Back to the Future!: When would you go?

[Trekker4747]

You're going along doing your daily routine when before your eyes a being appears out of nowhere (whether it be another human, an alien, an omnipotent being represented only as a glowing light) and it offers you a round-trip "vacation" to any future date. It outlines for you the "terms and conditions" of this trip and provides you with a pamphlet listing them:

• You can go to literally any future date be it a week from now or the heat-death of the universe, though you're advised to maybe not go quite that far.
• You will stay in this future date for a period of one week as you presently see it (7 cycles of 24 hours as they now are. (I.E. you can't stay longer because some future date has longer days due to the slowing of the Earth's rotation or you're able to visit a planet with longer days.)
• Whatever point you pick you'll be provided with valid credentials and access to enough currency to allow you to obtain lodging, food, clothing, entertainment, etc. While not entirely unlimited you'll find it very hard to empty the account.
  
• if you pick a future point where you, as a 21st century human, will stand-out there'll be a "Quantum Leap"-like effect, you'll appear normal to everyone else and not stand out.
• Environmental, atmospheric, or whatever changes from vastly future dates will not harm you and you'll be able to survive in. So you could, theoretically, go to the last "week" the Earth is a planet and witness the Sun turning into a Red Giant and consuming the inner planets. (Further if you really wanted to you could also go to the heat-death of the universe, but you may find yourself pretty bored for the whole week floating in space "near" the black dwarf that was once the Sun.)
  
• Simply, there's no consequences for going to the time you pick you'll be returned unharmed by the trip or the time you choose. (You could still be harmed by your actions. If you break a law and find yourself on death-row due to a truncated legal system you're on your own. But you'll be imbibed with knowledge of whatever future laws that may prove a challenge. No "Wesley Crusher given the death penalty for stumbling into the flowers," stuff here. If such a thing is a capital offense you'll know it. So if you opt to do it anyway, that's on you, pal.)

So, you think to yourself pretty good! I'll just..

"Keep reading," it says.

• You cannot bring any physical object back with you, not even any clothing/souvenirs you may buy. If you're wearing your future clothes, for example, the moment the time is up you'll find yourself back in the present, naked, and the clothes you left with in a pile at your feet.
• You cannot make use of your knowledge of future events to make any changes to the timeline. No getting next week's lottery numbers, no finding out who wins the next 50 Super Bowls nothing. While you will retain these memories you will not be able to make use of them, even to tell someone else of your adventure. If you attempt to do so you'll find yourself grasping for words, knowing what you want to say but just unable to get it out. Sort of like having a song stuck in your head and you know the name of it or you know what movie you've heard it in or it's known for; but you cannot just make things *click* to be able to say what the answer is. Any attempt to use knowledge to place bets, buy lottery tickets, whatever will be the same thing, you'll know the answer but just not be able to get it out in any useful way.
  
  So, when would you go?
  
  A few years in the future to see how you life turns out?
  A few decades in the future to see your descendants?
  Centuries in the future to see the progression of mankind?
  Millennia in the future to see the greater progression of the human race?
  Eons into the future to see the descendants of man?
  Or, darn-it, you just really do want to see the sun become a Red Giant or experience the heat-death of the universe.

 

[thestrangequark]

The pragmatic (and broke) side of me would take advantage of your loophole: I may not be able to bring anything back with me, but that doesn't mean I can't pull a Back to the Future III:
Simply, I would go back in time say, to the early to mid twentieth century, stock up on a bunch of things that are affordable and accessible in the period, but current rarities (collectibles, a nice car, an Eames chair -- that kind of thing), rent and pay for a locker in a building I know to be presently secure and operational, and leave everything in my own name for present me to keep or sell for loads of dough! Obviously I would buy a ton of clothes for my own enjoyment.

The adventurous and not pragmatic side of me would like to do one of two things:
1. Research and find the week with the absolute best combination of concerts from bands that died, disbanded, or had their heydays before I was born (Zeppelin, Floyd, Hendrix, etc.) and basically just jet set it from show to show -- or Woodstock.
2. I'd really like to see the earth in the period before the dinosaurs when the atmosphere was super thick and the air was full of man-sized dragonflies and things.

 

[Australis]

Sadly @thestrangequark it says:

offers you a round-trip "vacation" to any future date.

so I'm guessing no trips into the past. Not fair, sez I, but that's the rules.

And when I stopped and thought about it... I'm not that interested about going to the future in one leap. For some reason these days I prefer the 1:1 travel ration, because things change so fast and you need to understand why. Little point in leaping forward 200 years and trying to grapple with how the US ended up under water, why Japan broke in half, and why there was another huge European war that razed the place.

So many futures out there, some benign, most malign (I fear).

If you twisted my arm, I'd say I'd like to go to a future where FTL travel is a thing, and a quick round trip to Alpha Centauri

 

[thestrangequark]

^Damn, in my excitement I misread "past or future".

 

[thestrangequark]

Okay, loophole too. Let's go with the nonlinear theory of time. The past therefore is the future and so I stand by my post!

 

[Trekker4747]

Okay, loophole too. Let's go with the nonlinear theory of time. The past therefore is the future and so I stand by my post!

The terms of the Being's sending you through time still preclude this, you cannot use your knowledge of events to affect the timeline. So you couldn't hide valuable things in the "past" for yourself to recover in the "future" because thought experiment contrivances will prevent you from being able to remember where you hid this stuff. You know where you last put your keys but dammit you just can't remember! You cannot use your knowledge of events to impact the timestream this is purely a sight-seeing trip. So even if you want to go with the "past is the future" thing you still can't make use of it to any beneficial way.

Want to prevent a tragic event from occurring? Well, you'll find that your attempts to prevent it actually caused it. You can look but not touch. So, even allowing for a "past is the future" idea on this trip When would you go just to have the experience?

(Again, assume travel contrivances allow for you to survive/not stand-out during the trip. In reality modern-day people wouldn't be able to eat food from even as soon as 100 years ago because the changes in processing and storage of foods have made most modern people in-immune to many food born illnesses, food born illnesses people in the past are exposed to enough to have built-up resistances. Your medical needs will be covered by similar contrivances, either during your trip the medical need won't impact you or you'll simply be allowed to bring/provided with the necessary medications and you can use them without standing out. (Similar to not standing out in future dates beyond humans, you'll simply have a "Quantum Leap Effect" of appearing normal.) And no you can't leave behind future medical knowledge in hopes finding out about it in the past will cause there to be great advances, solutions, cures in the future. Like with your clothes anything belonging to you will be brought back to the present regardless of where it is. Any passed on knowledge you'll either be unable to communicate (again, the "know it/can't put it in words thing) or the person taking in the knowledge will similarly be unable to make use of it.

Why all of this?

Because it's a Sci-Fi message board and I know how people think in such an environment and want all the bases covered. The "magic" means no changes can occur, this is simply a trip for your personal experience and nothing else.

 

[thestrangequark]

Let me preface this with: I just really am enjoying this thread and hope you don't mind my screwing around with your rules. I like riddles and puzzles and the time-travel ideas. I still have the real answer (giant insects or rock concerts because those would be fucking awesome.), but this stuff is fun to think about! So...
Me being a nerd, I have a basic grasp of every mainstream theory of time travel! As you may already know, you are employing a bit of self-consistency theory, my personal favorite (BTW, not sure if the Bill and Ted reference was intentional, but definitely a movie that uses self-consistency theory to great effect!).
Without violating your self-consistency clause, we could go all out with the nonlinear theory and postulate that all points in time are concurrent. Indeed, if the past is the future is the present, then there is only one point in time, but we are able to see only one dimension of it. Therefore, I could ask the Being to show me the One Point In Time. The week would then be never ending and I'll know everything, so there will be no present to return me to and I win.

 

[Trekker4747]

Oh I know, I'm having fun with it too playing around with you.

 

[Finn]

I'd go 250 million years into the future and do a hike along the coast of the inland ocean some believe will exist in the supercontinent Pangea Ultima.

 

[thestrangequark]

Oh I know, I'm having fun with it too playing around with you.

Have I mentioned that since I was five years old and for most of my childhood I dreamed about the Traveler coming to rescue me and taking me on adventures through space? When I was nine and discovered the Doctor, he came to rescue me and take me on adventures through time. I've been thinking about this stuff for a long time!

 

[Trekker4747]

Let me preface this with: I just really am enjoying this thread and hope you don't mind my screwing around with your rules. I like riddles and puzzles and the time-travel ideas. I still have the real answer (giant insects or rock concerts because those would be fucking awesome.), but this stuff is fun to think about! So...
Me being a nerd, I have a basic grasp of every mainstream theory of time travel! As you may already know, you are employing a bit of self-consistency theory, my personal favorite (BTW, not sure if the Bill and Ted reference was intentional, but definitely a movie that uses self-consistency theory to great effect!)..

Yeah, I love the way Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure uses the "closed loop" thing very nicely, and demonstrates it nicely in the Circle-K scenes. But, of course, this all means that Rufus's mission was never in danger of failing because the very existence of his present is proof he'll succeed, this further has Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey's villain not make sense as he should know that his attempts to change the past will be futile since it's fixed and cannot be changed just like no matter what Ted's always going to forget to wind his watch. His dad was looking for his keys the whole movie and we find out near the end it was Ted who took them after all of the events in the movie take place. It's really very beautiful. It also means that their experiences in the present are part of the historical figures' actual history, so any events that happened after Bill and Ted returned them to their rightful times are events that happened because of that trip to 1988. This has very interesting implications if you think about how much Lincoln learned about his own future and his eventual assassination and what happened as a result. Did he see what events occurred because of his assassination and see it as necessary? Or did his attempts to avoid the assassination actually cause it to happen? Like getting different seats or maybe even changing the night he was going to visit the theater.

It, to me, is just really wonderful how it's done and for me it's probably the most "realistic" use of time-travel as if time-travel to the past is possible, to a point before the time-machine was invented, then anything that's happened in the past happened because of the time-machine/travelers being there.

Have I mentioned that since I was five years old and for most of my childhood I dreamed about the Traveler coming to rescue me and taking me on adventures through space? When I was nine and discovered the Doctor, he came to rescue me and take me on adventures through time. I've been thinking about this stuff for a long time!

I used to have fantasies and dreams and such as a kid about me being the inventor of the DeLorean time machine from Back to the Future and had many crazy adventures with it my high-school years including traveling to Star Trek's time and the car being outfitted with a warp-drive and such and being friends with the crew of the Enterprise-D. (Myself: Errrrrrrr....I went further in the future and used future micro-technology to gain access to warp-drives and other technology that could be outfitted into a mid-sized car.)

I had entire "series" of adventures thought about, some I even wrote about, almost in an "episodic" or movie series format with crucial points in the time-line interacting with my future-self and girlfriend, whom I would marry in a BTTF2-like future 2015 with flying cars and all the crazy technology seen in that movie.

Big "twist" for my little mind-made-up series? The first season had middling ratings and barely got a renewal, causing the actress who played my girlfriend to bail on her contract, so she was written out of the show by having her travel back in time and do something to the time-machine that'd delay me and preventing ourselves from meeting and setting our futures into motion. As a result I met someone else and had adventures with her and that shocking-change caused the show's ratings to sky-rocket and become successful. A late-series episode had this other girl return and it's revealed her "older self" went back in time to tell her younger-self she needed to break-up with me/not meet me in order to save my life, so she sacrificed our meeting to save my life.

Because I wasn't Gary Stu'ing my own fantasies enough, *I* was the writer/creator of this television franchise, in which I also starred in it, while it also being somewhat auto-biographical as I really did have a time-machine, etc.

....

Yeah, I was sad, lonely, bored, kid/teenager.

 

[Trekker4747]

Damn, as I consider it and look at it and reflect more on those "fantasies" I was pretty screwed-up.

 

[Smellincoffee]

I'd want to look at a century hence, or perhaps five centuries hence -- to see if society had collapsed and revived, or had become some unrecognizable hell. It would be interesting to review as much of the period's history as I could and then come back and see the germs of future trends as they were created. I'd write histories that made me look like a genius to those few people in the future who were still literate.

 

[Australis]

Damn, as I consider it and look at it and reflect more on those "fantasies" I was pretty screwed-up.

No, you just wanted to escape. We all did, if we're honest.

I was going to write a magic realist/fantasy novel about a guy called Stare the Escapist based on my real life versus my mind life. Much later, Michael Chabon, in his novel The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay had the title characters create a comic book character called The Escapist. <sigh>

We were lucky, in some ways. We got to live in a thousand different times and a thousand different places. And before Terry Pratchett used it as the title for a writing competition, my motto was: anywhere but here, anywhen but now.

 

[T'Bonz]

I'd rather go to the past and check out various eras/events, but only if I could be invisible and unable to be harmed or do harm. I wouldn't be able affect the past but could see what really happened at a certain point in time. That would be awesome. I'd be checking out the Tudor era and Henry VIII, be at some pivotal Civil War battles and take in a ballgame where legends such as Ty Cobb and Cy Young played.

Oh the things I could see.

 

[Kemaiku]

Something more like the Quantum Leap imaging chamber would be better for that, literally seeing a moment in time and walking around harmlessly in it, not changing the past either.

It just means no physical contact at all with the time period. But it does mean you could be in the room for every major event in human history as if you were there without having to worry about breaking it.

 

[thestrangequark]

Something more like the Quantum Leap imaging chamber would be better for that, literally seeing a moment in time and walking around harmlessly in it, not changing the past either.

It just means no physical contact at all with the time period. But it does mean you could be in the room for every major event in human history as if you were there without having to worry about breaking it.

Unless there are very young children or dogs there.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

I don't want to go to the future. However I would very much like to revisit the past. (WARNING: Gratuitous baseball references to follow.)

I would LOVE to see some more games at old Yankee Stadium - I had only been into baseball for a short time when it was torn down, so I never had the chance to get to know it the same way I have at the new stadium. And also Shea Stadium of course - I'm a Yankees AND Mets fan (yes, it does happen ) so there's a lot of history to experience at Big Shea as well.

Plus I would also love to see some of those other ballparks that got torn down before I ever got the chance to see them...Comiskey Park (Whitesox), Memorial Stadium (Orioles), Crosley Field (Reds), Tiger Stadium, things like that.

 

[thestrangequark]

I'd like to see the future but I want to get there without skipping anything. Like, a 300 year life-span or something.

I would like to see a good several 100K years or so into the future to see what humans evolve into (should we avoid wiping ourselves out), and what the earth looks like and what new animals there are. If we do destroy things with global warming or nuclear war, I'd like to see what new life evolves given the new conditions. But I'd like the option of a "forget" button, because I don't think I am emotionally equipped to know the future.

 

[Gaith]

^ Yeah, what if you decide to visit a century in the future, and found that civilization has crumbled due to resource scarcity, global warming, and all that? And you couldn't ever discuss it with anyone, much less try to avert it, due to the scenario rules. If a huge nuclear war will be starting in, say, five years, and I can't prevent it or change my own future at all, why on Earth would I want to know about it?