Time-traveling Ipad?

Here is a matter for pure speculation.

Premise: You have an Ipad (or other tablet PC). It has games (anything from Donkey Kong to Angry Birds - but nothing of cinematic quality), videos of movies and TV shows (but nothing too deep or thought-provoking - game shows, sitcoms, melodramas and popcorn-flicks). Maybe it even has a few webcam videos of you wandering around your modern house or town doing mundane tasks. It has ebooks (along the lines of Twilight, Harry Potter, Fifty Shades Of Gray, etc. - nothing like Principia Mathematica, Einstein or Jung, nor any other works of classic literature, history, philosophy or science and no technical manuals). It has a wide variety of music mp3s: Some Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Joplin, Ellington and lots of rock and pop music from the '60s to the present).

It is fully-charged and switched on. A wormhole materializes beneath it and whisks it away back through time, delivering it to either A) the local shaman of a Eurasian nomadic tribe circa 10,000 BCE, B) Aristotle, or C) Leonardo da Vinci.

How do you think each recipient would react to this unexpected gift and in what way (if any) do think it would alter the course of history?

Leonardo gets addicted to Angry Birds and the helicopter never gets invented.

The shaman destroys it relatively quickly, never figuring out what it is or what to do with it.

They would be branded as a witch/sorcerer/etc, the battery would die, and so would the recipient when they couldn’t replicate the magic.

People would be slightly amused, but after seeing no practical use for it they’d regard it as a novelty and not really think about it too much beyond that. You may find a young person who really get sparked by the whole thing and plays with it until they work the in and outs, but with with a limited battery they probably won’t get to far.

People currently bring iPads to remote villages and the like where people don’t have first hand experience with stuff like electricity (mobile devices are the hip new thing in public health and the like). People generally don’t freak out about it, and they usually just figure it’s a weird foreign person thing that isn’t particularly relevant to them. Humans are very short sighted if they do not have an immediate application for a technology.

Scenario A: There’d be no reaction because the device would cease to exist the moment it reached its destination as the material to construct the components of the device would not have been invented yet.

Stipulating the ability for the existence of material and components in the past that were invented far in the future…

The moment the device was handled by another human, quantum events would conspire to create a shunt in our timeline leading to a dimension where the device and the ability to construct it has existed for over 12,000 years …oh, and our present and everyone in it would be substantively different in the very next instant.

Stipulating the ability for the existence of material and components in the past that were invented in the far future, AND to heck with paradoxes and the universe needing to make sense…

The English language not having yet been invented, although the shaman would eventually figure out how to bring the device out of sleep mode by pressing the start button, and possibly begin an app [that is if the lock screen has been disabled], he wouldn’t get much beyond that, the rows of strange symbols meaning nothing to him, and by the time the device was passed around to enough people until someone with a clue actually realized that what was needed was a cipher, the device would be all out of juice.

Stipulating the ability for the existence of material and components in the past that were invented in the far future, AND to heck with paradoxes and the universe needing to make sense, AND the shaman who finds the device happens to be a crack cryptologist, or knows one…

The shaman would proclaim it to be evil-spawn and attempt to destroy it. Failing to do so, and cutting his big toe in the process, the shaman either burys it or throws it into a pyre while praying for forgiveness to his favored deity.

For scenarios B and C, events would play out similarly to A, but with Aristotle imploring his students to take his word that a multicolored glow did indeed emanate from from the smooth, flat surface of the device, and the objects under the surface were indeed influenced to movement by the pass of his hand, and all this throughout the pitch of night.

Leonardo would just break it in a frustrated attempt at disassembly.

Actually, Leonardo gets addicted to Bad Piggies and once the battery dies he invents the helicopter but also the race car, the jet plane and the hybrid balloon-jet-heli-car.

<Invader Zim>PigEEEES!</Zim> :cool: