I was sitting at lunch with a friend today, reminiscing about how gas here in LA was once 93 cents/gallon. Somehow, we got sidetracked to the point that I found myself saying that if I had a time-machine, I’d go back to when gas was under a dollar, buy tankers full of it, bring it back to the present (assuming that we’re not concerned about energy consumed in the process of time traveling), and open up my own gas station. Just to enjoy the other stations being pissed off when I’m selling gas for $1.25 and everyone else is well over $3. And also to enjoy the reporters and government officials being completely baffled at how I’m able to do this and make a profit.
Now, I realize all of that is kind of lame, but it got me to thinking that this is just the kind of idea that you creative Dopers could make something fun out of.
I know that we could all find ways to get rich and/or save the world if we had access to some tool we’ve read about or seen in sci-fi. But I’m interested in ideas that are a little less world-moving and a little more selfishly entertaining.
With a time machine, I might be inclined to do any of the following:
Appear in Dealey Plaza on November 23, 1963 wearing a rainbow colored wig and carrying a “John 3:16” sign, timing it appropriately to be captured in the Zapruder film…
Include Pac-Man and Smiley Faces in ancient cave art.
Rewrite the Rosetta Stone to contain the complete lyrics to Freebird in all three languages.
Forge a volume of Nostrodamus to include amazingly accurate predictions of major professional sporting events for the latter half of the 20th Century.
If I could borrow a space ship to go with the time machine, I might also scatter a few monkey bones and WWII level technology relics around the Moon…
Combining time travel & space travel, I’d go leave a huge pile of empty beer cans where the Apollo astronauts would find it. Using the force-field suit from Varley’s novels, I’d be sure to leave a bunch of bare footprints in the lunar dust, too.
I’d go back to Daimler’s original workshop in the 1880s and leave a high-quality colour photograpph of a modern car there, posed in front of a famous monument like the Louvre that existed at the time. The car would be a Ford.
Better yet, take modern calculators and electronics back to the early 1950s and sell them through those cheesy half-scam ads in the back of Radio-Electronics and Popular Mechanics.
(I seem to remember hearing of a science-fiction story with a similar plot, where an unaffiliated inventor makes a paradigm-shattering discovery like antigravity or zero-point energy, and can’t get anyone to believe the results, and is forced to similar tactics to get funding…)
Paint a picture of Dogs Playing Poker under the Mona Lisa canvas.
Plant some directed charges in the atomic test blasts so that all of our stock footage would have smiley faces in the mushroom clouds.
Place a powerful amplifier rigged to play from a durable laser-etched phonograph at 11°19′N 142°15′E, timed to go off at 1:06 p.m. on January 23, 1960.
I would build a Giant Japanese Anime Battle Robot, slathered over with weapons, & stride fearsomely down the streets of Washington DC, playing a looped tape through the loudspeakers: “CRUSH! KILL! DESTROY! KILL ALL HUMANS! I AM THE REVENGE ROBOT OF RICHARD MILHOUSE NIXON!”
I would pilot the Robot to the White House. Smashing through the fence, I would then…break out in song & dance!
“I’M A LIITLE
TEA-POT,
SHORT AND STOUT!
HERE IS MY
HAN-DLE.
HERE IS MY SPOUT”…
Mr. Squishy, it’s an allusion to a few old SDMB jokes. And I can’t remember the name of the song I had in mind, but it has something to do with dancing across sand.
If you had some kind of tool that could control power at will, you could do some mischievous stuff. I would make the whole country “haunted”. I would start by having some kind of localized EMP generator and use at busy city intersections in New York, LA, etc. I would just make all of the cars automatically die while they are stopped a a red light and leave them that way for 5 minutes or so until they mysteriously start again. If you do that a few times over a wide area, it would start to get some real buzz. Terrorists? Aliens? Government? Once the paranoia builds would have some fun. I would make all of the lights in a skyscraper blink in code for a few nights in a row. I don’t know what it will say. “All your building are belong to us” might link it to this board but I would come up with something like that. If you do enough of that stuff sporadically, the paranoia and theories will take on a life of their own. How would scientists, religion, and government handle a seemingly haunted country especially when nobody is even getting hurt?
I’d spike the drinks at Congress with truth drugs.
I’d slip Pat Robertson Jerry Falwell and certain others some body-modifying nanotech. Then the next time they start preaching about God and sin and so on, they grow horns, cloven hooves and a pentgram on the forehead. And goatees.
I’d use the transporter to beam away Bush’s clothes every time he appears in public, and beam a good supply of helium into his lungs. [squeaky voice]My clothes ! What happened to my clothes ![/squeaky voice]
Whenever I saw a political speech I disliked, I’d beam in a Tabasco-coated butt plug in the middle of it and see if the politician in question can keep a straight face.
I’d get a scholar to write a fake document ( on and with whatever the Romans used to write ) by an “eyewitness and participant” detailing Jesus’s fondness for homosexual orgies, then leave a copy or two back in time where they will found, in readable condition and undeniably 2000 years old.
