In the interests of [del]spreading havok and chaos over the Earth[/del] helping America out of its current economic troubles, I have decided to make my Burroughs-Libby continua skipper available to a deserving Doper. You may make a single trip to a single fictional universe and come back with whatever technological innovation you judge to be most likely to help the United States out of its current malaise.
There’s a few rules, of course. I’ve locked off all the comic book universes, because meddling there always leads to somebody chasing you back, and I [del]wet myself at the thought of confronting[/del] am respectful of the prerogatives of Darkseid, Thanos, and their ilk. So no Miracle Machine, no Cosmic Cube, no Green Lantern Rings. In fact, nothing that makes the bearer omnipotent is allowed. (You can always try to defeat my safeguards of course but please bear in mind that Rhymers do not believe in non-lethal countermeasures, or for that matter non-torturous methods of execution.)
You can go for magical items, I suppose, but I’d advise against it. Those tend not to work outside their home universe, for one thing, and for another if you get yourself captured by Sauron that’s your own damn problem.
A hand-held portal device. Imagine the money to be saved in transport costs!
Of course, truckers would be out of work and the automobile industry would cease to exists. Anyone involved in air travel would lose their jobs. Rail travel becomes redundant. Hmm…didn’t really think this one through.
You need to specify what universe you’re going to anyway. You only get one trip (there and back, of course), and Gay Deceiver is much less helpful now that I’ve lobotomized her.
I think this is the best bet. Not only would you revolutionize travel and transportation, you can also make perpetual motion devices out of them, which would revolutionize the energy industry. But I’m not sure how they scale: If you have multiple devices, can you make multiple portal-pairs, or is there always only one red and one blue anywhere?
And Skald, I’m assuming that Mr. Kobayashi meant the ones from the Portal video games.
I think I’d go for some really powerful weather-control or weather-generating gear, like at the end of Crimson Skies. Being able to alter climate to alleviate drought, save crops, etc. seems to me like a Good Thing.
Shipstones and the Douglas-Martin screens to charge them. RAH’s Friday (the D-M screens are mentioned in many earlier stories, but Shipstones don’t appear until Friday).
In the novel Pushing Ice by Alastair Reynolds, one character receives
a cube of femtotechnology, which is essentially as far beyond nanotechnology as nanotech is beyond current tech. One could use this to produce virtually anything: converting saw sand to thousands of square miles of solar cells would be a trivial task, as would duplicating any existing object (computer chips or what not). It can act as a near instant transporter device by disassembling something into parts on one end and reassenbling on the other. I don’t recall if it mentions it explicitly, but I suspect that it can fission or fusion at will, making for nearly unlimited power. Most likely, you could use this power to convert other elements into gold, if one so wished.
Assuming I’d have to ability to reverse engineer and/or build more of it, yeah, I’m going to go for a Mr. Fusion too.
Speaking of, um, specifically not spreading havok and confusion over the world like a mantle of ash, anyone want to speculate on what happens to the middle east when the Mr. Fusions suddenly go into full production?
Make the solar system into Ringworld. A public works project that would take millennia, destroy the planet, and risk the life of every being within the solar system.
What could possibly go wrong?
OR
Have deliberate massive population growth so pyramid schemes will WORK, dammit!
I shall travel to the far-flung galaxy of Sincerus aut Smurfus to bring back a substance that turns people bright blue and causes extremely painful urination for an as yet undetermined period of time whenever they lie.
Star wars Universe, and bring back an automated factory for repulsorlifts , as used in spaceships for takeoff, landspeeders, hoverbikes or hell, even those tiny self-propelled hovering droids. They use minimal power once made. Incorporate that into a car and non-US cars aren’t going to look so hot when they still need tyres and petrol. Save the US auto industry and reduce dependence on foreign oil at one stroke.
Hell, repulsorlifts work out to 75000 km from the surface of an Earth-sized planet, so space (and all its resources) is your oyster too. Of course, it’d have to be - repulsorlift factories are space-based things IIRC - something to do with a miniature black hole and “knots” in space-time…
Obtain a large supply of TWT (a drug that makes people tell the truth, and leaves the user with a lasting habituation against lying) from Spider Robinson’s story “Satan’s Children”. Add to various capitol-building and executive-mansion water supplies. Pop corn.
I’d take a trip to the Star Trek universe, and bring back holodecks, along with appropriate development tools and textbooks. Entertainment is already one of America’s greatest exports - we might as well play to our strengths.
