# Forum > Discussion > Mad Science and Grumpy Technology >  Using time travel to force accelerated technological progress

## SirKazum

So, assume you have a form of time travel. Don't worry about paradoxes; assume, for simplicity's sake, that the time travel deposits you in a parallel universe identical but unconnected to your own at the designated timeframe, so that whatever happens there has no bearing on your own timeline prior to the travel. Assume also that you can take pretty much anything you could reasonably carry on your person on this trip. Final assumption, the time travel should be kept secret from the people at the destination, or at least not be public knowledge.

So, with all that in mind, your goal is to create a timeline where technology has progressed a lot further than in our own, so that you (or your compatriots) can visit it further down chronologically and reap the rewards of ultra-advanced tech. A couple more parameters for the sake of discussion: say that only 1 person travels, that this person is knowledgeable enough though not necessarily a genius (say, a Masters in engineering, whichever field you consider most suitable), and that they travel to 40 years in the past (so, early 1983 in our case). What could they do to make sure that this other timeline's 2023, say, is as technologically advanced as possible? Again, they can take with them whatever they can reasonably carry. I have some ideas of my own, but I'm curious to hear what you guys might come up with!

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## sihnfahl

The issue I see is the interconnected nature of all the technologies.

For example, advancements in chemistry improve material sciences (since it's effectively a mix of chemistry and physics), which further becomes improvements in ... well, whatever fields that can best utilize the materials you produce (carbon fiber for planes, replacing aluminum skin at key locations, as one).

So having a specialist in ONE field would stymie advancement by the minimal knowledge in the interconnected fields.

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## Mark Hall

> A couple more parameters for the sake of discussion: say that only 1 person travels, that this person is knowledgeable enough though not necessarily a genius (say, a Masters in engineering, whichever field you consider most suitable), and that they travel to 40 years in the past (so, early 1983 in our case). What could they do to make sure that this other timeline's 2023, say, is as technologically advanced as possible? Again, they can take with them whatever they can reasonably carry. I have some ideas of my own, but I'm curious to hear what you guys might come up with!


First of all, I consider calling 1983 "40 years ago" to be unnecessary violence towards me, personally.

However, I would say a computer hardware engineer, with the know-how to build solid-state drives and more advanced chips, would do a lot; a 20 year jump in processing speed (up to early 2000s) would move things forward quite a bit. The increasing in computing power would have influence across a lot of industries.

A somewhat amusing option would be to bring a lot of information on a USB, and a laptop capable of using that USB, and a USB 3.5" drive. Go to your room, load up your laptop, and just copy over reams of data onto 3.5" discs. If you can manage a printer, and have the drivers for one of the old beasts, you can print stuff out, too. How do you make the chips you'd need? Well, consult this binder full of dot-matrix printouts.

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## Rynjin

Wasn't this the plot of a novel? "Immortals" who just reset back to their time of birth whenever they died or some such. And the bad guy was artificially advancing tech for some nefarious purpose or another?

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## Batcathat

> Wasn't this the plot of a novel? "Immortals" who just reset back to their time of birth whenever they died or some such. And the bad guy was artificially advancing tech for some nefarious purpose or another?


I think you're thinking of "The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August", by Claire North.

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## Rynjin

Yeah, that looks right.

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## Gnoman

Frankly, this is such a short amount of time that you wouldn't be able to bring any actual fundamental tech back.

What you _would_ be able to do is tell the past what directions progress happened in. A lot of technologies stagnated for a while because their early forms were in some way less capable than the ultimately worse alternatives, or because nobody knew what would be important and prioritized the wrong things, or... . Being able to go back and say "floppy discs work OK for a while, but cap out at a really low space, but these CD things area absolutely great for data, then we transitioned to chips like these ones coming from Toshiba for data storage. That scales best in the end" would be a huge boost.

Even more often, there was an idea of what would be desirable, but no clear notion of the details. Being able to describe what a modern smartphone is, how the interface works, and what you can do with it would be a huge boost because they would have a common model to follow.

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## Devils_Advocate

Ryan North has created some relevant apparel and reading material, although not specifically for the recent past.

"You know, Stephen Hawking said 'The greatest proof that time travel isn't happening is that we're not being visited by tourists from the future'. I'd refine that into 'the greatest proof that time travel isn't happening well is our embarrassingly unoptomized timeline'."

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## Chronos

> So, assume you have a form of time travel. Don't worry about paradoxes; assume, for simplicity's sake, that the time travel deposits you in a parallel universe identical but unconnected to your own at the designated timeframe, so that whatever happens there has no bearing on your own timeline prior to the travel.





> So, with all that in mind, your goal is to create a timeline where technology has progressed a lot further than in our own, so that you (or your compatriots) can visit it further down chronologically and reap the rewards of ultra-advanced tech.


These two ideas are at odds with each other.  If there's one world (World A) where Right Now it's 2023, and another world (World B) where Right Now it's 1983, and all you're doing is traveling between those worlds, then you'll never get anything more advanced than you'd get in the 2023 world, anyway.  At absolute most, you could get World B caught up to World A, technologically.  But then, if you wait 20 more years, World A will have 2043-level tech, and World B will...  also have 2043-level tech.  So you won't actually gain anything from the time-traveling.

The one exception I could think of would be if there are specific, once-every-few-centuries-level geniuses, who you want to be able to work on fields that weren't developed until after they died.  For instance, Einstein might be able to do some interesting things with loop quantum gravity, if he ever had the chance, that the current crop of geniuses couldn't.  But that depends on having a genius who's so much smarter than all of the current geniuses that he can outthink all of them, and that's very rare.

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## Rynjin

> These two ideas are at odds with each other.  If there's one world (World A) where Right Now it's 2023, and another world (World B) where Right Now it's 1983, and all you're doing is traveling between those worlds, then you'll never get anything more advanced than you'd get in the 2023 world, anyway.  At absolute most, you could get World B caught up to World A, technologically.  But then, if you wait 20 more years, World A will have 2043-level tech, and World B will...  also have 2043-level tech.  So you won't actually gain anything from the time-traveling.


I think the idea would be that you have Timeline A, 2023.

Travel back to Timeline B, 1983, make changes.

Travel to Timeline C, 2023, grab newest cutting edge tech.

Shift to Timeline D, 1983, make changes.

Etc.

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## Eldan

This is more or less the worldbuilding of Continuum, the time travel RPG. 

With the addition that what most time travellers do first is travel forward in time to pick up better tech. At which point the community of time travellers gives them the best possible time machine and they get to live in what is basically a singularity, where everyone has all possible technology and is constantly travelling in time so much and so casually that time is just another dimension, not unlike space and everyone meets themselves constantly.

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## SirKazum

> The issue I see is the interconnected nature of all the technologies.
> 
> For example, advancements in chemistry improve material sciences (since it's effectively a mix of chemistry and physics), which further becomes improvements in ... well, whatever fields that can best utilize the materials you produce (carbon fiber for planes, replacing aluminum skin at key locations, as one).
> 
> So having a specialist in ONE field would stymie advancement by the minimal knowledge in the interconnected fields.


Not quite as much if the engineer's job is less to use their own knowledge to advance things and more to understand and apply the knowledge they bring with them. Which brings me to...




> A somewhat amusing option would be to bring a lot of information on a USB, and a laptop capable of using that USB, and a USB 3.5" drive. Go to your room, load up your laptop, and just copy over reams of data onto 3.5" discs. If you can manage a printer, and have the drivers for one of the old beasts, you can print stuff out, too. How do you make the chips you'd need? Well, consult this binder full of dot-matrix printouts.


See, this is kind of what I had in mind. Bring a laptop full of technical manuals and schematics, and a bunch of diamonds to build a nest egg with they can use to create their own lab and/or company.




> These two ideas are at odds with each other.  If there's one world (World A) where Right Now it's 2023, and another world (World B) where Right Now it's 1983, and all you're doing is traveling between those worlds, then you'll never get anything more advanced than you'd get in the 2023 world, anyway.  At absolute most, you could get World B caught up to World A, technologically.  But then, if you wait 20 more years, World A will have 2043-level tech, and World B will...  also have 2043-level tech.  So you won't actually gain anything from the time-traveling.


I mean, the idea would be to, say, drop the agent off at 1983, then a short while later (in our world) arrange a trip to that timeline's 1993 to exchange tech, then 2003, and so on. The first trip or two might not yield much as the other world is playing catch-up, but then things should start to take off, ideally.

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## sihnfahl

> You know, Stephen Hawking said 'The greatest proof that time travel isn't happening is that we're not being visited by tourists from the future'.


There was an old sci-fi short story I remember where time travel had become so commonplace that the reason why the Continental Army had so many people in it was because of future visitors wanting to be part of it, so they all time travelled back with 'period appropriate' clothing and weaponry... to the point that the majority of the Army were actually time travelers.  And the reason why they won is because of all those future 'soldiers' knowing that they'd win!





> I'd refine that into 'the greatest proof that time travel isn't happening well is our embarrassingly unoptomized timeline'.


Ah, but you forget perspective.  It may not be 'optimized'... but it may be the one that is the least destructive to humanity as a whole!




> Being able to go back and say "floppy discs work OK for a while, but cap out at a really low space, but these CD things area absolutely great for data, then we transitioned to chips like these ones coming from Toshiba for data storage. That scales best in the end" would be a huge boost.


Which comes with the caveat the OS has to be able to access that amount of data.  Remember, the 286 came out in '82, and it had a memory limit of 16MB.  So to speed things up, you'd have to also introduce 32 and 64 bit computing, and the means of manufacture, OS design, and motherboard configuration.

You'd want to ramp up production of additional storage ASAP.  You want to speed up progress?  Make as many copies as possible and distribute them as wide as possible.

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## Mark Hall

> See, this is kind of what I had in mind. Bring a laptop full of technical manuals and schematics, and a bunch of diamonds to build a nest egg with they can use to create their own lab and/or company.


Heinlein's "Door Into Summer" pulled some weird stuff like this.

*Spoiler: I mean, it's old, but you might not want to read a spoiler*
Show


So, this guy is an inventor, and he's made household robots that are practical and versatile. He's going into cryostorage for some reason, but just before he does, he finds that his partner and his girlfriend are cheating him. He wakes up from Cryostorage and an entirely different company is ruling the domestic robot business.

He somehow discovers a way to go back in time (I cannot recall all the details). He goes back in time, steals all of his work from his faithless partner, starts the new business, then puts himself into cryostorage again, and wakes up in the future again. There's also something about his partner's young daughter also going into cryostorage to be an adult with him, but that's because it's Heinlein, and he's kinda gross)

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## Batcathat

> Heinlein's "Door Into Summer" pulled some weird stuff like this.
> 
> *Spoiler: I mean, it's old, but you might not want to read a spoiler*
> Show
> 
> 
> So, this guy is an inventor, and he's made household robots that are practical and versatile. He's going into cryostorage for some reason, but just before he does, he finds that his partner and his girlfriend are cheating him. He wakes up from Cryostorage and an entirely different company is ruling the domestic robot business.
> 
> He somehow discovers a way to go back in time (I cannot recall all the details). He goes back in time, steals all of his work from his faithless partner, starts the new business, then puts himself into cryostorage again, and wakes up in the future again. There's also something about his partner's young daughter also going into cryostorage to be an adult with him, but that's because it's Heinlein, and he's kinda gross)


While I agree about the gross part, the book might be worth reading just for the description of the main character's relationship with his cat. It's very sweet (and as a cat person, I kinda feel like dogs get almost all the good parts like that in fiction.)

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## gbaji

> [COLOR="#0000FF"]However, I would say a computer hardware engineer, with the know-how to build solid-state drives and more advanced chips, would do a lot; a 20 year jump in processing speed (up to early 2000s) would move things forward quite a bit. The increasing in computing power would have influence across a lot of industries.


I'll second someone else's comment. A computer hardware engineer would have problems because it's not the design of the computers themselves, but the technology to build them. IC fabrication is a very steady, slow, gradual, constantly evolving process that has to more or less bootstrap itself through each interation. Even if you arrived in 1983 with complete plans and schematics for a 2023 model computer chip, no one could build it. And even if you arrived with complete plans and specifications for a modern fab facility to build those chips, you couldn't build that either. You can't just skip ahead. You have to build B, C, D, E, F, G, H, and I, before you can get from A to J.

You could maybe speed things up a bit along the way, but not as much as you might think. Most advancements in this area aren't in design or concept, but rely on other ancilliary technologies that have to be developed along the way (lots of chemistry, and learning how to manipulate things we can't see), and a lot of *that* can't be done without advanced high speed computer systems to model and design those. You literally can't mask and layer metal, glass, and semiconductive material in a modern IC without computer aided systems running the operational components themselves. And I think most people would be shocked at how "fuzzy" the actual resulting chips are relative to the designs. Accuracy is less important than precision and consistency. And unfortunately, the costs to do development in these areas can't really be justified unless you're actually working on the "next step" in the process. Skipping ahead would be a really hard sell.

You have to build the machines that build the machines that build the machines that... You get the point.

I'd start maybe more basic. Advances in discovered chemistry, metalurgy, composites, etc. Walking into 1983 with a USB drive full of those things would actually just plain decrease the time taken to develop many technological advances across the entire spectrum. Computers, displays, materials for building all sorts of things, power components, transmission components, etc. Taking the time out of discovering "what material can we use to make the next step" would massively speed pretty much everything up.

I suppose we could also put pharmaceutical advances in there as well. Basically, anything that requires a ton of trial and error and "discovery" of how to make something, and what properties that something has, would work best. What typically slows down (or just delays for long periods of time) technological progress isn't the lack of ideas or designs, but the inability to actually build them with the materials and technology you have at hand. Eliminating a ton of dead end development along the way would make a huge difference I think.

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## sihnfahl

> You have to build the machines that build the machines that build the machines that... You get the point.


And skipping some steps isn't possible because there's no direct path for A to produce G.  You need tech C at a minimum... which is inefficient and slow compared to tech F.

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## Gnoman

> Which comes with the caveat the OS has to be able to access that amount of data.  Remember, the 286 came out in '82, and it had a memory limit of 16MB.  So to speed things up, you'd have to also introduce 32 and 64 bit computing, and the means of manufacture, OS design, and motherboard configuration.
> 
> You'd want to ramp up production of additional storage ASAP.  You want to speed up progress?  Make as many copies as possible and distribute them as wide as possible.


You're conflating RAM and storage here. FAT16, introduced with the PC-AT and the accompanying DOS 3.0, could handle 2GB of storage fine. Technically speaking, if you manage to get DOS 7.0 on a 286 you can use FAT32 and access up to 2TB of storage.

Equally important, you would not have to introduce 32 bit computing. 32-bit microprocessors were introduced in the late 1970s, and were a big thing in minicomputers before that. In the proposed timeframe, supercomputers were partially 64 bit already. The technology was there, home machines were just far weaker for reasons of cost and failure to see what the full potential would be. Knowledge of the future would very much have the chance to change things. In this example, you could go to IBM and convince them that they really need to put a proper 8086 instead of a 8088 in the PC/XT, or convince Microsoft that they need to go ahead and rebuild DOS because their quick and dirty OS is all too likely to hang on and that memory limit is a colossal pain.

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## veti

> However, I would say a computer hardware engineer, with the know-how to build solid-state drives and more advanced chips, would do a lot; a 20 year jump in processing speed (up to early 2000s) would move things forward quite a bit. The increasing in computing power would have influence across a lot of industries.


Not that simple. By 1983, the microcomputer revolution was already well under way, and people were improving and building new stuff just as fast as they could in every which way anyone could think of. There's a reason it still took 20 years to get to the smartphone - you need to do a lot of intermediate development to get to that point, not only in hardware, software and fabrication, but also in infrastructure, economics and marketing. You _can't_ simply shortcut all that.




> What you _would_ be able to do is tell the past what directions progress happened in. A lot of technologies stagnated for a while because their early forms were in some way less capable than the ultimately worse alternatives, or because nobody knew what would be important and prioritized the wrong things, or... . Being able to go back and say "floppy discs work OK for a while, but cap out at a really low space, but these CD things area absolutely great for data, then we transitioned to chips like these ones coming from Toshiba for data storage. That scales best in the end" would be a huge boost.
> 
> Even more often, there was an idea of what would be desirable, but no clear notion of the details. Being able to describe what a modern smartphone is, how the interface works, and what you can do with it would be a huge boost because they would have a common model to follow.


But maybe following all those dead ends was - necessary. I don't think anyone expected floppy discs to last forever, but they didn't need to - they bridged a gap. And being able to describe a smartphone in detail would be - nice, I guess, but by approximately 1990 Steve Jobs already had that vision in his head and was working towards it just as fast as technology would go.




> In this example, you could go to IBM and convince them that they really need to put a proper 8086 instead of a 8088 in the PC/XT, or convince Microsoft that they need to go ahead and rebuild DOS because their quick and dirty OS is all too likely to hang on and that memory limit is a colossal pain.


I honestly think the biggest single contribution one person could make would be to introduce and promote the concept of "technical debt". Make people understand that their "quick and dirty" solutions will be hanging on and still in use for 20, 30 years or more. That would potentially save the world a lot of trouble when it comes to the late 90s in dealing with the Y2K bug, and might even give us a more secure and trustworthy internet today.

It's not flying cars, but it is a _lot_ of wasted effort we could be spared, which could be directed into something more useful instead. 

I'd also try to introduce, and ridicule, the idea of cryptocurrency. Just maybe we could avoid that cesspit entirely.

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## Khedrac

Unfortunately I agree with the position that very little technical advances are of much use if only going back 40 years from now.  Probably more useful would be modern history books and geological surveys, plus scientific papers about the impact of man on the ecosystem (i.e. what not to do) though I expect they would be mainly ignored or ridiculed.

Where one could make a difference is to take back a lot of today's cyber-world concepts (facebook, twitter) and persuade people to treat the concepts like email - establish a standard format for how to pass the data then let people use the service provider of their choice to connect to anyone they want to.  Whilst pre-empting the super-giants of the Information world (well mainly) this might just enable faster progression as everyone could use the technologies without having to subscribe to multiple similar services to reach everyone....
One can but hope.

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## Chronos

> Quoth *Rynjin*:
> 
> I think the idea would be that you have Timeline A, 2023.
> 
> Travel back to Timeline B, 1983, make changes.
> 
> Travel to Timeline C, 2023, grab newest cutting edge tech.


Except that Timeline C would be one where you didn't travel back, so Timeline C's 2023 is no different than ours.



> Quoth *SirKazum*:
> 
> I mean, the idea would be to, say, drop the agent off at 1983, then a short while later (in our world) arrange a trip to that timeline's 1993 to exchange tech, then 2003, and so on.


But the premise was that you're just moving perpendicularly to another timeline, so you can't go to different points on the same timeline.

If you're going to use a "well, it's not REALLY time travel" premise to avoid the paradoxes, then you're also avoiding the benefits, because the benefits come from the same place as the paradoxes.

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## BaronOfHell

> Except that Timeline C would be one where you didn't travel back, so Timeline C's 2023 is no different than ours.


I suppose timeline C is the timeline where 40 years ago some sufficient identical copy of you did what you already did to timeline B.

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## Solauren

The problem with any attempt to accelerate technological development is one that is over looked.

Just because you have the knowledge to do something, doesn't mean you have the needed infrastructure.

So, going back to 1980 with the total sum of human technical knowledge.

First, it would be useful.
However, it wouldn't result in what we would consider a modern gaming computer being on the market by 1985.

Why?
Because you're trying to make it with 1970s/early 1980s infrastructure.

To make that gaming computer, you'd have to upgrade the infrastructure (which could require anything from designing and building a single new factory from 'the ground uo', to a dozen factories, redoing part of the telecommunications grid, putting a satelite in orbit, and opening a few dozen mines across the world), and then train people on how to use same infrastructure.

You will cut research and development time down considerably, but it won't be an overnight transformation.

At best, you might cut a 2022 gaming computer 'on the shelf' in half the time.

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## Rynjin

> Except that Timeline C would be one where you didn't travel back, so Timeline C's 2023 is no different than ours.


Timeline C would only exist because of the split caused by altering timeline B.

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## J-H

_"Technological advance is an inherently iterative process. One does not simply take sand from the beach and produce a Dataprobe. We use crude tools to fashion better tools, and then our better tools to fashion more precise tools, and so on. Each minor refinement is a step in the process, and all of the steps must be taken."_
-Chairman Shen-Ji Yang, Alpha Centauri

This is very true with computing.  The Asianometry channel on Youtube has quite a few videos about semiconductor fabrication and the processes used to get smaller and smaller chips.  Modern high-end fabs use what I would call _ridiculous_ technology, where you're using droplets of high-temperature liquid metal at high speed to make a repeating lense to aim and focus a laser to make super-microscopic cuts on silicon wafers, which themselves are in a vat of ultra-pure water with contaminants measured in single-digit parts-per-million.

Consider also that I had books with the F-22/F-23 prototypes in them around 1991 or so, and the F-22 is still the modern air superiority fighter 30 years later.  The only real changes in aerospace tech since the 1980s have been in the area of better stealth coatings and more sophisticated computing.

The internet?  Same thing.  You need the tools to make better tools to make modems fast enough to support it (look at an early 80s magazine and laugh at the blazing fast 1200 baud modems sometime), and the infrastructure to support it.  Those undersea fiber optic cables didn't lay themselves.

We've had some advances in genetics and medicine, so you can take back better ways to fight cancer - most of which require $100k-$10M expenditures in terms of specialized radiation or chemicals.  Similarly, modern EMS more or less existed by the 1980s (in EMT school they said it was an outgrowth of the late 60s/early 70s experiences with medicine in Vietnam, and the development of the Golden Hour theory).

If you want to time travel to make money, being able to take back detailed chemical breakdowns and fabrication instructions for new medicines is reliable.  R&D expenditures in that industry are huge and there are a lot of dead-end roads that take millions of dollars to investigate.  However, again, this isn't going to change the world in a leap forward.

You'd want to go back to the late 1940s/early 1950s for that.  There was a huge flowering of technological innovation between 1945 and about 1975 where many new things were invented or built that could be sped up in computing, materials science, aerospace, manufacturing, automation, safety, medicine, and more.  Speaking of aerospace again, they designed the B-52 in the 1950s that's going to be flying into the 2050s because we can't come up with anything better.  But that also gets into issues of "Why do things take 20 years to build now instead of 4 years then" that relate to regulation, standards, processes, and apparently different theories on whether or not the average IQ is going up or down by the decade.  There's also the technological difficulty curve of making the initial changes in a new field, and then having progress slow down as the low-hanging fruit is taken care of.  It took 40 years to go from Kitty Hawk to jet engine prototypes, and here we are 80 years later still using jet engines.  Ours are just better.

You could download and take with you a bunch of printoffs of patents, but of the tens of thousands of patents per year, how many are going to be meaningfully different?  A patent for the layout of a touchscreen interface finger-scanner is not going to cause a leap forward.  Same with a lot of other things that are generally useful but in practice are obscure minor details.

This topic by nature references a lot of real-world history, but I believe it's OK since it's only in the context of when different practices and technology were developed.

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## SirKazum

> Except that Timeline C would be one where you didn't travel back, so Timeline C's 2023 is no different than ours.
> 
> But the premise was that you're just moving perpendicularly to another timeline, so you can't go to different points on the same timeline.
> 
> If you're going to use a "well, it's not REALLY time travel" premise to avoid the paradoxes, then you're also avoiding the benefits, because the benefits come from the same place as the paradoxes.


Okay, so I think it bears explaining exactly where I'm coming from. As you might have suspected, this is based on an idea for a science fiction story - I haven't written anything yet, it's mostly just concepts at this point. But the basic way that time travel works in this setting is: you can take any given known universe (that is, your "base" reality, or any other universe you have previously traveled to) and open a portal _apparently_ to any given point in space and time in that universe... except that each portal you open is to a completely new universe, just one that's exactly identical to the one set by your parameters. So, say you want to travel to 1983. You open a portal to a universe that is exactly identical to our own in every aspect, including history, but in 1983. Let's call that universe "A", so you open a portal to 1983-A. Then you get your guy there to accelerate technology or whatever. Shortly thereafter, you set your machine to calculate how to open a portal to 1993-A. That is actually impossible, because you can never go back to world A... but, by setting that as your goal, you go to 1993-B, which is exactly identical in every respect to what 1993-A _would_ be, including the presence of your time-traveling agent and whatever changes they cause. Then you exchange tech with them or whatever, go back, and set your machine to 2003-B, which makes your arrive at 2003-C, which is what 2003 looks like considering that the previous two trips _did_ take place in that universe. (If, instead, you set your machine to 2003-A, you would arrive at a universe where the 1983 trip took place, but not the 1993 one.) That way, you _can_ for all practical purposes go back to the same timeline as previous trips and reap the benefits of time travel, even though _technically_ it's not the same universe.




> The problem with any attempt to accelerate technological development is one that is over looked.
> 
> Just because you have the knowledge to do something, doesn't mean you have the needed infrastructure.
> 
> So, going back to 1980 with the total sum of human technical knowledge.
> 
> First, it would be useful.
> However, it wouldn't result in what we would consider a modern gaming computer being on the market by 1985.
> 
> ...


Quoting this reply because it seems like a good summary of an important point that a lot of people are making. So, indeed, it seems that the requirement of infrastructure and the presence of supporting technologies should slow down progress... but I don't really mind that if technology can still progress appreciably faster than it should. In fact, upgrading the existing infrastructure is part of the reason why I envision the guy bringing diamonds and stock market data (which would gradually become useless over time as that world's economic history decouples from our own, but hopefully is enough to give the agent a big head start) to become massively rich, so they can build a massive tech company that will become a major influence in the market and dictate what other industries need to catch up to. Of course, there's only so much that a single company, no matter how enormous, could do given that they need materials and other resources that require massive infrastructure in place to generate, but with a smart enough plan I'm hoping that the guy could, as you put it, have what would be a cutting-edge 2023 computer in our world ready by 2003.

If you're asking yourselves, "why limit yourself to 40 years? Why not go to 3000 BCE with plans for agricultural advances, better writing systems and recording materials they could manage at the time, etc., and then travel to that world's 3000 CE?" Well, the #1 reason if I'm honest is "so the plot works", but I also think that being too ambitious would make the resulting world too unpredictable and even potentially dangerous - you don't know if they're going to overwhelm your folks, walk back through the portal and conquer _you_ if they're powerful enough. Also, you need a loyal agent there to both keep the plan on track and to have an ally you can communicate and exchange knowledge with when you come back later in the timeline - relying on cooperation with "locals" for that might be too risky. So I thought going back in time 40 years and then coming back to the same timeline in 10-year intervals would be the sweet spot for going far enough back to have significant room for improvement while still having a good enough technological base to start from and achieve good results within a single lifetime.

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## sihnfahl

> So they can build a massive tech company that will become a major influence in the market and dictate what other industries need to catch up to. Of course, there's only so much that a single company, no matter how enormous, could do given that they need materials and other resources that require massive infrastructure in place to generate, but with a smart enough plan I'm hoping that the guy could, as you put it, have what would be a cutting-edge 2023 computer in our world ready by 2003.


That's optimistic.  Remember, it's also what the market can bear and costs involved.

Example?  "Little" company called IBM introduced one of the first of what would become our 'smartphones'.  Hello, my name is Simon and I can do calling... and faxes and such for a hour ... then I need recharging.

As you can see, it didn't even make it a year for various reasons.  Plus, if you calculate out inflation, the price was US1800 or so in today's dollars...




> You're conflating RAM and storage here. FAT16, introduced with the PC-AT and the accompanying DOS 3.0, could handle 2GB of storage fine. Technically speaking, if you manage to get DOS 7.0 on a 286 you can use FAT32 and access up to 2TB of storage.


Not really.  Remember, there's still the fact that chips like the 68000 still had a 24 bit data bus, allowing it to access 16MB of physical memory.  Consider the size of modern CAD/CAM programs and the memory requirements for the computations, which you'd need when you're trying to ramp up from the 68,000 transistors to, say, an Ryzen 7s almost 11 billion... and all the motherboard requirements to support it.  And I really don't want to think how long it'd take to do those computations, considering the 68000 was 4.8MIPS.

----------


## Mark Hall

> Not that simple. By 1983, the microcomputer revolution was already well under way, and people were improving and building new stuff just as fast as they could in every which way anyone could think of. There's a reason it still took 20 years to get to the smartphone - you need to do a lot of intermediate development to get to that point, not only in hardware, software and fabrication, but also in infrastructure, economics and marketing. You _can't_ simply shortcut all that.


No, you can't, but you can accelerate it, which is what you do if you want to bootstrap a technology industry. And since this scenario allows for multiple time-travels, you can do it again and again.

You take information back; a couple terabytes worth on USBs, a laptop that can run those USBs, and a way to transfer data from the laptop to contemporary storage material ("I have daisy-chained enough converters to let me use a dot matrix printer, and had someone write me drivers"). Get the information on the *steps* out there, because you've got data storage to carry that sort of thing. Let that 40 years worth of data iterate again, with people making improvements, and advancing further, then you take the data from THAT back, lifting the base higher again.

You're not creating 2020 tech in 1980 ex nihilo. But you _are_ running the game with a walkthrough, so you don't have to figure out WHERE the key to the kitchen pantry is... you picked it up the first time you went through the ballroom. At the same time, you're going to get random background changes... in c-series, there's an improvement in 2010 that b-series didn't take, so your d-series 2010 (starting from 1990c) is a lot different than where it would have been if b series had been allowed to iterate.

Here's an example. It is 2020a, and you, Justin A Guy, are 60 years old, and in possession of a time machine. So, you gather up all the data you can on computer developments over the past 40 years, load it onto a laptop with some legacy features, and travel back in time to 1980b to meet with Justin B Guy. You give him next week's lottery numbers and this technical data, and teach him how to access it. You jump forward to 2020b, get all the information that Justin B Guy has, and let him jump back to 1990c. Justin C of 1990c gives data to Justin B, who travels forward to 2020c, where Justin C takes the information he's gathered to go back to 2000d, giving Justin D a leg up. In 2020e, Justin D goes back to 2010f, passes on his information, and goes to 2020f

In this time, we don't have a smooth acceleration by any means, but we do have several jump-starts, all without anyone involved aging more than they should. Justin A is hanging out in 2020b, B is in c, C is in d, etc. All of you are 60 years old, living in the timeline jumpstarted by your information. Each iteration is ahead of the one previous, because of the technology walk-through provided by your predecessor.

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## Quizatzhaderac

In terms of computer hardware, I'd say it makes more sense for this to be universe B, the universe with the external knowledge source always ready to advance to the next step just as soon as we finish building the tools.

In terms of what I'd do, I invent social media earlier and steer it more towards being a utility. I don't have a silver bullet to the everyone gets a voice/conspiracy theory dilemma, but I think going into it knowing that it would be a problem would give me some advantage.

The other big thing that has changed is the increase in automation over the last 40 years. If you've never worked in a factory you may not be aware of how huge a deal this is. Maybe two or three times as much is manufactured per worker now-a-days. All else equal this is a good thing, but doing this even quicker raises complicated questions about employment opportunities and wealth distribution that we can't really discuss here.

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## sihnfahl

> ("I have daisy-chained enough converters to let me use a dot matrix printer, and had someone write me drivers"). Get the information on the *steps* out there, because you've got data storage to carry that sort of thing. Let that 40 years worth of data iterate again, with people making improvements, and advancing further, then you take the data from THAT back, lifting the base higher again.


There you get into the scaling issue.  Dot matrix is 240 dpi, right?  Now imagine the resolution issues printing out a chip with 5 million transistors...

You'd need a plotter for that job.




> You give him next week's lottery numbers..


You'd give the numbers to the largest jackpot in the timeframe if you went that route.  You want to jumpstart a tech, you'll need lots and lots of capital.  Go whole hog or not at all.

And even then, you'd need backers.  You're Joe Blow Kid who just suddenly -came into- money (60-year old you going back in time to a 20 year old fresh-face youth still in college).  So just as important as the tech how-tos would be a list of people you'd need to connect with to get the manufacturing off the ground, not just up to speed...

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## gomipile

> There you get into the scaling issue.  Dot matrix is 240 dpi, right?  Now imagine the resolution issues printing out a chip with 5 million transistors...


Things like this are where hindsight of knowledge of the best tools of each era comes in.

The Linotron 202 digital typesetting machine came out in 1978 and printed at 700 DPI. It printed on smelly bromide originals which were in practice used to make printing plates and rollers, but it did the job. Also, it was impossible to print arbitrary graphics on it or make your own typefaces with the software provided by the manufacturer, but...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVxeuwlvf8w

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## Storm_Of_Snow

> The issue I see is the interconnected nature of all the technologies.
> 
> For example, advancements in chemistry improve material sciences (since it's effectively a mix of chemistry and physics), which further becomes improvements in ... well, whatever fields that can best utilize the materials you produce (carbon fiber for planes, replacing aluminum skin at key locations, as one).
> 
> So having a specialist in ONE field would stymie advancement by the minimal knowledge in the interconnected fields.


Well, as someone who studied Materials Science, while there is some chemistry (and biology for certain specific applications, like prosthetic joints), it's mostly physics and very heavy maths.  :Small Wink: 

My main point would be that advances in one field also need suitable advances in other fields to be able to build the thing that creates that advance - as an extreme case, Peter Higgs theorised about what's now called the Higgs Boson in the 1960s, but think of all the work that was needed before they could even plan the LHC, let alone start to build it. Materials science, computing, power systems, even geology and mining to construct the tunnels it sits in.

But the biggest issue I can see for taking science and technology back in time is whoever you have trying to advance it for you understanding what you're bringing back - the longer it takes, the less you're going to advance at the end of the time period, and that's only going to get worse with each iteration. And that's assuming they understand it perfectly - if they miss something, then there could be dire consequences.

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## Lvl 2 Expert

I'm tempted to send a political specialist. 1983 to now really isn't _the_ most violent era in our history, but I bet we could still increase technological progress by making everyone work together better. Plus you'd save a whole bunch of lives in the process. Getting their asses in gear on climate change might work too. It won't really improve where we stand now, but it might improve where we stand a hundred years from now.

I also agree with the idea of just bringing a long list of which ideas did and did not pan out: "Quantum mechanics: still weird, still works. Moon travel: we haven't been back yet, and the only real reason we'd ever want to is tritium. Nuclear Fusion: much harder than we thought, haven't got it producing energy yet (okay, that one recent time experimentally), seriously doubting economic viability, running out of tritium. Video games: tell Atari not to try and have one guy make an ET game in one month, increase budgets and team sizes to match profits, you'll be golden. Try to invent an "Unreal Engine"."

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## veti

> I'm tempted to send a political specialist. 1983 to now really isn't _the_ most violent era in our history, but I bet we could still increase technological progress by making everyone work together better. Plus you'd save a whole bunch of lives in the process. Getting their asses in gear on climate change might work too. It won't really improve where we stand now, but it might improve where we stand a hundred years from now.


What sort of "political specialist" do you think could achieve that? There was no shortage in 1983 of reasonably clever people of genuine goodwill who were already doing their best to work for generally-beneficial aims for humankind. What sort of person do you think could suddenly help them to achieve the success that eluded them, in many cases, all their lives?

All the plans that depend on "telling people stuff" run into a problem: how do you get anyone to listen to you? If you publicly announce that you're from the future - and prove it by predicting something = you'll instantly be swamped with demands, from absolutely everyone, for information that you probably don't want to give out, even if you're persuaded they mean well. So how do you convince the people you _want_ to believe that you know what you're talking about, without blowing your cover to the rest of the world?

OK, you can pick one or two people to carry your message to the world. Then they run into the same problem: how to prove they know what they're talking about? Obviously they can become very rich (although, quick thought: what _were_ the winning lottery numbers on 8 January 1983? Is that information even recorded anywhere you can get at it?), but even "being very rich" isn't an instant passport to success in any other area (such as developing products or guiding politics). I can't give real-world examples, but I can think of a number of people who have tried to convert financial success into achievement in some other area, and some who've achieved modest successes, but none who have really "changed the world" to the degree the question seems to posit.

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## Fat Rooster

I think the best thing you could do if you were able to go back 40 years would be to push for SIMD compute units. Making that generation of supercomputers 10x more powerful would have knock on effects for many industries. Improving the programming languages would probably make a big difference too.
For actually pushing semiconductors forward you would probably be best bringing back some good photoresists. 193nm lasted a very long time, so and boosting of that tech will accelerate things considerably.
You could push LEDs through pretty quickly. A lot of that was just finding the correct band gaps. Pushing silicon carbide for power electronics might be worth doing too.
You might make progress on some superconductor research, but we are not actually at the point that we could just point them towards a world changing superconductor. The best ones currently in use were discovered in 1986 anyway.

Maybe the simplest thing you could do is point out that graphene can be isolated with tape. We haven't been able to do much with it in 18 years, but an extra 22 might help!

Pretty much every leap in the last 40 years has been integration of computer control and design into some area (many areas have steadily improved, rather than making a leap, but that is even harder to accelerate). Improving computers and computing should definitely be the priority, but is quite hard to do. The foundations were already in place by 1983, and since then the rapid progress has only recently really stalled.

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## SirKazum

> I'm tempted to send a political specialist. 1983 to now really isn't _the_ most violent era in our history, but I bet we could still increase technological progress by making everyone work together better. Plus you'd save a whole bunch of lives in the process. Getting their asses in gear on climate change might work too. It won't really improve where we stand now, but it might improve where we stand a hundred years from now.





> What sort of "political specialist" do you think could achieve that? There was no shortage in 1983 of reasonably clever people of genuine goodwill who were already doing their best to work for generally-beneficial aims for humankind. What sort of person do you think could suddenly help them to achieve the success that eluded them, in many cases, all their lives?


Hard to go into this topic at any length or depth without running afoul of board rules, but yeah. A shortage of well-meaning people with good ideas has never been a problem in politics, and I doubt we could really bring any new ideas to 1983 in that particular field that someone somewhere wasn't already saying. The problem has always been getting people to listen and/or overcoming the ramifications of the game-theory nature of politics that kinda "forces" people to be crappy in general.

But I think it's a good point overall about how bringing new information (including tech) runs into the problem of getting people to listen. Which is why I'm thinking the real way would be to give your agent the means to get rich (I was thinking privileged stock market information rather than lottery numbers or anything like that, but either way) so they can create a company big enough to do what needs to be done at their own direction, no need to convince anyone else. Maybe proving something works by just _doing_ would also be enough to convince others that it's a good idea, so the industry as a whole might start moving its research in the right directions.

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## Anymage

Re: political information, the most a real time traveler could do would be predict major flash points and neutralize them.  Here we're talking less big and vague like "pollution is bad", and more specific and actionable like being properly placed to steer the titanic.  Although with how chaotic real world systems are, averting even significant disasters is unlikely to have predictable long-term social change, much less predictable technological change.

Re: technical information, one of the problems that's only being hinted at is the question of who you tell.  If you only tell one group of people (the classic movie choice where "the government" is one major entity and geopolitical ramifications are anywhere from downplayed to ignored), you're handing out a massive tech edge and shouldn't be surprised to see that have massive downstream political consequences.  If you release major technological advancements openly, you'll be disrupting balances of power.  If you try to position yourself as a technological leader, expect supply chain problems as the local tech isn't up to the standards you want, and lots of espionage if you try to build the tools to build the tools yourself.

And looking at this as a fictional work, if you're able to open time portals to essentially arbitrary points in time, it'd be smarter to just look ahead to the future and see what tech they've made the long way around.  Unless attempts to peek forward have run into potential problems that could threaten the present like a gray goo scenario.  However, in that case, mentioning gray goo is setting up a chekov's gun that it'd feel awkward to leave unfired.

However, looking at this as a fictional work, it shouldn't be too hard to salvage the concept.  In a slightly alternate 2023 we've figured out how open portals to alternate universes, but most of them have nothing to give us.  (Most of them are empty space around the portal, a few are uninhabited worlds that can be mined but where the portal size bottlenecks just how much useful material can be gotten through, one was an antimatter universe and that's why new portals must be tested with major caution, etc.)  One luckily happens to resemble our universe almost perfectly except for the fact that time runs faster there, so we land our agents at some point mirroring the 1980s and then check in at intervals.  This lets you have a world that's mostly our 2023, while the other lets you take decade retrospectives of a tech advanced alternate world, plus allows you to handwave the trickier geopolitics that frankly sound like they would just distract from your story.

My hunch, however, would be that if they ran with basically a tech walkthrough they'd catch up to us in half the time.  Which assuming the best case scenario (the scientific and technological powers of the world all work together to advance technology, geopolitical side-effects are at most a background detail, etc), the other side running our notes as a walkthrough would let them advance twice as fast.  They'd hit our point sometime in their 2000s.  Then assuming that their scientists are prepared to pivot perfectly as soon as our notes are used up instead of floundering without guidance, leaves their 2010s and 2020s looking where we predict ourselves to be in 10 or 20 years respectively.

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## Saintheart

Not sure if explicitly covered, but I haven't seen the good old Gray's Sports Almanac tactic referred to yet in connection with producing the local resources required to advance technology in the 'backward' timeline.  Assuming this timeline is identical to ours and the sudden displacement of your mass and weight into a timeline in which you do not exist doesn't lead to Butterfly Effect conditions, then nothing in the timeline is likely to be markedly affected by one guy having an improbable run of luck betting on every high-odds sporting event in history.  Sure, you'll probably get locked out of the betting game entirely after a few massive wins.  At which point it's time to head over to the biggest casino on the planet, also known as the stock market.

Our historical records of stock market prices back to that year are pretty good, and even if you don't intervene to stop corporate pratfalls like Sculley pushing Steve Jobs out of Apple or, say, Lehman Brothers collapsing, you're going to assure yourself of a pretty significant pool of funds very, very quickly.  One big short ahead of Black Friday in October 1983 is enough to give yourself a nice pool of funds to start with.  And since you're a time traveller, you can just disappear back to your own timeline for a few days if the SEC comes asking questions about why your corporation _always_ make the call right.

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## veti

> Our records of stock market prices back to that year are pretty good, and even if you don't intervene to stop corporate pratfalls like Sculley pushing Steve Jobs out of Apple or, say, Lehman Brothers collapsing, you're going to assure yourself of a pretty significant pool of funds very, very quickly.  One big short ahead of Black Friday in October 1983 is enough to give yourself a nice pool of funds to start with.  And since you're a time traveller, you can just disappear back to your own timeline for a few days if the SEC comes asking questions about why your corporation _always_ make the call right.


The historical record of stock prices is (I would guess) more than good enough to make you extremely rich in the first few months. But stock prices are extremely sensitive to, basically, everything on earth, and the presence in the market of someone with preternatural predictive ability trading on a large scale would very soon start to have effects of its own. By the time you get to October, the effects might well be strong enough to avert, or at least change the timing of, Black Friday. And the historical records you brought with you would by then be worthless.

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## Saintheart

> The historical record of stock prices is (I would guess) more than good enough to make you extremely rich in the first few months. But stock prices are extremely sensitive to, basically, everything on earth, and the presence in the market of someone with preternatural predictive ability trading on a large scale would very soon start to have effects of its own. By the time you get to October, the effects might well be strong enough to avert, or at least change the timing of, Black Friday. And the historical records you brought with you would by then be worthless.


... so you're saying I have to make enough money to induce a massive stock loss and then place it such as to induce a massive stock loss in order to profit from a stock market crash that I have predicted.

_I like this plan._

EDIT: Better yet, if I have enough resources to be able to influence the market to buy what I buy and then suddenly sell what I sell and have shorted, and I can't be stopped by the SEC because I'm already gone 35 minutes before they arrive to ask me questions, then gosh.  I guess I've just turned into a more efficient version of (THIS SECTION CENSORED BY SAINTHEART IN FEAR OF BREAKING BOARD RULES ON POLITICAL DISCUSSION)

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## Bohandas

> So, assume you have a form of time travel. Don't worry about paradoxes; assume, for simplicity's sake, that the time travel deposits you in a parallel universe identical but unconnected to your own at the designated timeframe, so that whatever happens there has no bearing on your own timeline prior to the travel. Assume also that you can take pretty much anything you could reasonably carry on your person on this trip. Final assumption, the time travel should be kept secret from the people at the destination, or at least not be public knowledge.
> 
> So, with all that in mind, your goal is to create a timeline where technology has progressed a lot further than in our own, so that you (or your compatriots) can visit it further down chronologically and reap the rewards of ultra-advanced tech. A couple more parameters for the sake of discussion: say that only 1 person travels, that this person is knowledgeable enough though not necessarily a genius (say, a Masters in engineering, whichever field you consider most suitable), and that they travel to 40 years in the past (so, early 1983 in our case). What could they do to make sure that this other timeline's 2023, say, is as technologically advanced as possible? Again, they can take with them whatever they can reasonably carry. I have some ideas of my own, but I'm curious to hear what you guys might come up with!


Can they go back further? Go back far enough and you could plausibly take over the world. 

A few hundred years ago something as simple as a wristwatch from 5-Below could give you an enormous edge in naval warfare

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1o3_w0Ypb78
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7CA73yhaCo

More to the point, if you went back far enough - all the way to the dawn of civilization - you could conceivably replace all the world's various belief systems with books of fun-facts or an encyclopedia or something, and replace all of its traditions of mysticism with a bombastically worded description of the scientific method. Translate it into the relevant languages first (and expurgate any cultural refrences while you're at it) and then transcribe it onto something other than a cellphone* when you get there. (although, of course, the obvious end to a science fiction story where this is done would be for it to turn out that the timelines don't branch after all, and that all they've done is become the source of the idea of people sxrying with black mirrors, with the rest of it being forgotten)

*you're gonna want everything on a military grade cellphone and micro sd-cards, and have a bunch of power banks (or better yet a solar panel) to recharge it





> What sort of "political specialist" do you think could achieve that? There was no shortage in 1983 of reasonably clever people of genuine goodwill who were already doing their best to work for generally-beneficial aims for humankind. What sort of person do you think could suddenly help them to achieve the success that eluded them, in many cases, all their lives?


Your use of quote marks suggests the answer: an assassin. While there's never been a shortage of people of good will there has always been a glut of people of people with corrupt motives (although, in adherence to board rules, I will not list them). These could be cleanly eliminated by popping back to a time and place where you know they're going to be, in the words of Scott Evil, "sitting on the crapper or something" and then dumping the bodies in a time when the statute of limitations has run out.




> The issue I see is the interconnected nature of all the technologies.
> 
> For example, advancements in chemistry improve material sciences (since it's effectively a mix of chemistry and physics), which further becomes improvements in ... well, whatever fields that can best utilize the materials you produce (carbon fiber for planes, replacing aluminum skin at key locations, as one).
> 
> So having a specialist in ONE field would stymie advancement by the minimal knowledge in the interconnected fields.


Even for the default trip you're going to have to pre-prepare a lot of refrence material on sd cards. You need to find the things you need to make the things you want work, and bring that knowledge along

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## warty goblin

Remember folks, the farther back you go, the less likely you are to be cool smart person who's ahead of the curve, and the more likely you are to be a useless weak person with really poor social skills who doesn't know how to do anything.

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## Bohandas

> Remember folks, the farther back you go, the less likely you are to be cool smart person who's ahead of the curve, and the more likely you are to be a useless weak person with really poor social skills who doesn't know how to do anything.


This is where that extensive prep work I talked about comes in. If you go all the way back, then ideally you'd want to compile a document showing how to build up technologies to wherever you feel confident you can get to starting from only common naturally occurring resources.

Also you'll want to document where the rarer resources are located beforehand

Also, bring a gun like in Evil Dead 3

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## Gnoman

You're vastly overestimating what somebody could do even with a library. Assuming, of course, you didn't catch a disease that moderns don't have immunity to, or completely fail to think about something enough to even look it up, or just anger the wrong person and get stabbed in the gut. Even with a vast library, reinventing even the most basic of devices is almost impossible. 

That ignores problems like your "cheap wristwatch" idea (which wouldn't actually work - most consumer timepieces that aren't synced to the Internet or an atomic clock signal aren't that accurate) where the instant your device breaks you're helpless.

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## DavidSh

> Remember folks, the farther back you go, the less likely you are to be cool smart person who's ahead of the curve, and the more likely you are to be a useless weak person with really poor social skills who doesn't know how to do anything.


See the classic Poul Anderson story "The Man Who Came Early", about a 20-th century American soldier tossed back into Viking age Iceland, who couldn't adapt.

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## Anymage

Assuming the best case scenario - you have a small squad of people who are well trained and equipped, and then drop them near a rich abundance of natural resources and/or an ancient society that could capitalize on modern thinking and knowledge - you'll eventually have to close the door if you want to reap any benefits of time travel.  And if you do close that door and let them spend a while in the other  timeline, you don't necessarily know what'll be on the other side after all your original colonists have long ago died of old age.  They might be all dead of some mishap, but other options are dogmatic adherence to initial ideas that were sent back or them being much more technologically advanced than us.  Opening the door again might lead to contact with a friendly and much more advanced technological society, but no element of that is guaranteed.

Plus of course the part where OP noted that he could send people back sooner, but because that didn't work for his story that idea was a nonstarter.




> Your use of quote marks suggests the answer: an assassin. While there's never been a shortage of people of good will there has always been a glut of people of people with corrupt motives (although, in adherence to board rules, I will not list them). These could be cleanly eliminated by popping back to a time and place where you know they're going to be, in the words of Scott Evil, "sitting on the crapper or something" and then dumping the bodies in a time when the statute of limitations has run out.


Depending on how time travel works in the given universe, this is either minimally useful or not useful at all.

If history is mostly a factor of large scale social forces and the major names are just the people who happened to be best placed to step up, assassinating various figures changes little.  If you kill one populist dictator in the cradle, the society would still be primed for a populist dictator to step up and someone else would probably be able to take that role.  Some minor details might change, but you won't know ahead of time if the other guy would wind up being a little better or a little worse.  The general presence of a nasty dictatorship would still be a factor no matter what you chose.

If history does hinge on great men and you kill the dictator as a baby, you managed to avert one nasty dictatorship and can pat yourself on the back for that.  However, since history hinges on great men and you just removed one, you have no idea how the rest of history would turn out after that.  Your knowledge of everything after that point is suddenly irrelevant.  So you get to make one change to the alternate timeline, and then you're just as blind as anyone inside of it is.

You don't actually get to send time-ninjas to assassinate your way to a utopia.  And anyone who thinks that the quickest path to a perfect world involves the death of everyone between them and that ideal is someone I want nowhere near actual levers of power.

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## Bohandas

> If history does hinge on great men and you kill the dictator as a baby, you managed to avert one nasty dictatorship and can pat yourself on the back for that.  However, since history hinges on great men and you just removed one, you have no idea how the rest of history would turn out after that.  Your knowledge of everything after that point is suddenly irrelevant.  So you get to make one change to the alternate timeline, and then you're just as blind as anyone inside of it is.


My thought was to eliminate them shortly after they've already come to power and became the state. And also to eliminate the heirs apparent to their regimes as well. Like you wouldn't just kill the guy that everyone always talks about going back and killing, you'd also kill his propagandist, and the head of the secret police, and the generals, and the heads of the paramilitary organization that propped him up and did his dirty work, preferably all on the same day so that the entire regime just collapses into anarchy; a lot of these regimes are worse than nothing, and replacing them with nothing is achievable.

Because of the forking timelines you;d have to do each slightly after the other.

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## veti

> Can they go back further? Go back far enough and you could plausibly take over the world.


No you couldn't, because there's no effective communication between diverse areas at that point. At most you could take over the largest contemporary empire at the time (and I think you're severely underestimating the difficulty of getting that far). And by the time you did that, you'd have to focus all your energy on internal politics and you'd have no time to work on longer term projects. 




> A few hundred years ago something as simple as a wristwatch from 5-Below could give you an enormous edge in naval warfare


Again, I think you're vastly overestimating the advantage. As has been pointed out, cheap wristwatches aren't really that accurate. More expensive ones (high precision quartz) are very good, but they'd only last as long as their battery. And at best you're giving yourself an edge in navigation, which, while useful, doesn't even slightly replace the need for a well trained and disciplined crew, and a captain who knows things like how to tack and when to reef sail, which no wristwatch will help with. 




> More to the point, if you went back far enough - all the way to the dawn of civilization - you could conceivably replace all the world's various belief systems with books of fun-facts or an encyclopedia or something, and replace all of its traditions of mysticism with a bombastically worded description of the scientific method.


Again, you can't do "all the world's belief systems" in one shot, that would require dozens if not hundreds of missions, each one requiring an enormous investment of research and preparation. And even if you could, we're back to "how to persuade people to listen to your version rather than their own locally grown tradition, which is probably better couched to appeal to them".

It also occurs to me that a sufficiently "bombastic" description of the scientific method may not be very different from some mystical texts, certainly once it's been through a few generations of interpretation by your priests... But I probably can't develop that thought without breaking rules. 




> Your use of quote marks suggests the answer: an assassin. While there's never been a shortage of people of good will there has always been a glut of people of people with corrupt motives


That "glut" is precisely the problem with that scheme. Murder a leader, make a martyr. Murder someone who's going to become a leader, and the mantle will be taken up by someone else, someone you can't predict because they're relatively unknown in your history. You can maybe change the surface details of history, but the underlying currents and turbulence would still be there.

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## Bohandas

> No you couldn't, because there's no effective communication between diverse areas at that point. At most you could take over the largest contemporary empire at the time (and I think you're severely underestimating the difficulty of getting that far). And by the time you did that, you'd have to focus all your energy on internal politics and you'd have no time to work on longer term projects.


You coukd either take more than one trip, (not going back as far the second time so that you return after the timelines have already forked) or prioritize developing the infrastructure for advanced ships (not like modern advanced, like age of sail advanced)




> Again, I think you're vastly overestimating the advantage. As has been pointed out, cheap wristwatches aren't really that accurate. More expensive ones (high precision quartz) are very good, but they'd only last as long as their battery.


You can fit a lot of watch batteries into a backpack

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## Gnoman

> You coukd either take more than one trip, (not going back as far the second time so that you return after the timelines have already forked) or prioritize developing the infrastructure for advanced ships (not like modern advanced, like age of sail advanced)


Yeah, that isn't going to work. Even if you manage to learn exactly how to create a proper ship of the line with period tools (which is not going to be easy - we've pretty much lost that skill and nobody alive knows how to do it), operating such a thing requires decades of accumulated institutional knowledge. Your best case scenario would be to get a bunch of people who've figured out just enough to move, and getting absolutely crushed by people who actually know what they're doing the first time you go into action. 

You are essentially picking up a rock and assuming that means you can lift Everest.

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## Storm_Of_Snow

For playing the stock markets or betting markets, where's your initial investment money coming from?

Walk into a bank and drop a million of whatever currency on their desk, questions are going to be asked (well, unless it's Italian Lira or something like that  :Small Amused: ). Assuming you can even get currency of the correct time period.

And good luck opening a bank account without any relevant paperwork - you could also use your younger self to set up the accounts, although you should remember that person isn't you and may decide to do something ill-advised when they've suddenly got access to a load of money they've not really earnt.

At best, bookmakers will ban you if they think you're using inside knowledge (and large amounts of money on a long odds accumulator that comes in will get them suspicious), they may also report you to the police for potentially being part of race/match fixing, or they could be involved with organised crime who're doing that themselves. And the same applies for market trading.

Best bet is probably doing that same as in Star Trek 4 - take a relatively cheap antique back, sell that somewhere that won't ask questions and use that with a knowledge of sports results to build your inital stake, making lots of small trades and simple bets in a range of locations - including a few that you lose money on - so that you won't draw attention from anyone and can build up your finances that way.

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## Bohandas

> For playing the stock markets or betting markets, where's your initial investment money coming from?
> 
> Walk into a bank and drop a million of whatever currency on their desk, questions are going to be asked (well, unless it's Italian Lira or something like that ). Assuming you can even get currency of the correct time period.


Precious metals and precious stones. 

And in particular precious stones that in modern can be made synthetically. Those are generally cheaper, and if you take them back to before they could be synthesized the fact that they;re synthetic won't affect their price

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## Fat Rooster

> Precious metals and precious stones. 
> 
> And in particular precious stones that in modern can be made synthetically. Those are generally cheaper, and if you take them back to before they could be synthesized the fact that they;re synthetic won't affect their price


While each type of stone would be limited, you would still have a backpack of full of gems and metals that you are dumping on the market. You either sell it all to one major power, or try to spread it around. In the first case you are trying to deal with somebody powerful when you have theoretical wealth, but nothing of inherent value or usefulness, making your negotiating position quite weak. If you try to pretend you don't have a backpack full of the stuff, and trade widely and slowly, eventually somebody is going to realise and you will get murdered. If something's value is entirely dependent on it's scarcity, yet you manage to magic it into existence without a good explanation, it significantly loses value.

You could certainly take some ready cash* with you in the form of metals, stones, and trinkets, but mostly I think you should be taking things with inherent value. Exotic spices would be pretty good for most of history and not appear too suspicious (they might actually make your funny accent and mannerisms less suspicious). Even if a merchant doesn't know what a spice is, if it makes their food taste better and they have enough people to sell it to, they wouldn't care as much where it actually came from or that more might appear. Focusing on 'money' is probably a mistake, given that relationships will probably be the bottleneck. To modify history we don't want to acquire property, we want influence over property that we don't own, and that means impressing the right people, even if we are broke. You cannot just buy contacts, and certainly not contacts that trust you.
A Leatherman would probably be worth more than it's weight in gold for most of history. I have a pair of kid's binoculars that would also fetch a king's ransom. A ballpoint pen is the comedy example. This is just things on my desk! These things will do more than just buy other things, they will impress people.

If the time travel aim is good then it might be worth having a specific target in mind. You do the research, and then aim to deal with a specific person at a specific time. An ideal target would be somebody powerful with a sick relative that modern knowledge can help. You would need some ready cash to get started, some antibiotics to treat a nearby infection to get a bit of credibility, something miraculous tailored to the target to get them to initially trust you, and then you have a patron to bootstrap from. Obviously there are details, but getting the initial push should certainly be doable. A general purpose bootstrapping kit for an untargeted time jump would be significantly harder.

*Worth pointing out is that 'ready cash' could easily be enough to cover a lifetime of comfortable living before becoming a problem.

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## Bohandas

> While each type of stone would be limited, you would still have a backpack of full of gems and metals that you are dumping on the market. You either sell it all to one major power, or try to spread it around. In the first case you are trying to deal with somebody powerful when you have theoretical wealth, but nothing of inherent value or usefulness, making your negotiating position quite weak. If you try to pretend you don't have a backpack full of the stuff, and trade widely and slowly, eventually somebody is going to realise and you will get murdered. If something's value is entirely dependent on it's scarcity, yet you manage to magic it into existence without a good explanation, it significantly loses value.


That loss of value is dependent on speed of communication; it only occurs _after_ people realize that there's suddenly a lot more sapphires on the market

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## Anymage

If your plan involves hopping between your present and various points in the past, all you've done is posit that you have one technologically advanced society and one that isn't.  The side with time travel and other modern technologies will crush the past, barring some cosmic paradox prevention laws in place.

If your plan involves dropping an agent or a small number of agents in the past and then closing the door, I wonder how those agents could travel faster than any news when the fastest modes of travel are alongside other people who would likely be gossiping and otherwise spreading news.

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## Bohandas

Just had another idea. What if we sent back advances made in mathematics.

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## veti

> For playing the stock markets or betting markets, where's your initial investment money coming from?
> 
> Walk into a bank and drop a million of whatever currency on their desk, questions are going to be asked (well, unless it's Italian Lira or something like that ). Assuming you can even get currency of the correct time period.


You don't need $1 million in seed money, or anything like it. In 1983 it was not unusual for a company to float itself on the stock exchange at a share price well under $1, sometimes as low as 10 cents. Armed with foreknowledge of which of these was going to succeed, you could become a millionaire in months with a starting float of a mere $1000, which wouldn't raise anyone's eyebrows particularly. 

And currency of 1983 isn't particularly hard to find. 

Opening a bank account with a false identity was a lot easier than it is today, because you don't have to go to the trouble of seeding or synching multiple data sources. One set of faked paperwork, and you're basically home free. (And paperwork isn't hard to fake convincingly either, because nobody in the bank has heard of laser printers.) This is something that bank regulators have cracked down on repeatedly over the past 40 years, but you'd be getting in before all that.

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## animorte

On this topic, make sure you prepare bills that are older than 40 years or the print might register somewhat suspicious.

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## Manga Shoggoth

> Just had another idea. What if we sent back advances made in mathematics.


Almost nothing, I imagine. About the only time I am aware of where the sciences had to create new maths to model the world was with Newton, gravity and the method of fluxions (or differential calculus as we know it today). And he still had to explain it in terms of regular maths (of the time) afterwards.

Most of the time the sciences need new tools in the maths toolkit, they are already there, waiting.

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## NichG

> Almost nothing, I imagine. About the only time I am aware of where the sciences had to create new maths to model the world was with Newton, gravity and the method of fluxions (or differential calculus as we know it today). And he still had to explain it in terms of regular maths (of the time) afterwards.
> 
> Most of the time the sciences need new tools in the maths toolkit, they are already there, waiting.


Quantum mechanics needed a lot of advances in linear algebra, operator math, etc... I was surprised at how modern matrix math is - the first stuff that looks like modern linear algebra is in the 1840s. Operator algebra was then in the 1910s.

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## Bohandas

> Almost nothing, I imagine. About the only time I am aware of where the sciences had to create new maths to model the world was with Newton, gravity and the method of fluxions (or differential calculus as we know it today). And he still had to explain it in terms of regular maths (of the time) afterwards.
> 
> Most of the time the sciences need new tools in the maths toolkit, they are already there, waiting.


There's still problems with the Navier-Stokes equation

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## SirKazum

> Quantum mechanics needed a lot of advances in linear algebra, operator math, etc... I was surprised at how modern matrix math is - the first stuff that looks like modern linear algebra is in the 1840s. Operator algebra was then in the 1910s.


That still puts advances in mathematics several decades ahead of the scientific advances that require them at least, in those specific cases, while in most cases the most advanced maths you use are from centuries ago (probably the 1700s, probably developed by Leonhard Euler to be specific, lol)... I don't see math having that much of a dramatic impact when brought back in time this way, unless you're talking _really_ long timespans (like getting those ancient Indians who first used a fully positional number system up to speed with calculus), and then you run into all the problems with really long-term fiddling with history, i.e. it gets way too unpredictable by the point you're going to see concrete improvements over what we have today.

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## NichG

> That still puts advances in mathematics several decades ahead of the scientific advances that require them at least, in those specific cases, while in most cases the most advanced maths you use are from centuries ago (probably the 1700s, probably developed by Leonhard Euler to be specific, lol)... I don't see math having that much of a dramatic impact when brought back in time this way, unless you're talking _really_ long timespans (like getting those ancient Indians who first used a fully positional number system up to speed with calculus), and then you run into all the problems with really long-term fiddling with history, i.e. it gets way too unpredictable by the point you're going to see concrete improvements over what we have today.


Yeah it's probably not the most useful, but this was more the point that its not quite as stagnant as was suggested.

Honestly, something like ceramic and alloy compositions for good solar panels, superconductors, etc are probably a good time saver - expensive search spaces, very little help from theory to narrow the search. Also results of drug studies. Those have the advantage that 'show me' works, you don't need any particularly more advanced infrastructure to use them, etc. Also just in general stuff from the chemistry literature, a lot of that is very 'extensive' rather than 'intensive' in nature, e.g. trying different synthesis pathways and gradually optimizing the entirety of the route to making a particular thing from precursors.

There are a couple of gimmicks that panned out in things like industrial robotics you could transmit - some of the principles of soft robotics (I'm thinking grippers using non-Newtonian fluids to mold to what they hold for example as something thats really super gimmicky but ends up being kind of useful, and its very simple once you have the idea) for example would be pretty counter-intuitive in the 80s. That could be an overall industrial process accelerator, but probably only a few percent...

Possibly some stuff on design directions could save a few years in this or that industry. Knowing at exactly what scale Moore's Law for serial computation is going to end, getting modern automatic parallelization stuff in at the ground floor rather than having to be built on top, introducing automatic differentiation as readily available software a decade or two before AI takes off (and nudging graphics cards towards designs that will anticipate and better handle some of the scaling, memory, general computation, and bandwidth needs), etc might all be worth a bit here or there. Heck, even just tossing in a lot of the standard tricks to make networks easier to train - don't use saturating activation functions, things like batch normalization, use a history-normalized gradient descent method like Adam rather than SGD - would let someone save a factor of 10 or 100 in computational costs compared to what people of the time were doing, meaning you could get certain things going about a decade early, though the problem is you'd quickly end up waiting for hardware to catch up since earlier AI won't really help speed up hardware development. But that's only a very narrow, and very non-physical industry...

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## Bohandas

There are STILL issues with solving the Navier-Stokes Equation.

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## Manga Shoggoth

> There are STILL issues with solving the Navier-Stokes Equation.


And yet they were created back in the first half of the 1800s, and are successful at what they do. The mathematical model does not have to be perfect to be useful, nor does it have to be developed to the nth degree to be useful.

(I never dealt with them when doing my degree - the focus was on different areas)

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## Radar

> There are STILL issues with solving the Navier-Stokes Equation.


As with any other non-linear and inherently chaotic differential equation. It does not mean there are no ways of solving them to good enough precision for practical purposes - it is just computationally intensive. Other mathematical example of a very difficult to deal with equation is the tomographic reconstruction: there exists a well known analytic solution, but in practice it is awfully unstable with respect to noise, so the practical solving algorithms are significantly different.

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