Now lets assume it is possible and Joe has a time machine. He goes back in time say 30 years. He does not care about messing up the time line and just wants to have fun. How would he survive? His money would be no good. Where could you pawn off his cell phone? Would anyone want to buy it? How much could he get for his? I mean its not like he could just walk up to NASA headquarters and put it on the desk and ask for money could he?
I don’t think it would be worth much of anything. With no infrastructure in place to support it, it wouldn’t do much good…as a phone.
OTOH, if Joe could show it playing music (he’d be wise to load it up with tunes from the era), demonstrate it’s abitity to take pictures, work as a calculator, play games that look better then an atari on a 12 inch TV, it’s got multiple LCD screens, a voice recorder etc etc etc etc all packed into something the size of a pack of cigarettes, I think he might be able to sell it. He could probably sell it for even more if he had a working knowledge of the electronics behind it.
I would skip NASA and take it to Sony or Mitsubishi or Sharp or some other electronics company.
I hope he brought the power supply back with him.
:smack: :smack: :smack: And it’s probably about 2 years old so the battery only lasts about a day, if you don’t use the phone.
Well, the people of 1977 are a friendly but simple people. The beautiful shiny talk box will still awe them, despite its short life as unto the butterfly.
Incidentally, there have been similar bits in Star Trek. In the sixth film, Kirk pawns his antique glasses in 1986 San Francisco, while in Time’s Arrow, Data uses his communicator badge to get a grubstake so he can unleash his mad poker skillz in ~1885, also San Francisco.
Hmm, San Francisco must be full of future-past junk.
:::Past people playing with phone:::“y do u wr1te L!ke m0r0n$ 1n teh Fu7ur#?”
Mobile phones have been around since the fifties. There was an infrastructure thirty years ago. Whether modern phones would be compatible is another question. I’d guess yes, because at every stage the network must have needed to maintain compatibility with older phones.
Anyone know for sure?
I would point out that a similar problem was the main plot device of The Man Who Fell To Earth, except that it was alien rather than future technology. The strategy used there, as I recall, was to consult a patent attorney.
Thirty years is not all that long ago. Why would his money “be no good”?
OK, the $5, $10 and $20 bills are all peachy colored now, but with fairly little effort I’d imagine you could assemble some currency from less than 10 years ago that would pass muster in 1977.
You wanna make some dough, pick up all the under $5 digital watches you can before your time warp. Those babies were HOT. And those 99 cent solar powered hand held calculators would be too.
Oh, and see if you can put in a patent on the idea of a cassette tape portable music device with lightweight headphones, and for posterity’s sake, come up with a better name than “WALKMAN” this time around.
The answer is no.
No currently shipping phone is compatible with the ancient (non-cellular) mobile phone system, which was basically a walkie-talkie. For that matter, I’m not even sure if any new cellphones support the first analog system. I know ATT forced me to get a new phone so they could phase it out.
Explain, please. By my understanding mobile phones were cellular from their first inception.
In December 1947, Douglas H. Ring and W. Rae Young, Bell Labs engineers, proposed hexagonal cells for mobile phones.
I would think that the phone would be worth a metric shitload of money. It could be reverse engineered to reveal its “mind-boggling” technology, technology that cost billions and took decades to develop.
I mean just think, if someone from 2037 showed up with a CPU or a portable fusion reactor or whatever, don’t you think Intel, Microsoft, GE, etc… would pay dearly to have a look?
It’d give them some interesting ideas, but the technology just to analyze the thing didn’t exist, let alone replicate it. It’s not like you can just pop it open and make note of where the resisters and capacitors are. At best, I guess, you could slice the integrated circuits open one layer at a time while photographing the guts of the chip with an electron microscope or something…
And figuring out the software… oy. By the time you build the equipment necessary to see how the phone was built, you just build your own phone.
Good points. I was thinking about the electron microscope as well.
But if they lacked the ability to even analyze the phone, surely that would come with time, and they would be able to anticipate that. It makes me think of the movie “Contact”, where society stumbles upon the blueprints for a space/time travel device. A caveman, say, would have been able to do nothing with the plans, but, given time, the plans would become accessible and were so in the film. There seems to be a window where the recipient society is advanced enough to have the ability to analyze and understand the new technology, but where the recipient society is not so advanced that they have no use for it.
I dunno, just thoughts.
The battery technology alone would be worth pretty much any asking price, and that would be something that a tech company in the 70s would be able to analyse and reproduce.
Even if they couldn’t replicate the phone itself (and I would think they wouldn’t be able to), there are plenty of components in there that they could reverse engineer for very big profits, for example; the blue LEDs and the TFT screen - heck, even the little vibrate motor probably represents quite a wow in terms of miniaturisation.
I think a significant limitation would be the manufacturing abilities of the time. I’d wager that there would be people who could understand the science, but would be hamstrung by the lack of manufacturing options.
tim
The fact that someone conceived cells in 1947 doesn’t mean that cellular systems as we think of them today were commercially implemented then. The same article you linked talks about radio-based mobile phones much earlier than 1947 (it must be said here that all mobile phones are radios). Also, one of the first systems that used a “cell” supported a call only while the caller remained in the same cell, a far cry from anything we would consider a cellular system today.
If you were trained to recognize counterfeit currency, would you accept a twenty-dollar bill dated 2037?
Does anyone* actually look that closely at their money? I know the last time I pulled a $20 note from my wallet, I didn’t look at it so see which year it was made in or which Governor of the Reserve Bank’s signature was on it. I took it out of my wallet and exchanged it for lunch, and at that point my interest in the $20 note ended and I pocketed my change and retired to consume my newly acquired sandwich.
So, if someone from 2037 showed up in the US and the currency hadn’t changed too much (ie, assuming it’s still greenish and has pictures of dead Presidents on it), then I doubt anyone’s likely to notice that it’s got a 2037 date and a picture of Theodore Roosevelt on it.
*And by that, I mean “Normal People”, not you the Currency Collector down the back there