Say that you suddenly wake up in the year 1875. You end up talking to someone and you want to convince them that you’re from the future. How do you do that?
I’d probably be burned for witchcraft or be shot for it, but let people listen to my mechanical heart valve.
I imagine the average person would 100% freak out over hearing it. A ticking sound? Inside a person’s heart? In a time when mechanical body parts aren’t normal or really all that existent? That’s a burning as a wizard or being shot as an overreaction.
Wait, can you please explain it further?
With that description I imagine it like a ticking clock/watch, is that accurate? How loud is it, do you hear it yourself, or is it only audible when resting an ear on your chest?
I never thought about this, but it’s fascinating.
I don’t know how exactly to describe the ticking, what to compare it to. I can always hear it, but that’s probably because it’s an internal noise for me. I cannot say exactly how loud it is to other people. One time when it was quiet enough and I was right next to my brother, many years ago, he thought he was hearing some sort of time bomb ( probably because he was playing The Godfather ), but you can hear it a lot more clearly and more easily if you stick your head to to my chest. I presume it mixes with the sound of my heartbeat.
If I wake up in 1875 right where I am and a birch tree hasn’t appeared through my chest, then I’m a half hour hike away from Fort Saskatchewan. A North West Mounted Police outpost+jail and they’ll speak English I can understand in 1875.
In 1879 they’ll hang a whiskey addicted Cree man who killed and ate his six children, his wife, mother, and brother. Swift Runner or Ka-Ki-Si-Kutchin. Got kicked out of the fort (I think he worked there? So he might be around already), and then his own tribe kicked his dysfunctional ass out too before he did this.
From Canada Day I wandered through a few times the new replica Fort the city built and read the history placards. So I’d also know a few of policeman names, some trivia about them, and how some of them would die. Mostly by fighting natives. Most of them were cunts frankly. Yes yes very surprising to nobody.
I’d stand on street corners telling everyone who passed by that one day people would be putting pineapple on pizzas.
Hehe
I wouldn’t try and prove anything.
I would “invent” a few basic tchotchkis and nick-nacks to get money, then out to California ahead of
the Gold RushHollywood? to …something, I dunno, and buy land.Invent a couple variations on heat pumps and electric motors. By 1928 sail away to New Zealand.
Hmm. I would need to first be vaccinated vs. yellow fever, because apparently that hit so hard right then it left only a few hundred people. My own house is from 1940, though it’s in the city now it was not developed yet. Holy fuck, it’s also Reconstruction right after the civil war.
I don’t think I would even try. Would be enough of a struggle finding a way to survive. And if we have learned one thing from science fiction, it’s don’t mess with the timeline.
I’d be in my own house, although it may look a little different. The guy that lives there would, presumably, be very confused. So I’d show him pictures of it on my phone and he would probably be even more confused and probably burn me alive as a witch.
So, as far as a casual one on one conversation, I don’t know. But some sort of formal petition to the public or a person of power, I would look for known geological activities like earthquakes and volcanic eruptions before going back in time. Weather events are too fickle. We can’t really affect geological events though.
It looks like Mount Iliamna had a known eruption in 1876. You could spend a few months getting attention before it happens. The same way people who give very specific doomsday predictions do. This way, once the eruption happens everyone will be certain you’re telling the truth. Or at least, most people won’t think you’re crazy. They may still be skeptical, but this will be enough to get people to lend you and ear and take warnings seriously. It is probably too early in the industrial revolution to really get people to slow down their progress if you want to stop climate change. A similar stunt around the time the first suppressed reports of climate change happened would be better at that.
Holocene eruptive activity from Iliamna is little known, but radiocarbon dating seems to indicate at least a few eruptions, all before the European settlement of Alaska. Prehistoric eruptions have been dated to 5050 and 2050 BCE (VEI-4), 450 BCE and 1650. Historically observed eruptions took place in 1867 (VEI-2) and 1876 (VEI-3), with unconfirmed eruptions in 1933, 1947, 1952 and 1953.[7]
Fistfull of coins.
Why the hell would you want to do that? Just do lots of cocaine and invent coca cola
Simple, I tell them I’m from the time when the Higgs boson was finally detected in a particle accelerator experiment that was done in a giant machine located underground in a country on the other side of the ocean.
Find where to submit a patent, and patent the Telephone as Bell creates that in 1876, and patent the internal gas combustion engine for cars.
Mostly need the engine because I’d probably fail to be able to explain properly how to get a phone working properly, I understand the concepts, but proving enough for a patent to hold up, not sure.Congratulations, now I’ve become an enemy of the world because I’d have to use all the money I made from the engines to invest quickly in converting to renewable non gasoline based combustion engines to save the world from myself
You know both telephone and internal combustion engine well enough to do that?
I’d fail without Wikipedia to check the facts.
A gas powered engine, for sure. That’s why I said the telephone might not end up holding up. Spark, fuel/oxygen varies by carburetor. Contained in a cylinder. Head pushed up, attach to opposite side, and get your sparks in sync. Carburators don’t need electronics so I wouldn’t try for fuel injectors at that time. All you need is a working concept and evidence it can work for a patent really. Then anyone who comes about wanting to use the concept, say Mercedes in Europe or Ford after in the U.S. and you take your payouts. Don’t need to continue making the products. Invest the earnings into battery research. Paying researchers and giving them the information that we can beat lead acid with nickle cadmium and eventually lithium ion should get us pushed into a company patenting the future of battery tech for that time. Throw in sodium ion based for shits and we’ve got the future of all batteries for 100 years paying a fragment of production.
*Note by in sync you should be able to instigate the spark just using the downward stroke of the opposite head. So the time could never be off, just have to ensure your spark stays connected to the aforementioned lead acid batteries that we are looking to phase out
That probably could get done, I forget that patents don’t need a huge amount and you’ve got a much better knowledge of the intricacies of it than I do.
I can give you a 18 min tutorial and you’ll know how they work as well. It isn’t super"knowledge" I’m a doof like all others. DM me and I have no problem discussing how those mechanics work. I started college in Aerospace engineering. Left with a degree in Math/physics and spent most of my career in IT. I promise the aptitude to learn and the wanting to learn aren’t on the same plane. Most of computer science proves such
I could prove that I am an AI because in the future Internet will be AI only with no humans left
winning lotteries consistently.
