I would try to find someone known for thinking ahead of his time; someone like Vannevar Bush. I wouldn’t fixate on one thing, I’d just calmly explain the world as it is today, comparing it and contrasting it to the world of 1950. (We would be smoking cigarettes and drinking Scotch in his office at MIT, of course.) I would be sure to pack a tweed blazer for my visit to 1950.
I’d find my Dad at Yale and tell him everything I knew about him, including his social security number. Knowing my Dad, that would convince him. He would most likely then be able to convince the theoretical physics graduate students he knew there.
I think I would probably tell a half-fictionalized and exaggerated story of how the Cold War-era years panned out. I would say things like:
“The US intervenes in a war in Vietnam to attempt to stop communism from spreading in Southeast Asia. The war turns into an absolute disaster because of troop morale issues and unwilling draftees; the American troops begin fighting each other, and hundreds of officers are killed by their own enlisted men. The war destroys the credibility of the American military and leads to the draft being discontinued, which in turn leads to the American military and the American people in general becoming weaker - therefore you must not intervene in Vietnam because communism in Southeast Asia does not matter. The Communist system will collapse on its own, later, and cannot be defeated militarily.”
“Because you wasted so much time trying to fight communism, you ignored the real threat, which is the rise of Islamic fundamentalism. You should never have funded the Afghan groups fighting against the Soviets and you should have allowed or even encouraged the Soviets to destroy the Mujahadeen. Likewise America allows the Saudis to grow far too powerful through oil revenues. America becomes completely financially dependent on Saudi Arabia; you cannot allow this to happen. Therefore you should do everything within your power to weaken the Saudis and attempt to install an American puppet regime there.”
They’d probably laugh at you for not sharing their certainty that Communism was the biggest threat to the free world and that the Soviet evil was to be resisted by whatever means possible. Such was the mindset of the time.
pretty easy for me. I have a cochlear implant.
Seriously – I’d upstage Djikstra.
I would tell them that nationalism is ultimately stronger than communism and that the Soviet system, underneath the formidable exterior of military parades and political pageantry, was actually very inefficient (because, of course, communism is evil and stupid and can’t really get things done - something I am sure they would agree with me on.) I am sure I could find a way to make them believe me.
Not too much to add, although I think y’all are underestimating how well you could do by suddenly knowing the melody and many of the words to hundreds if not thousands of upcoming hit songs. Plots of books/movies would be less useful, but who among us could NOT sing 10 or 20 songs from the Beatles catalog, verbatim? I’m quite sure that professional musicians and composers would recognize that what you were singing was from-memory imperfectly-realized versions of polished, professional songs, but would also fairly quickly realize that you yourself didn’t have the ability to write them (barring some massive and pointless hoax… since what would be the point of NOT claiming to have written them?).
Another approach is to find someone who is open minded and start describing the social implications and outer fixings of the internet and modern communications technology. I think it would be pretty clear to an intelligent and imaginative person in 1950 that your description of the social and cultural implications, along with extremely precise details of things like windowed user interfaces and so forth, were either actual knowledge or the single greatest work of self-consistent intellectual imagination ever accomplished by mankind. People like sci fi writers who had done enough thinking to start to imagine the implications of having cell phones would recognize how impossible it would be to invite such an edifice from whole cloth.
Granted, that doesn’t necessarily PROVE you’re from the future, but if you’re some schlub who shows no particular musical talent or knowledge or ability or training, who comes up with a massive glut of imprecisely-remembered but clearly genius-level songs in an incredible variety of musical styles plus your wild tales about the internet…
I guess it partly comes down to who you’re trying to convince… one random person? Some people will believe anything. A panel of learned experts? The public as a whole? Are you starting by just showing up on the street in your pajamas? If so, you’re bigger problem is surviving and finding the funds to travel around to find/talk to people, etc., but that’s a less interesting question than the actual convincing.
Assuming you’re trying to convince a panel of learned experts in various fields, who are skeptical (as they should be), I think that the combination of knowing zillions of songs along with being able to describe in great depth how things like facebook, amazon, ebay, etc work, along with the fact that none of them can figure out who you are, where you came from, or where you learned to be such a brilliant composer and futurist, should give you at least a fighting chance to get some of the them to tentatively accept the hypothesis. (Assuming that you don’t have the specific knowledge necessary for some of the other clever suggestions in this thread, which most of us don’t.)
Actually, the music bit is a pretty good idea.
As to who to convince, that’s why I picked Campbell, Asimov, Heinlein and the like.
They’ve already accepted the fact of time travel, at least intellectually, or they couldn’t write about. They may not believe it, but they have thought about it. That is a big advantage to me.
I know hundreds of songs from the 50’s and 60’s on piano and guitar, and I can sing them (albeit poorly tonally speaking). Fairly sure this would convince a few people once they were actually written and performed. Though the problem there is if I become more well known and the people who actually go on to write, record and perform these songs hears them, they won’t write them or might write them differently. And then there’s the whole issue of time travel changing how things turn out anyway. The same bands might not even form. Don’t see any reason why the same events would transpire either.
Right. The idea is not “here’s this song about Yesterday… I predict that it will be written and recorded in 20 years”, it’s “here are several hundred fully formed polished songs that I have made up out of thin air… how could any human being possibly do that?”.
Another avenue of attack that would work at least for me: I could in one day invent 30 or 40 incredibly fun, interesting, diverse and balanced board games. A professional board game developer (they had those in the 50s, right?) should be able to recognize what I was doing was unlikely to just be a bunch of games I’d been working on in my back office for a few years…
Play/sing them the real, clear words to *Louie, Louie. * No, wait…that won’t work, either.
Now I’ve just got this lovely image of successful Soviet puppet states now rising throughout Asia, perhaps forestalling the fall of the USSR—although it may survive in a state more closely resembling today’s China than Gorbachev’s Russia—and an upswing of Islamic Socialist movements rising to oust the decadent and militarily timid western powers from the Arab world. :smack:
On the other hand, refugee and first-time actor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wins an academy award for the classic 1984 film The Killing Plains. :eek:
For some reason, after reading this thread, I would think it’s easier for a female to convince others that she’s a time-traveller.
“Yeah, I’m going out to get drunk. What’s the big deal?”
“What do you mean ‘wearing jeans isn’t “ladylike”’?”
“Sucks major ass being in a world where the only form of contraception is condoms and rhythm method.” “But you’re not married!” “Yeah, so?”
SLAP!!! “You pinch my ass again, baldy, and you’re going to lose those fingers.”
Whether the OP planned this out or not, the idea sounds a lot like Kyle Reese’s problem from The Terminator! (Other than, you know, the, uh, Terminator.)
You’re sent back in time, essentially (literally) naked, and the only history you know is post-Judgment Day; you can’t predict who wins what elections because there were no elections; you can’t predict who won what World Series because there were no World Series (i.e. you’re not allowed to predict anything).
You can make rudimentary explosive devices out of common house hold chemicals. What 1950’s revolutionary couldn’t do that? So you’re left sounding like a crazy person. With only about 60 years separating you from your future timeline, I think it would be almost impossible to convince people you’re actually a futureman, and not just some really smart (or really crazy) dude in his underwears.