…Inspired quite a bit by this thread, I’ve come up with the following scenario…
I, a fairly intelligent American man from the year 2003, am happily playing around on my iBook laptop, when…
Bam Due to some cosmic fluke in the fabric of space-time, I’m transported back to January, 1942, landing in the Oval Office, and interrupting president Roosevelt’s meeting with the British ambassador.
Now, I’ve got the 21st century laptop with me, I’m wearing a bunch of synthetic fiber clothes, and I’ve just teleported out of thin air. I say I’ve got at least a slight chance of not being seen as an Axis agent.
So, if they buy my “unexpected time travel” story…exactly what good am I to the government of the past?
The lap top is brand new, and doesn’t have any sort of CD/DVD-ROM “encyclopedia” with it. I’ve just got a newish flight sim, the new “Wolfenstein,” and the other “sundry” software that came with the operating system (a Chess program, MP3 player, etc.).
The only other knowledge about future history, technical developments, and the like is what I can remember myself.
So…I ask you, exactly what value would I have, to a someone in 1942?
A lot depends on your knowlege of history. For example, in January of 1942, the Soviets expected the German Spring offensive would be aimed at Moscow but the Germans attacked in the South instead. Knowlege of military things like that would obviously be useful.
You could tell people the German A-bomb program wasn’t going to work.
If you knew names like Philby, Blunt, Fuchs, and Rosenburg, you could share them with American and British intelligence.
You could also offer general knowlege about future events; the Communist victory in China, the Middle East wars, independance in India and other colonies, the Vietnam war, the development of jet aircraft, TV, and computers, the cure for Polio, the Baby Boom, etc.
And your laptop would have more computing power than every computer on Earth combined in 1942.
Well, if you know anything about the major events of the war, you’d obviously be of considerable intelligence help. Likewise, even if you are not an expert on technology advances since '42, what you do know would have you sitting in debriefing rooms for months, if not years.
The laptop would be of great interest from a research standpoint, but would simply using it be of more immediate help to the war effort than dismantling it for research purposes? Well, I’m not familiar with the standard suite of applications for an iBook, but if there’s an on-board calculator with scientific functions a la Windows, that alone would be of great service; for one thing just having that little calculator would probably significantly shorten the design processes for various high-priority efforts such as the design of the atomic bomb. If you’ve got a word processor and spreadsheet program, all the better. Then there’s the technologes embodied within: semicondictor ciruits, magnetic and optical media, lasers (in the DVD drive), the LCD display, even the exotic (for '42) plastics of the case.
The clothes and games: of some interest, perhaps, but a definite sideshow to the iBook.
Anyway, you’d probably never have to buy a dinner again. OTOH, the government of the time would likely make sure you remained in thier custody for the rest of your life.
Your knowledge of history wouldn’t help in the long term. As you shared with them what you knew about immediate affairs, your actions would sway history in ways that would render your knowledge about later decades completely obsolete or at least very unreliable.
Oh, and you’d get lots of chicks. Chicks love a time traveler.
Indeed. Keeping the iBook intact would be the primary priority… but knowing that it worked would be enough to advance computing science by decades. They don’t have the tools to make the tools to make the tools to make it yet, but… certainly can give a boost.
In that computer is enough raw horsepower, even if you’re just using unix shell scripting, to beat all the world’s supercomputers until, eh, '80 or so.
Not to mention television! Or the highways… or that we would beat the Soviets… in time. Or what you could do to help the space program! You’d be surprised what you can remember if you work at it.
Basically… for WWII alone, you’d be worth about what the Manhattan Project was.
“The world’s first electronic digital computer (Atanasoff-Berry Computer) was invented at Iowa State in the late 1930s by mathematics and physics professor John Atanasoff and graduate student Clifford Berry.”
Hey dumbass!! Don’t you watch time travel movies? The good guys WON WWII! Don’t DO ANYTHING to fuck it up!
If you try to help, odds are you will either be locked up in a mental institution or accidently kill Roosevelt or Patton or something. Either that or you will become the bonehead that allowed the Japanese to sneak attack Pearl Harbor. “If you just look at this laptop screen…ZZZZZZZZ YOU SHORTED OUT POWER ON THE ENTIRE ISLAND!!”
If Kirk Douglas couldn’t prevent WWII with a modern carrier group, what makes you think you could do anything with your laptop?
Yeah, but in that movie, Kirk Douglas couldn’t act his way out of a paperbag. It also appears to be the inspiration for Europe’s sole US hit. Two big strikes against it, IMHO.
There’s tons of things you could do to help the Allies. Simply telling them that they won the war would be a big help, because at that time, the news from the battlefield was mostly bad. (Of course, seeing the “Made in Japan” on the components of your laptop might not help your case.) Letting them know what’s going on in the concentration camps might save a few lives as well.
There was an SNL sketch along these lines (called something like B- Time Traveller) in which Janeane Garofalo played a girl travelling through time who hadn’t really paid attention in high school history (or anything else). So we saw her trying to talk to Columbus in really bad Spanish about how one of his boat sinks but she can’t remember which one, or to Washington at Valley Forge (where all she could remember was “something about shoes”) or MacArthur (“this will be the worst military debacle since Washington capsized in the Delaware with all those shoes!”). Very droll.
