A Time Machine, A Warehouse Store Membership, and 50 bucks...

[Meredith]

I went to Costco last night as I wanted to go there to stock up on spices and I realized something. All it would take to get to be super duper mega ultra rich without hurting anyone would be a Time Machine, a Costco membership, and 50 bucks. With 50 Bucks you could buy a bunch of spices like cinnamon, caraway, etc.. and then take it to 1600's Europe and trade it for Gold, then take the gold back to now which is 800 bucks a ounce, sell it, buy even more spice and then repeat the cycle. When the place you are trading runs out of gold, you then travel a few years later and trade more spices for gold....

You could even sell those rubes in the past Aluminum foil and they trade large amounts of gold for sheets of the stuff. (not to much to screw up the timeline though.)

I like this time travel wealth generating scheme better than betting on sporting games using an almanac.

 

[Christopher]

Why not just sell the patent on time travel?

 

[sojourner]

Go back in time to oh... 1935, buy $50 in IBM stock and let it compound. Move forward to 1981 or 2 and sell the IBM and buy Microsoft. Move forward to about 1999 sell MS for Google. come to present - Multi-Bajillionaire!!

 

[Luckyflux]

I know there is a Great Karnac joke in here somewhere....

 

[Harvey]

Why not just sell the patent on time travel?

Wouldn't somebody just copy the patent, and travel back in time, so that they would be the inventor behind it? No, the best way to make money with a time machine is to ensure nobody else knows about it.

 

[Myasishchev]

Or take a few modern firearms and a kevlar vest to the 1600s, set up shop in Cadiz, and just wait till the galleons come in.

The spice plan may or may not be cheaper. Less fun, though. And let's be honest, the Spaniards are asking for it.

 

[Christopher]

Why not go to the future, bring back some advanced technology, and patent it as your own invention? Like Matt Frewer's character Rasmussen wanted to do in ST:TNG's "A Matter of Time."

 

[Lapis Exilis]

The nice parts of Meredith and sojourner's plans are they keep the timeline pretty much intact. They are low impact, so to speak (except the aluminum foil thing). Whereas introducing guns early, going to the future and so on - trouble you won't be able to control.

'Course it's real likely if you go back to the Middle Ages you won't be able to communicate with anyone because they'll be speaking Middle English. And you might pick up the bubonic plague...

 

[Christopher]

^Well, realistically, the timeline can't be anything but "intact." Physics says that if you could go back in time, you'd be constrained to create the same future you came from. Even if you tried to change history, you'd fail. This is true even in the Many Worlds Interpretation where multiple timelines exist. If you come from a particular timeline, a particular quantum state, then your past has already been "measured," already determined from your perspective as a quantum observer, and so everything you experience in the past will be predetermined by that measurement. Rather than branching off into a different timeline as in fiction, you're essentially trapped in a single one, the one you came from.

So the question is, how can you make time travel profitable given that you can't change the past even if you try? Given that, no matter what you do in the past, it will have already been part of your history all along -- and if you try to do anything that directly contradicts that history, you will be prevented? Keeping in mind that the nature of that prevention is open to question and may simply involve the collapse of the time vortex with you trapped fatally inside it.

 

[Meredith]

The nice parts of Meredith and sojourner's plans are they keep the timeline pretty much intact. They are low impact, so to speak (except the aluminum foil thing). Whereas introducing guns early, going to the future and so on - trouble you won't be able to control.

'Course it's real likely if you go back to the Middle Ages you won't be able to communicate with anyone because they'll be speaking Middle English. And you might pick up the bubonic plague...

They can cure the plauge these days. Or at least the success rate is pretty high with tech.

 

[Davros]

Show up at Woodstock with some 5th generation hydroponic skunk bud and a bag of seeds.

 

[Tom]

In the movie Idiocracy, Costco did have a time machine!! Well sort of. lol

 

[shivkala]

Why not just do what Marty wanted to do in Back to the Future Part II and buy a sports almanac? Then come back in time, make some modest, but substantial bets in Vegas on the games? Spaced out over enough time and done correctly, it should be enough to live off of, without drawing attention to yourself.

I'd suggest the lottery, but seeing as how lottery winners are publicized, it would draw attention.

 

[Myasishchev]

Why not go to the future, bring back some advanced technology, and patent it as your own invention? Like Matt Frewer's character Rasmussen wanted to do in ST:TNG's "A Matter of Time."

Didn't he go to time jail or something in that episode?

Incidentally, in MW I don't think you'd be prevented from "changing" the past according to your own subjective, one-universe view of history. You simply wouldn't be changing your past--just as you cannot really change your future, at least inasmuch as "you" are the collection of quantum states that in sequence produce the "present" moment of consciousness, and literally nothing else. You can determine to a degree what universe several collections of quantum states that are very similar to you will experience, but that's not quite, philosophically, the same thing.

Now, the great thing about MW time travel is that you (the colloquial you) can be a real jerk. In fact, if time travel is possible, and MW is true, somewhere, you are being a real jerk.

 

[Joy]

You could use that Costco membership to get yourself a Hot Tub Time Machine!



Joy

 

[Possum]

Go back in time to oh... 1935, buy $50 in IBM stock and let it compound. Move forward to 1981 or 2 and sell the IBM and buy Microsoft. Move forward to about 1999 sell MS for Google. come to present - Multi-Bajillionaire!!

You could do this in one easy step by buying Berkshire Hathaway stocks when they sold for $20 bucks a share and no one knew who Warren Buffett was. A share traded yesterday for 100,310.00.

 

[Aragorn]

Why not just do what Marty wanted to do in Back to the Future Part II and buy a sports almanac? Then come back in time, make some modest, but substantial bets in Vegas on the games? Spaced out over enough time and done correctly, it should be enough to live off of, without drawing attention to yourself.

I'd suggest the lottery, but seeing as how lottery winners are publicized, it would draw attention.

It depends on how many different outlets you can find to place these bets, since people would start to notice your 100% winning streak.

 

[Aaron McGuire]

Why not just do what Marty wanted to do in Back to the Future Part II and buy a sports almanac? Then come back in time, make some modest, but substantial bets in Vegas on the games? Spaced out over enough time and done correctly, it should be enough to live off of, without drawing attention to yourself.

I'd suggest the lottery, but seeing as how lottery winners are publicized, it would draw attention.

It depends on how many different outlets you can find to place these bets, since people would start to notice your 100% winning streak.

A riff on this was done in Ken Grimwood's Replay. After the protagonist makes several bets with his future knowledge of sports, the Vegas casinos and other sports books refuse to take his bets. He then switches to "playing" the stock market.

Aaron McGuire

 

[Christopher]

Incidentally, in MW I don't think you'd be prevented from "changing" the past according to your own subjective, one-universe view of history. You simply wouldn't be changing your past--just as you cannot really change your future, at least inasmuch as "you" are the collection of quantum states that in sequence produce the "present" moment of consciousness, and literally nothing else. You can determine to a degree what universe several collections of quantum states that are very similar to you will experience, but that's not quite, philosophically, the same thing.

I'm not really sure what you're saying here. Subjectively speaking, you can't change the past. Whatever you experience in the past will be the same history you know, because as a quantum observer you're constrained to observe the already-measured quantum state you're part of. It's not that your history continues to exist while you create and experience a different history (like Nero in the Star Trek movie) -- that's fiction. You're compelled to experience the same history you originally came from. Any other histories that may exist are beyond your perception and are functionally irrelevant. In terms of what you experience as a time traveller, the past cannot be altered.

The explanation is given in the 2005 paper Quantum Theory Looks at Time Travel by Greenberger & Svozil.

 

[ParticleMan]

Why not just do what Marty wanted to do in Back to the Future Part II and buy a sports almanac? Then come back in time, make some modest, but substantial bets in Vegas on the games? Spaced out over enough time and done correctly, it should be enough to live off of, without drawing attention to yourself.

I'd suggest the lottery, but seeing as how lottery winners are publicized, it would draw attention.

It depends on how many different outlets you can find to place these bets, since people would start to notice your 100% winning streak.

The trick would be not to ALWAYS bet on the winner...toss in a couple of "losing" streaks every now and again to keep your profile low. Just calculate things that no matter what, you come out ahead, just not a ridiculous amount ahead with multiple bets spaced closely together.