheer scale of work involved shows quite clearly that it’s not reasonable for you (and especially for a hypothetical average programmer) to have the whole thing ready to casually clone. As far as riding the coattails of someone successful goes, that wasn’t the challenge. No one was disputing whether ‘go back 40 years, get a job at a company that you know will make it big’ could make money. But it does poke a hole in your claim that you’d put 20:1 odds on the company headed by a guy from the future rather than the one headed by a person of the time. > [@](#): > > 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. I got bored going down the list of stuff - if those were such great examples, you shouldn’t have buried the lead. This, again, highlights the problems with the I make ‘future advances early and get rich’ scheme - again and again, you post a huge list of vague things, then when someone looks at them and points out that your ‘knowledge’ is actually incorrect, already known at the time, or otherwise flawed, you jump to whatever they didn’t look at in detail. But if you’re postulating doing multiple things that each will take years of work, significant cash investment, and a lot of other people, the fact that most of the ideas are duds is a big deal. > [@](#): > > 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. It’s a great field for my side of the argument. The fact that you keep posting vague stuff like ‘clone successful software packages’ as a key to success makes my point for me. ---
**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 13, 2020, 3:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-you-could-travel-to-the-year-1820-how-could-you-prove-you-were-from-the-future/854931/209 "2020-06-13T03:03:22Z")
bit late, but I just happened to run across [the obligatory](https://xkcd.com/716/) [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=10)