Exercise: You can teleport any one object to a random stranger in the past

[Matthiasa]

Hmmm could I send a physicist back to the past, that would be one object.

 

[Kadarin]

A Nimitz-class aircraft carrier complete with air wing to the Taino Indians prior to October 12, 1492. Imagine being the first lookout on the Pinta to see this barreling over the horizon!

"Um, thanks, you can go ahead and keep your beads and genocide. We're good."

You've just come up with the plot for "The Final Countdown: The Sequel"

 

[RaistlinZ]

 

[MagnusTheBrewer]

I'd send a bullet train to 1830. Fuck air travel.

 

[Jeff7]

Some sort of insanely complex virus to screw with our genome, sent back maybe 100,000 years - something to reduce inherent aggression and self-predatory tendencies, and to enhance brain growth, as well as to make a few tweaks to how it works, and eliminate a few other pesky mental bugs.

Oh, and it would encode "Never Gonna Give You Up" directly into our genetic makeup - just something to screw with humanity once it again gains the ability to decipher its own genes.


And if that somehow violates rule #4, well, then I think about the only thing permitted to be sent under the vast restrictions of that rule set would probably end up being a ham sandwich. Though that might also violate rule #4, so I guess just two slices of bread.
Woo. Hoo.


Edit: Screw it, I'll just have the virus somehow encode "We apologize for the inconvenience" into some safe place within our genome. If all goes well, Douglas Adams would still come into existence in that timeline, and write his books. Then scientists would eventually come upon a rather odd discovery.

 

[Raduque]

Slapchop. 1492. Let the Native Americans and Christopher Columbus slap their troubles away.

They're gonna love your nuts.

 

[natto fire]

The problem is, most of our technology is comprised of systems of many objects.

There is no point in sending back a spark plug, or a shell, or bullet because it wouldn't affect anything. And considering a guy convinced people he read the word of god on special plates a bit over 100 years before I was born, I don't think they need any other "alien artifacts" to help them along. Also, I must invoke butterfly effect.

 

[dighn]

The problem is, most of our technology is comprised of systems of many objects.

There is no point in sending back a spark plug, or a shell, or bullet because it wouldn't affect anything. And considering a guy convinced people he read the word of god on special plates a bit over 100 years before I was born, I don't think they need any other "alien artifacts" to help them along. Also, I must invoke butterfly effect.

how do you define an object? a gun in the OP's example is composed of objects, but apparently that's fine.

frankly i'm not sure what's allowed. can I send back an object with the intention of demonstrating a concept? or that would violate one of these rules? e.g. a hand-cranked generator hooked up to a motor? the rules are arbitrary and ambiguous. I would send books, that's the most practical and efficient method.

 

[lokiju]

Message to observe wtf happens to Roanoke and document it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roanoke_Colony

 

[Jeff7]

Message to observe wtf happens to Roanoke and document it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roanoke_Colony

Or better yet, just some message to somehow (magically) convince people to simply document things better - make the historians of the future obsolete.

Really, isn't it kind of weird? We actually need people around who dedicate their lives to the study of us, simply because we don't remember or document much of anything of interest. (And all we've got now is Twitter and Youtube comments.)
Granted, I have no idea how this would be accomplished, and compiling all that information would require some epically powerful supercomputer to make sense of it all.

 

[bobdole369]

And all we've got now is Twitter and Youtube comments.

AND NOBODY IS WRITING THEM DOWN!!!!!!!!

When the big one, or the crazy one, or the alien one - whatever it is - hits, we will have virtually no record starting about 1995ish. Most stuff is no longer recorded in any form that will be decipherable without current tech.

Remember how hard it was/is to understand hieroglyphics?! How about how hard it will be for aliens to figure out a flash drive!!!! Why did all their pictures stop in early 2000's??!! Only a few "artists" still had photographs produced? etc.

 

[Jeff7]

AND NOBODY IS WRITING THEM DOWN!!!!!!!!

When the big one, or the crazy one, or the alien one - whatever it is - hits, we will have virtually no record starting about 1995ish. Most stuff is no longer recorded in any form that will be decipherable without current tech.

Remember how hard it was/is to understand hieroglyphics?! How about how hard it will be for aliens to figure out a flash drive!!!! Why did all their pictures stop in early 2000's??!! Only a few "artists" still had photographs produced? etc.

Yeah...one of the unfortunate side effects of electronic storage. It's reasonably stable - for now.
Flash memory degrades eventually, recordable CDs don't hold up terribly well, and bearings in hard drives eventually seize up.

Wikipedia somehow needs to get backed up onto some kind of very nonvolatile medium. Inscribe the bits into granite.
It's vaguely like a modern-day Library of Alexandria; a giant repository of information which (nearly) anyone around the world (with an Internet connection) can access.

Best, though rather unfeasible solution: Somehow get some of us off this planet. There's a decent pile of evidence showing that this place sometimes gets a bit fussy, and decides to attempt to wipe out just about every last living thing in existence. Roughly paraphrasing Neil DeGrasse Tyson, 99.9...% of all living things ever to exist on this planet are dead now. It's not a friendly place to live.
All your eggs in one basket...

Next best solution: AI, something more durable than us, and potentially more intelligent, and see if it wants to volunteer to go on a deep space mission: Our gift (infection?) to the galaxy, of our own breed of sentience.



(And knowing how the Universe seems to enjoy screwing with people, the only two things that'll survive the apocalypse will be the Youtube and Twitter serverfarms.)

 

[KaOTiK]

fleshlight

 

[EGGO]

A picture of FSM.

 

[IronWing]

A vibrator to Eve.

 

[l0cke]

Send a 1911 to Moses (^_^)

 

[MagnusTheBrewer]

Send a 1911 to Moses (^_^)

Hotline to God > 1911

 

[Cuda1447]

I'd send back a massive sailboat back as far as I can. Surely that would speed up colonization of the world and technological research?

 

[l0cke]

Send a 1911 to Moses (^_^)

Hotline to God = 1911

Fixed.

 

[ichy]

I'd send a modern physics textbook back to the 1500s. Imagine what a jumpstart on science that would give us.

 

[chitwood]

I would send Paris Hilton back to the Dark Ages.

 

[Gunslinger08]

The rules make this borderline pointless. 100 years before you were born means you pretty much can't send anything that requires electricity. No books means you can't send back knowledge. No instructions means nobody will know what the heck anything else you send back is. If you can't send back technology or knowledge, what does anyone care? Even if you sent back 100 million doses of black plague vaccine to the Middle Ages, nobody's going to know what it is, how to use it, etc.

 

[Ancalagon44]

Yeah, they are a bit restrictive, hence a lot of people ignored them.

I'd love to send back a modern desktop gaming PC back to the mid eighties. When the engineers of the day see a computer rendering in real time what would normally take a mainframe a few months to render, I'm guessing they will shit bricks.

 

[ussfletcher]

I'd probably send a box truck to something like 1000bc.. maybe that could jump start our industry?

 

[darkxshade]

The rules were made to make the exercise difficult but not impossible. You just have to think out of the box.

If you asked me, I'd say the microscope/magnifying glass back to 1AD