I've discovered a way to time travel! So now what?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

After 30 years of development, it works! Unfortunately, it has also cost me my entire family fortune. I’m dead broke. My credit cards have been maxed out, the electricity is going to be shut off in three days, and I have $32.12 in the bank.

I would like to somehow use time travel to recoup my fortune. Unfortunately, time travel in the real world is very different from Hollywood’s version of time travel. Real time travel is very limited, and also insanely expensive.

First of all, I can only travel to a place and time that has already happened. Since the future has not happened yet, it is impossible to go there. Also, there is no way to interact with my surroundings once I reach my destination time. I can go to any place or time in the past as an observer only. Nobody from that place and time will know that I am there and I can’t move anything. Essentially, while time traveling I am a bodyless entity that can only watch and listen. However, I can move around freely once I arrive at my destination time. I can move through walls, doors, metal vaults, anything.

Another sizable problem is the expense of traveling though time. Moving around in an alternate dimension takes an incredible amount of energy. Just to fire up my time travel contraption costs about $750.00. This is the base cost of time travel, and it goes up from there. There is also the not insignificant cost of actual moving through time. The cost for a round trip is about 50 cents per day. The cost of going back a year or two is really not all that much, but going back a few thousand years is prohibitively expensive.

As an example, if i want to travel back 1 year the cost is the $750.00 base, plus 365 days at 50 cents per day. That’s 750 + 182.50 = $932.50.

By selling everything that I own, I can come up with about $15,000.00. This will allow me to go back in time a maximum of 78 years with a little left over for a safety net. With my current funds, anytime before August 30, 1933 is out of my reach.

So is there a way I can make some money off of this thing?

2

Sure. Sell trips to people with more money. You’d make a fortune.

3

Ummm … go back and invest in the initial offering shares of Apple Computer or Cisco?

There once was a lady named Bright
Who traveled much faster than light
She departed one day
In a relative way
And returned on the previous night.

4

Your time travel device sounds an awful lot like a “past viewing” device from a short story I once read. What you have is the ultimate spy device, you can travel back 1 second, and go anywhere, see anything, spy on anyone. You can get into a board room to see what kind of quarterly report a company is going to release next week, the ultimate insider. You can be a private eye and let your client go back to last week, just to see if his wife is really cheating on him.

There are also less tasteful ways to be a super spy, let’s not discuss those.

5

TimeWinder’s (appropriate username!) idea is the obvious one, of course.

Can you take a video camera with you? Imagine what someone might pay for authentic footage of Lincoln’s assassination… Hitler’s final moments in the bunker… The crucifixion of Jesus Christ… The possibilities are endless!

6

I’m pretty sure this violates the rules of the OP.

I suppose my answer would be blackmail, assuming you’re not averse to the moral issues. Since you can’t be detected, go back just a few short years and spend your time observing celebrities and/or other high-profile figures (politicians might be a good choice) doing things that no one else could possibly know about (and that they’d desperately prefer no one know about). Then hope you can collect on some blackmail money before they try to actually try to have you killed.

Also risky, but you might also just go back just a day and sit in on some nation’s high-level secret meetings, then sell secrets to another country.

Unfortunately, almost every way I’m thinking of to profit involves something unethical. You could steal patents, etc.

Oh! I’ve got one that isn’t unethical! You could run a small service. Say someone’s lost a pet yesterday. You can go back in time to when they last saw the pet, then follow the pet around to determine its present location (hopefully, still alive). You wouldn’t have to charge much, but it’d be an easy profit for you. After you pick up enough cash, you can become a full-fledged PI. Police forces all over the world would hire you. Easy money.

7

Asimov’s The Dead Past [Wikipedia link – contains spoilers]. I’ve always been fond of that one.

8

Okay, no investments.
Well, you could choose history that we’re still uncertain about. Go witness who shot JFK, come back and write books with all the details.
Follow Amelia Earhardt … see where she ended up.

9

TimeWinder’s idea was the first thing I thought of.

How about a detective service? You can solve crimes by watching them as they’re committed.

Is there any limitation to where you can go physically? If not, you could view the recent past on other planets or even in other galaxies. Maybe you could get research grants to do this.

Actually, this is a pretty scary invention. No on would have any privacy. Everything they’ve done in the past, and everything they do in the future, can be viewed by anyone who wants to.

10

Do research on sunken cargo ships. Determine which ones carried the most gold, silver … find out where they can be located today.

11

Apart from Asimov’s The Dead Past, Clarke and Baxter’s The Light of Other Days explores a similar concept.

12

I’m sure National Geographic, or the Discovery Channel would give you a magnificent sum if you could charter an IMAX 3D crew to capture the entire Apollo 11 landing, excursion and liftoff from the moon.

$8,500 is nothing for a documentary like that. Even if it took several trips. Your markup would be… wait for it… astronomical.

13

Oh man, you could really burn OJ on June 12, 1994.