Suppose you were given the ability to travel back in time 100 years. You could take what you could carry, but you could carry nothing from the past to the future. And you could only travel one time back.
How could a person profit a significant amount of money from doing this?
Even if you purchased something - like land that you know will be valuable in the future, you would have to have several generations of kin be able to keep it. My past kinfolk would not be able to do that - alcoholism etc.
My best thought would be to buy something that I know would be of great value now, and bury it in a easily identifiable wooded location. A location I know would not be touched, except maybe logging etc. But I dont know what that object would be? And I dont know if that is even the right course.
not just generic land - aim for the land with the oil or gas underneath.
That being said, I would guess that even generic land in Busan in South Korea must have grown enormously in value since 1910. And Busan happens to be an area with reasonably stable government throughout this period. Another similar location would be Taipei in Taiwan, unless there are records of corrupt expropriations by the Kuomintang immediately after 1949 withdrawal to the island.
I wonder how well did titles of property in Hong Kong and Singapore survive the Japanese invasion. Other than under Japanese these seem to have been very stable and well governed areas.
Was 100 years ago long enough ago that aluminum was still disproportionately valuable? The Hall-Heroult process was invented in the 1880s so the value may not have completely collapsed by 1911.
Carry as much cheap modern aluminum as you can, trade it for gold, hide the gold, return.
Take a sports almanac, and some gold to bet. Invest the winnings, but be sure to cash out of the stock market by early October 1929. You can get back in after the crash, or buy land where you know oil will be found later, or subdivisions built, etc…and set up a spendthrift trust for your heirs.
Oak - My point is that you go and come back relatively quickly and then be “rich” by whatever you did in the past. Not stay in the past. But the sport almanac is a good idea. The winnings would have to be huge to make up the price diff in gold.
Isn’t a sports almanac just the plot element in one of the Back to the Future movies? Also I recall that we’ve done this question more than once already.
Find a bank with 100 years or more of history. Go back, buy coins and notes of the local currency - put them into a safe deposit box. Pay 100 years of fees.
Like bengangmo said, paintings would be a good investment. You could still pick up relatively cheap van Goghs a hundred years ago. There was apparently a whole bunch that went on the market right after World War I when some French and German collections were sold off.
It depends on your views of paradox. If you have the ability to travel in time, go to a remote location and dig up your treasure. You will discover what you have buried in the past, then go and sell it. Use the money to buy gold and then go back in time and purchase the items that you just sold, remembering to bury the items in the same remote location.
I’d look up Picasso and get him to paint me a bunch of works. Maybe look for a Honus Wagner baseball card.
I think the best bet would probably be to bring back a bag of synthetic diamonds and use the proceeds to set up an eccentric trust fund for people who happen to share your full name and look exactly like you.
Some of the solutions depend on recovering buried treasure, but I’d not want to gamble on that.
Another idea would be to prepare a book with items like stock-market tips and give it to great granddad. You’d use 21st-century materials for the book so they’d treasure it as a novelty even if, at first, they didn’t believe the predictions.
There’d be time travel paradox, but won’t all solutions suffer from that? In this case I’d worry that Dad, a billionaire in this alternate reality, would end up seduced by Glamour Queen gold-digger, never marry Mom, and I’d never be born. :mad:
I think buying cheap Van Goghs is by far the best way. You could expect a million-fold return on many of them. I think I read somewhere that he only sold one painting during his lifetime, so you’d probably make his day if you offered him ten bucks apiece for some now-famous ones. Just don’t buy so many that he becomes successful and doesn’t kill himself, or they won’t be worth as much.
And you would have to hide them, or put them in a vault that you know will still be around. Anything you do that would make your ancestors rich, like giving them a list of the best stocks to buy every year, is likely to make you disappear, since they would probably marry different people if they were rich.
Buy 1000 shares of Hollerith and find a cooperative Swiss banker who will, for a modest fee, hang on to them for a hundred years. Tell him a descendant (in fact, you, but you don’t have to tell him that) will come back in 100 years and claim them. You will come back to a zillion shares of IBM, which ought to be impressive. Don’t bother cashing out before 1929. Yes, you could do a little better, but it is not worth it. There would have to be some sort of secret password to release the shares to your “descendant”.
If I could go back to 1981, I would buy a whole bunch of Apple shares and sell them a week ago. Or Microsoft.
