I would definitely do it. And this time I wouldn’t, at the age of 17, sell my soul to the devil.
I’d would go back with some hesitation. My first clear memories are from when I was in first grade. Luckily I was already a precocious reader so I wouldn’t arouse suspicion at first. My first priority would be to make sure me and siblings avoided certain individuals so we could avoid being abused. They weren’t relatives so it should be pretty easy to accomplish.
My second priority would trying to prevent my dad’s death from coronary heart disease. This would probably fail because my father was a stubborn bastard and even after his first heart attack he refused to make any major changes to his diet. (He did stop smoking though.)
Aside from that I’m not sure what I would do. There are just many options to think about.
What am I supposed to do with this information? Can I actually change things? In that case, it’s not just the butterfly effect, it’s me actually stomping on the butterfly, and I can’t be sure if all the knowledge I had from that point on is still correct.
If I’m supposed to relive everything just as it was, but with the wisdom and maturity I accumulated over the years, I imagine I’d end up like Emily in Our Town, so shocked and disappointed by myself and everyone else that I can’t stand it.
And either way, what am I supposed to do with the knowledge that even if the doctors found my mother’s cancer earlier, it would still be incurable and kill her before she was 70?
Six years ago, I apparently voted “Yes, with some hesitation.” I scrolled through the thread, eager to see what I had said about it back then, but alas, I did not post a comment. It would have been an interesting time-travel moment to read my 2012 reaction.
Anyhow, if I could change my vote, I think I might go with “Yes, absolutely!” today. My life is okay, but there are surely more days behind me than ahead of me. I don’t get around as well as I used to, and honestly, who knows how much time any of us has left? A hard reboot sounds like just the ticket.
I don’t have a ton of regrets, so I wouldn’t necessarily look at it as an opportunity to live my life over again, but to try a different one altogether.
Yeah, being an adult in a kid’s body might be tough for a while. But I tend to be a loner anyway. I’d bide my time being a voracious reader and learner. I grew up in a time when unsupervised kids were the rule rather than the exception; I imagine I’d find the local public library - just 4 blocks from my house - a lot more interesting than I did then.
And then, when I hit puberty… imagine having a young, trim body, with newly working parts, AND the knowledge and experience to use said parts to maximum effectiveness - not to mention having an understanding of the lady parts as well. I’d be a living legend at my high school. 
I suppose I’d do the stock market thing to make myself as wealthy as possible, and spend my bonus life collecting great experiences. No need to map it all out ahead of time. Maybe I’d seek out my wife or a few key friends; maybe not. There’s no guarantee the relationships would develop the same way anyhow. There would be other friends to make and lovers to have.
If I did it right, I’d die with two lifetimes worth of memories. Doesn’t sound too bad.
Not a chance. I’d spend years under the thumbs of my parents and trapped in a small town. Given the era and my dad’s position in the local Establishment, there’d be no chance of becoming an emancipated minor or anything like that. I also agree that your new reality would start deviating from your original reality almost immediately and much of what you remember will be useless. I already had one life where I made a lot of mistakes every step of the way. I have no reason to believe that in this re-do, my overall judgement will be any better. Plus, wouldn’t it suck in this new timeline if I got killed by a drunk driver while I was walking home from school one evening? Life is too full of random motherfuckery for me to believe that just because I know to buy Microsoft stock that nothing bad can possibly happen to me.
Oh, yeah. I get to go all the way back to kindergarten and start all over again, eh? Sign me up - I can use my knowledge as a middle-age man to totally ace every test I get in school, have better relations with my teachers and fellow students, and be a lot better off than where I am now.
So yeah…yeah, I’ll take it.
First off: Hell yes I’d take this chance. My life has broken in such a way that doing that would only improve my life and my experiences. I would also easily be able to steer my life to where it is now to meet Mrs. Cups. We don’t have kids so I don’t have to worry about that random chance thing with kids.
And speaking of…
IT was brought up early in this thread how it wouldn’t matter if we memorized powerball numbers or sports outcomes because of the butterfly effect, but I don’t see how that’s possible. Can someone explain to me how me re-living my life in northern Indiana would have any indication on, say, the Yankees and Mets World Series outcome?
In your re-do, you will be doing things differently because of your memories. You doing things differently will cause others to things differently. Their actions will, in turn, cause others to do things differently…and so on and so on and so on. Things like lottery numbers can be altered because the drawing took place only a second or two off from when it happened in your first life. For things like sports events, do you agree that it might be possible for a key player to miss a game through illness that we might be able to trace all the way back to you going to school with the sniffles when, originally, you stayed home?
Sure, why not? Knowing how some of those relationships turn out will increase any pleasure in the moment and decrease suffering. Not to mention saving my paper route money to buy stock in something called “Google.”
The MVP of the 2000 World Series, when the Yankees beat the Mets, was Derek Jeter. So suppose he knows a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy who behaves differently in some way because you do, and that ends up affecting Jeter, who decides to become a basketball player and never plays for the Yankees?
Obviously we’ll never know how likely this is, and of course the likelihood is proportional to a number of things.
It would take some time for differences in one’s actions to propagate out into the universe. Sure, eventually your different actions may add up to meaningful differences in how the events of the world unfold. But if you place your big-payout bets soon after your arrival in your toddler self, you can score your pot of gold before your new timeline is significantly different from your old one.
How do you do it? As your toddler self, write the next winning lottery number or superbowl winner (the latter ideally at the start of the season, and also with the final score) on a piece of paper, and hand it to one of your parents for safekeeping until after the event has come to pass. Once your parents are truly convinced that you are possessed of some kind of freakish precognition, they’ll be willing to bet big on your next declaration.
If you wait until you’re an adult and then place your own bets, it’s somewhat more likely that your actions over the past ~15 years will have affected the outcomes of the events that you remembered. You can still place long shot bets that don’t cost much, like Mega Millions/Powerball, and maybe you only need to hit once to make it worthwhile. Apart from that, investing in known successful businesses (Apple, Google, Amazon, etc.) when they first appear, and divesting/reinvesting before/after major market crashes (1987, early 2000s, late 2000s), seems likely to be reliable in producing a fortune. Investing like that isn’t relying on chaotic random events like lottery drawings; it’s relying on people, organizations, and large-scale historical trends that are likely much more resistant to major influence by one temporally misplaced soul.
I missed this thread the first time around (and apparently the second as well! :)), but this jumped out at me. This is exactly the reason I would never do this in a million years.
It may be funny on Family Guy, but in real life a two-year-old who can think and talk like an adult is a freakish, terrifying monstrosity. I could expect to be locked in a laboratory to be poked and prodded by curious scientists for my entire life, at best. That’s if I’m not just flat out murdered by some bozo who thinks I’m an unnatural abomination.
I’m not sure how the butterfly effect would cause lottery numbers to be different if one was very discrete in the changes one made. A lot people seem to misunderstand the butterfly effect. It states that small random events **CAN ** have a larger impact on systems, not that they MUST. Winning the lottery one day shouldn’t have any effect on what numbers are drawn on the next day.
Nah, I’m good. Way too much that can go very wrong.
This is essentially my argument against the original time this was stated and the response to me just now. I absolutely, positively, 100% know for a fact that my toddler-to-8th-grade-self (as I was in 2000) would have no effect on that series no matter how much I changed my life.
I know that SOME changes would happen (that’s the point of it after all) but it’s a bit crazy to think that I couldn’t make money off plenty of things, because it’s a literal impossibility that they would change. The Subway Series and Jeter’s MVP included.
The Butterfly Effect is the allure for me. Why the hell would I want to live my exact life over again, just with a little extra knowledge? I’ve had 53 mediocre years on this planet so far, if you gave me a Try Again card that got me back to about five years old, there is a load of things I’d do differently in the fervent hope that the entire universe would change along with me. Hell, I thought that was the point of the original question.
A few points to consider:
When your “new” body hits the teenage years, many of you responding will have subjectively lived 50 or 60 or more years. I would be in my 70s, subjectively. How are you not going to feel skeevy trying to forge romantic relationships with your classmates? Yes, you can pursue people closer to your mental/emotional age, but if they are good people they will not respond to your overtures.
There is a belief that, since it is just you fucking about with the timeline, the overall picture will not be changed much and it’ll be payday on betting and investing for you. What makes you so confident it is just you? This shadowy agency spent who knows how much developing this tech just so you could go back and not puke in Betty Ann’s lap during that disastrous blind date? I wouldn’t be nearly so sanguine that everything else will remain static and only glorious I will be making changes.
You might want to consider that, unless your family is made up of some incredibly tight-lipped people, how odd you’ve become and your apparent ability to predict the future will become known. Wouldn’t it suck to disappear for the whole rest of your new life into a CIA facility where some fuckers with cold, dead eyes will question you in any way they think necessary? Once you start giving them answers, so the hurting will stop, I think we can agree the big picture will be changing dramatically.
I would but living through my parents divorce and truly understanding it would be absolutely horrific. That alone makes me hesitate.
Nah, you’d just need to lie low for a few years. No need to blow your cover right away.
Two words: Sun Screen.