Using time travel to force accelerated technological progress

[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

[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.

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.

[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"."

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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)

[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

[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.

[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

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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

[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.

[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 ). 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.

[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

[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.

[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

[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.

[Bohandas]

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

[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.

[animorte]

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

[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.

[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.