Time Travel Thought Experiment - Advancing Our Civilization

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

This might be a fun discussion:

You have a single one time opportunity to safely go back in time to any date you choose within exactly a one hundred year period (so yesterday to 1912).

You are also allowed to take ONE single item no larger than a briefcase with the only other restriction being that it cannot be the printed word with historic/future information on it (i.e. an almanac, newspaper, future published works or your 100,000 sheet dot matrix printed edition of Wikipedia :eek:).

Your goal is to simply drop off this one item in the hopes of advancing human technology. You will pop into your chosen time, hand off the “item” with no vocal instruction or “instructions” (see printed materials rule) and then pop back home to hope for the best.

So…

  1. What do you take?
  2. What time do you choose?
  3. Who do you give the item to?
2

I’d probably take a fully charged laptop with me and hand it to Alexander Graham Bell. I assume he’d get it to the right folks at Bell Labs and advance semiconductor technology by decades.

Pretty mundane answer, I know.
ETA: I’d go back as far as my 100 year visa allowed to 1912.

3

One fully-loaded iPad, with as much tech data as possible on it. I’d go back to 1938 and hand it, already on, to John W. Campbell.

:stuck_out_tongue:

4

You’d probably be better off taking, say, a VCR (I assume you can include a single tape in it and still be one item), as soon as they get small enough to fit into a briefcase.

An iPad or laptop is super cool, but they’re so miniaturized and densely constructed that I’d be worried that it would be hard for someone in 1912 to figure out how it worked. It’s going to be awfully difficult to take it apart and figure out what to do with it. Furthermore, they are almost entirely solid state, meaning that they wouldn’t shed much light on all the mechanical improvements needed for modern tech

An early VCR, on the other hand, demonstrates

[ul][li]a circuit board with components that are large enough to be reasonably modified and tested by hand.[/li][li]Magnetic tape as a storage medium.[/li][li]An analog signal output over coax (already a known transmission mechanism in 1912)[/li][li]Brushless motors[/li][li]7-segment LCDs[/li][/ul]
That’s going to get 1912 up to 1970s technology pretty quickly, where they might easily just break an iPod trying to disassemble it and figure out how it works. It’s possible that even the VCR is too much too fast, and you’d be better with a simple transistor radio that can receive something transmitted in 1912.

5

I’d go back the full 100 years with a suitcase full of old cash and written instructions on purchasing large tracts of land in the name of a trust which I will inherit after I’m born.

Being a land baron would certainly enhance my civilisation :smiley:

6

The program running on the iPad would be a tutorial on how to operate it. Attached would be the charger. I’d have all the tech data to do all of your list and so much more on the pad, along with history, literature, art and the like. Campbell would catch on quick, and get it into the hands of people who could use the information to change the future. If nothing else, it would give Asimov, Heinlein and all the other Amazing writers a bunch of new ideas.

I think I might just have “The Return of William Proxmire” keyed up as the first story they see, too. :smiley:

7

I’d go back just far enough to prevent Steve Jobs from building the iPhone.

8

I’m going to go even so far as to not allow a digital loophole into the “no written word” restriction and the maximum time restraint of 100 years to drop off a simple, $15 Texus Instruments, solar-powered scientific calculator; perhaps at The German University of Prague, to one Prof. Einstein who was currently working out the theories of General Relativity, I believe.

Then again, the technology might completely pull him off this important work and fall into the wrong hands, being such pivotal times in Europe.

9

What a cool premise for a book!

ETA: don’t know how the first part of that quote was dropped. Oh well…

10

I could probably take penicillin to Fleming, or someone else in that field.

11

This is one of the fascinating facets of the though experiment! You might be right in that we negatively alter the course of history… a gamble for sure.

12

Given the OP’s requirement against printed word, then further requirement against providing any instructions, I think that this violates the spirit of the question.

The idea is to give a thing, with no manual, and see if they can figure it out.

13

Drop an eletronics project kit at MIT in 1922 and let them play with the thing.

14

Rethinking this, one might posit that our civilization might advance more quickly with a much more simple device delivered to a more recent time when the receiver might be able to do more with it.

So instead of dropping an iPad in the hands of some turn of the century scholar or inventor who might exclaim its magic or alien :D, perhaps taking a late 70s 4044/8088 CPU to a 1950 NASA scientist planning the Mercury and eventually Apollo missions would net better advancement.

15

How about giving Einstein a simple gas-discharge laser and saying “here’s an example of that stimulated photon emission you wrote about”? So physicists have lasers available 48 years earlier.

DDT had been synthesized in the late 19th century but no one knew it was an insecticide. Ridding the WW1 trenches of lice would have saved some lives and at least made the war that much less miserable.

16

This may well not work due to being not different enough to make a difference, but I’d take some key car component such as a carburetor, specifically tuned to work on a gasohol-mix engine, and give it to Henry Ford, so his fleet of cars might roll off the assembly line burning alcohol as well as gas, limiting pollution and the need for foreign oil.

17

I think if it is something electronic, I would include a series of several stepa along way in its evolution, like an early example of miniaturized circuitry, so they can more easily follow the thread to what they got.

The hard part would be when the recipient says “What’s this”, and I have to slay “I can’t tell you. Some anonymous guy at an unknown location with a fake name told me I can’t tell you, and I’m on my honor.”

18

Don’t know whether this violates the “no text” rule.

To Donald Rumsfeld: First section of the New York Times, dated September 10, 2001. All the text is missing, except the date.

19

Do I really need a whole briefcase?

I hold in my hand a cheap MP3 player; cost me $30. Has an internal capacity of 8 gig, and can accept a media card of, let’s say, 32 gig for a total of 40 gigabytes of solid-state memory. Internal battery lasts about two hours; charging cord attached, total weight about a pound and volume… maybe 1/100 of a briefcase.

This particular device has a very crappy speaker and a moderately crappy LCD screen, and I currently have about 200 songs and an entire season of Family Guy loaded on it. These would be replaced with:

A series of audiobooks and podcasts describing various topics, such as world history and technological developments, focusing on electronics.

The entire series Connections, including season 2 and 3, showing how it all works together.

Various You-tube videos about technology and computer science, focusing on electronics.

All the music that’s currently on it, just because.
I may or may not delete the Family Guy.

…and hand it to Nicola Tesla, in 1913, a good 30 years before his death. Remember to whisper: “60 Hertz, 120 volts!” so he knows how to power it up.

Not only would he have actual working proof of future technology, the programming on it would describe the way it was made in enough detail that he’d be able to put it back together without destroying it, because you KNOW he’d take it apart eventually.

End result: a 100-year leap in electronics technology, with Tesla at the helm this time. I think that would be pretty beneficial, personally.

20

I already did that, and the bastard took the credit for it.