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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
At that point I would fade away, as without the British troops my Grandfather never emigrates, and my Mother never meets my Dad.