Assume that the future can change based on your actions, so any historical information that you bring along with you from the intervening 25 years may quickly drift out of the new realities history.
Edit: also assume that you can be given a healthy 21-year-old body if you want or take your previous self’s place.
Further, identification will be provided for you if you were not born at that time.
I come with scientific evidence of the impeding doom that will be brought by climate change and urge the world’s powers to reduce greenhouse gas emissions while there is still time! Surely everybody will listen to my proofs and act to protect the world!
Sure, Mr. Gore.
LOL. It would be easier to just become the richest man in the world and buy politicians
Probably a backpack full of smart phones, go sell them and retire.
Then cry that it’ll be a long time until I can use USB C again.
That’s a good idea but I wonder if anyone would buy them? Obviously the technology inside of it would be a quantum leap for any tech company that could get their hands on it. AT&t or ma Bell or Motorola would all easily fall over themselves to hand you several million dollars for it just so that they could have their top researchers reverse analyze the equipment.
The downside to that issue though is that it would be very difficult to get in contact with the right people to sell these devices at the right price.
I mean I could always post photos on Twitter and… Oh wait.
That kind of technology is hard to get any value from. Nothing in modern phones is innovative, and most of it would be an obvious evolutionary step to any specialist in their field.
Mostly, though, the phones would be useless. Cellular networks were in their infacy, and none of the standards or technology existed to charge them. Reverse engineering anything in them would be hugely expensive, for little return.
Smart phones would be interesting, but far less interesting than the existance of a person who has access to future technology. I think op would dissappear into a government facility not long after trying to pawn their goods.
Grays Sports Almanac
Information is power. A simple smartphone loaded with major historical decisions, sports results is enough to make you a billionaire. Take some tech textbooks to stay ahead of the game, maybe some newly developed medicine.
Given that the AIDS epidemic was still in full swing at the time, just being able to teach medicine makers how to make pRep would make you a billionaire just from the licensing fees.
What’s that? Profilactic?
You can just take back the experimental vaccine and save some people.
Prep is an anti-hiv pill.
If you engage in practices likely to expose you to HIV you should use prep.
If you have pRep in your system and you are exposed to HIV there is a high likelihood that the pRep will destroy the HIV and prevent the infection from ever taking hold.
Of course, it won’t do anything to protect you from the other potential negative consequences of risky behaviors that would expose you to HIV, but considering that it helps protect you from one of the worst potential outcomes it’s essentially a godsend.
Just thought Kiwix seems like it’ll be handy here, it lets you download Wikipedia and some other websites, and they have an Android app to view them.
(They have a web version too, which I actually selfhost for if the world ends or something /s)
I assume I get ID for a person born in '78 if I choose the adult body? I was born, but very young.
Hard drives of data compatible with old computers, and a few modern laptops for good measure. Maybe some electronics equipment too in case I really need to interface with something obsolete or proprietary. Some period-appropriate cash to live on before my first “job”. The 2000’s won’t know what hit them.
I’m not going to be able to take over the world, but I sure as hell can be a shadowy hacker figure that steers the course of history. I’ll probably avert 9/11 assuming I can get up and running fast enough, and try to steer China towards reform and detente with the West. Russia’s probably intractable. I wonder if I could tip the Florida election towards Gore, in order to get global warming taken care of faster. Giving a bump to renewables research could also help things along.
Like the other person mentioned their family, I would say that about my friends and other relations. I don’t think it’s possible for me to redo my life in a way that my decade old friendships would be the same (or even better) than what they became. I don’t even know if I will feel the same about my friends if I decide to relive my life as memory is a precarious thing and I can’t rely on how I feel about them to last until I meet them again and live life interacting with them while trying to change the world.
I could consider a 21yo body but as a millennial I would end up overaged for the people who were important in my life to have any meaningful relation with them.
I have considered the scenario of reliving my life, correcting my mistakes and maybe making some massive changes along the way, if I could somehow guarantee keeping the things that matter to me the same.
Invent Apple Google and Amazon all at once. Yes, I know they all existed at that time but I would just do their best ideas before them.
New Pied Piper
How the fuck do you take your self’s place? You’re either a your current age trying to identify as a baby or you’re a baby which doesn’t have the mental capacity to remember having the historical info.
I have some crazy news for you. Not everyone is 21. Believe it or not, but there are people who are older than that (I’m one of them! Boo!)
I misread OP. I was under the impression that you reset as a 21 yo
It’s simple. Say for instance you were 30 years old in 1999. You would just slot into your 30-year-old self and have an opportunity to make new decisions loaded with information about a highly likely future.
However, if you were a baby in 1999, you probably would not want to take your own life over so you would choose the new body option, and lead a completely new life separate from your old one.
But how is there not a 24 year difference and 2 of you? Makes 0 sense
Removed by mod
Greys. Sports. Almanac.
The only correct answer.
A computer with lists of winning lottery numbers, stock prices by day of all major companies, archived copies of webpages or, preferably, scanned in newspaper articles of all world events from 1999 until now, and lists of every politician and individual with net worths over $300 million.
Also patents for LCD screens, the microchips in use in the 10’s and now, the efficient solar panels China cranks out if I can get a hold of that information, modern efficient wind turbines, etc. Also important scientific papers written between then and now, especially for Ozempic and Wegovy.
Also, this might be the one practical use for dumb shit like Chat GPT and its ilk, so we’re bringing along a couple of GPUs and copies of each major open source AI I can scramble up.
I use this information to:
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Hopefully prevent 9/11
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Become filthy fucking rich
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Infiltrate the elite and start bumping off motherfuckers one by one Count of Monte Cristo style
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Distribute my ill gotten gains to the masses and use the rest to stop climate collapse
#EatTheRich
Please don’t get rid of 9/11, without it we wouldn’t have WKUK
They are so talented they did not need 9/11 to have a hilarious TV show
9/11 was happening so they ran into a dorm room that could see the towers from the window
That room ended up being Timmy’s
Okay, if it’s that important just throw a party and introduce them that way.
If you need them to trauma bond, kidnap the fuckers, pistol whip them a little bit and then let them escape from their own ingenuity.
:O I could never hurt Timmy Weems
If you put it on a scale between bruising Timmys face with the butt of a pistol and saving 3,000 lives on one day and tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of lives in the interim between due to the post 9/11 increase in American policing and military actions in other countries, then not pistol whipping him would be a crime against humanity for which you should be tried at the Hague and hung.
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A Lenovo P series with deepfacelab. I would work public perception of Dubya (and Jeb) to avoid the decades of war crimes.
All the FLOSS software i could put my hands on (with source code), a couple awesome smartphones, wikipedia dump, sports almanac, and a stable-diffusion rig.
I’m curious how stable diffusion plays into taking over the world.
I don’t know about stable diffusion but I know deep fakes would be handy. Being able to release videos to the public while retaining my privacy would be invaluable.
And if the CIA or the KGB decided to assassinate my alter ego they would have a hell of a time even finding the fucker and if they did find somebody that looked just like them and executed them that wouldn’t have killed me.
stock data
Bitcoin has outperformed stocks by about 100,000-fold. All you need is a fiver to invest at the beginning.
Note that that return is only for the early investors. If you are incredibly lucky and we have a very flush couple of years you might triple an investment in by 2030 now. But you are also very likely to just lose it All
An entire offline copy of Wikipedia up to Jan 1 2024 on a tablet. Having all the world events up to that date available to consult at my fingertips, I could use it in so many ways.
Don’t forget a charger, otherwise you’ll be screwed for awhile
USB 1.1 was already around in 1999, USB 2.0 being released in 2001 with Mini-A/AB/B being available in 2001, and the standard Type-A as early as 1996.
Take one of those USB Type-A to USB-C and you’re good enough until circa-2008 when USB-C starts to get around
