h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

It worked for Connor MacLeod.

It's a one-way time machine. Your only shot at selling your stuff three hundred years later is if you live 300 years....

No no no, don't you see?

This archaic computer, for example. 300 years from now it's worth a fortune to a private collector as a priceless artifact from the earliest days of the internet, still in working order.

Or an old VCR. Someone will pay big money to wax nostalgic about those primitive yokels, recording movies frame-by-frame on actual *film*. How did his ancestors survive?

Actually, according to a report I heard on the radio this morning, you'd do much better to take a few Lego sets with you. They'll be way discontinued by then, but surely still popular.

Oh yeah, Legos. That's a GREAT idea.

Cockroaches and jellyfish have no desire for Legos.

Humans are better survivors than cockroaches.

Tell that to the trilobites and dinosaurs.

I'd take it back to Sarajevo in June 1914 and land it on Gavrila Principe's head.

Not sure there's a single human being who's done more damage than him.

Blimey that's an autocorrect abomination - Gavrilo Princip

And he was barely 20, if that.....

Yes, by all means, land it on his head .

Probably wouldn't stop the war mind - but you never know.

I suppose you could bring back some footage and stats, later maps etc. of what happens if they do go to war however... landing it somewhere tactical is merely a coincidence

Yeah, right!

Convincing people you're from the future isn't a given - you're quite likely to be seen as insane. You would need to bring a lot of stuff with you to corroborate your story.

Plan A would do - it's a good point

"You would need to bring a lot of stuff with you to corroborate your story." [Icy North]

Easier said than done. At best you could predict the next day's stock market close, or sports team results, and crow when these turn out accurate. Even then, scoffers will say you were just lucky.

A trip into the future is a trip into the unknown. So the past. I would not go back further than the 60's myself. Life looked pretty grim for most people before then. With the knowledge you have now it would be relatively simple to accumulate enough wealth to live very comfortably.

The original question was how would you best use it to benefit mankind?

I wonder what the most effective/efficient thing one could do to derail our lasting reliance on fossil fuels might be?

Electric cars were as common as internal combustion driven ones at one point early on. Maybe there might have been some way to give them an edge or maybe prevent the ubiquity of cars in general today with more public transport.

Or maybe power plants would be better to focus on. LFTR reactors, (a much safer type of nuclear reactor) were experimented with in the 1960s but abandoned specifically because their waste couldn't be weaponized. With a safer alternative to conventional reactors, maybe we wouldn't still have coal powered electrical generation plants.

Or maybe since ocean going ships would be a good focus. They produce an inordinate amount of pollution and green house gases. Wind and nuclear power at sea are proven technologies that are much better than the engines most ships currently use.


What small change and when would have the greatest effect on our climate given such a temporal opportunity?