That doesn’t work.
If you strangle ‘baby Hitler’, the nanny, not wanting to get in trouble, will just go buy a mentally ill homeless woman’s baby to replace him. You will have unintentionally created ‘Hitler’.
I’d put a thousand dollars in a savings account, then go forward five years, check my account, sight see for a week, jump another five years, rinse, repeat.
Well, I wouldn’t do anything until my parents are dead. They’d be devastated if I just up and left without a trace, although I could go back into the past I guess, but… screw that. The future is way more exciting than the past.
As a religious person, I suppose I could keep travelling forward in time until The Second Coming. If it doesn’t happen, and the universe explodes instead, then at least that settles that.
Even though I’d love to see the future, I’d have to go back in time. I know the past existed, but I’m not sure how long the world will exist in the future. If I hopped into an apocalypse, that would be a problem.
Yep - Heinlein had this in one of his books. You could have yourself frozen, and the trick was to put your cash into an annuity that would benefit from compound interest when you woke up. Heinlein was big into compound interest.
There was another comic I once read where a guy had a time machine, and he put instructions to always buy gold with his interest to the bank. Each time he woke up, he was even richer - until he was the richest man in the galaxy. He went to sleep one more time and woke up with the gold market having crashed due to some sort of alchemy discovered.
So going into the future only works if you have a good investment advisor - then you can pop out and start over rich (hopefully), having had no expenses and pure returns if you invested well.
20 years ago I would have leaped forward, but now I would just go with Chowder’s plan. It is beautiful in its simplicity.
I would choose go back and do the groundhog day thing.
I’d go back with a shitload of money (or with winning lottery numbers) about five years and buy all the things I couldn’t afford then.
Yeah, I’m selfish. What of it?
Since I don’t really want to abandon my friends and family forever, I’d set the time machine for “backwards,” and never use it as a do-over device. Go out for a drive, get distracted, and rear-end someone? Pop back a few hours, and make sure you’re extra careful at the corner of Elm and 9th. Your SO pissed because you forgot your anniversary? Go back a day and pick them up something nice. Get in trouble with the boss? Go back a week and buy a winning Lotto ticket.
You know, small, simple stuff like that.
Chowder has a good plan, but I’d take it a step or two further.
- Do enough research to find out what the biggest mega-jackpot was.
- Make copious notes about the stock market between then and now.
- Hi Opal!
- Make notes about other big jackpots between then and now. (Optional. How much attention do you want for winning multiple big lottos?)
- Jump back to drawing prior to first big jackpot.
- Profit!
I have occasionally thought about how much fun it would be to have a stasis field generator. Set it for a century and see what we’re doing. Enjoy the sights for a couple of years. Repeat.
Re: Hitler. Why bother with infanticide when there are so many simple ways to prevent his conception in the first place?
Give mommy one of the contraception shots that lasts for several months.
Take daddy out for a week long bender so that swimmer that becomes Adolph expires.
Take daddy out and get him drunk. Administer field expedient vasectomy.
The list goes on.
Silly. Invest your remaining net worth in a growth industry. Travel forward long enough for your stocks to mature. Build another time machine. Send it backwards with an archeophile friend. Travel further forward. Build another time machine in the far future, which you can use to travel back. Keep building more. You could have unmanned time closets carry the materials to build more into the far-distant past.
No longer a problem.
I love that you had to include this parenthetical, given the described dimensions.
I’d go backwards, enough to be able to get enough money so that I’d never have to worry about money again. Also, enough so that I’d never have to live through the Bush presidency again. As that time got nearer, I’d convert the money into something I could take back with me (probably gems), and become a time tourist.
I’d be tempted to plant archaeological (or paleontological) artifacts that would thoroughly mess up scholars pretty much forever.
'fraid you can’t do that. Once you collapse the time travel direction wave, all time machines can then only ever travel in the direction you chose.
I’m reminded of Compounded Interest, although that required a two way time machine. A fellow appeared 600 year ago, invested a few gold coins and gave some prescient advice. A hundred years later he reappeared, made sure the now fairly large investment was doing well, gave some more advice, and left. Over the time, thanks to compound interest and his future based advice every century, the investment grew larger and larger until it and those managing it became the secret dominant force in the world. Finally, he showed up one last time and announced it was time to liquidate - in order to have the funds to build his extremely expensive time machine.
I would do one of two things… I would go back to the age of 17 and try to change alot of things. My path. My friends.
Then I would go back 60 years and have a sit down with my grand parents on both sides. On my mother’s to get to know them where they passed before I was born. And on my father’s side to answer alot of unanswered questions that has cause my father’s family not to talk for many years…
Hmm… Invent the time machine, fill it with gold, wait a day then send it back a little less than a day, onto a safe location. Remove the gold and dismantle the active time machine. So it’s me with twice the gold and a non activated time machine and parts for another time machine (no doppelgangers! :D.) Repeat as necessary. Figure out what to do with my time machine after I get sick of all the money. (probably some scheme about building a smaller time machine inside of a bigger time machine and taking the small one back to the present.)
I don’t think people have grasped the nature of time travel - you don’t go back in time and regress within yourself so you can live your life again. You go back as a second version of yourself, like Marty McFly, and the best you can do is meet yourself and advise you to do things differently.
Though I subscribe to the theory that you cannot change time - it will do what it will do because any “adjustments” you think you made via your travelling was what actually happened originally anyway - it’s all fixed and unchangeable once it happens.
If Guanolad is correct, then unless chowder has already WON the lottery, then somehow he won’t be able to win it the second go 'round. Computer is down in every store he tries, he juuust misses the deadline to buy the ticket, the paper he brought back printed the wrong numbers, etc.
I’d go forward in time, find my great-grandson, hop out of the time machine with an assault rifle, yell, “But it’s NOT a PARADOX if I shoot YOU!”, and open fire.
This edit brought to you by a balky Space Bar. Space Bar - the typist’s snack bar friend!
PS - I wouldn’t really shoot him, just scare him a bit, then explain who I was and we’d have a good laugh about it. Because, hey, if he’s my great-grandson, he probably has the same warped sense of humor that I do.
No, that’s not how it works either. If he goes back in time and buys a ticket that wins, it’s his time-travelling self that has won. His past self who has already lived through this time didn’t win and, at that time, is unaware that it’s his future self who is the actual winner.