If anyone wants a specific goal, have it be either
- Earn a Nobel Prize by age 18
or
- Become a billionaire by age 18
For the sake of the scenario, assume the following:
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If anyone learns that you are mentally from the future, you immediately have an aneurysm and die. You somehow just know this and therefore must keep your true identity secret.
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You wake up as a random 10-year-old specifically in 2002, not your 10-year-old self, and not the age you actually were in 2002.
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You live in the same country, speak the same language(s), and are the same ethnicity as your old self. Your biological sex matches your gender identity (flip a coin if you are enby).
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You have 2 parents and 1.5 siblings. Your family earns exactly the median income for your country.
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The person whose identity you now inhabit left a diary. You have no other knowledge of your new identity beyond this.
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If you try to look for your old family, you learn they had a different child in this timeline who is the same age as you but is not you. They will not believe any attempt to convince them you are related.
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The USB drive is compatible with any standard USB Type A connector. It is just large enough to fit all of Wikipedia, including hosted media and files, and the drive is read-only. The drive cannot be reformatted.
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Stock market trends remain generally consistent for 5 years. After that, assume the butterfly effect will start to skew the results, so you cannot predict what will happen after 2007. Sports become too unreliable to bet on with 100% accuracy after 1 year.
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I feel like I shouldn’t need to clarify this one, but no grooming kids. Assume there is a magical force that prevents you from dating anyone until both you and they are at least 18, and no one is attracted to you unless they would also feel okay dating someone who is your mental age.
EDIT - Additional clarifiers, if this helps:
- The USB drive is not based on 2002 technology but is fully compatible with it. Assume it uses a novel architecture that can repurpose itself to be compatible with whatever system it is plugged into, as long as it fits the correct type of USB port.
I probably start voicing concerns about the housing situation in 2006 then bet everything shorting it in 08. From there I buy a foreclosed house study electrical engineering and attempt to get a solar panel startup going cooperatively in the hopes of pushing 2014 Obama to focus on full renewables.
I don’t need a lot of money, I need a future.
At 10, I won’t have much money to invest, and I doubt I’d convince anyone to invest on my behalf. So, the butterfly effect on the markets will be at least 10 years away. I’d spend my first 5-6 years soaking up the knowledge that would be most relevant to me for the late 00’s, then from 16 or so I’d use that knowledge for well-paid gigs to earn money to invest, first into the stock market (short term), and later into startups I know will succeed. By 22, I’d start sponsoring the Cincinnati zoo, as a side project. By 24, I’ll use my influence at the zoo to beef up security in the gorilla enclosure. The kid will not fall in, Harambe will live, and today’s timeline will never materialize. Then I’ll retire. You’re welcome.
This may be one of the better ideas I’ve read so far. Incredible, kudos!
You better stick around and make sure the cubs don’t win the world series either.
This is an expensive way to learn about causation vs correlation.
If I’m a 10 year old in 2002, first thing I do is go play some Melee.
This is truly the way.
Invest every cent i can get my hands on into bitcoin when possible, easy.
Bitcoin wasn’t invented until 2008 and launched in 2009. Your deadline is 2010. Someone bought 2 pizzas for 10,000 bitcoin in 2010.
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Or Apple, or nVidia. Or all of the above.
Edit: Actually, nVidia would be a bad call. Apple I think would result in around a 6000% return on investment by our deadline, which isn’t exactly a rocket ride to the moon, but you could probably use Wikipedia’s articles on pump and dumps and other financial scams to know in advance what’s going to happen, and be one of those at the top of the pyramid rather than the bottom in order to raise yourself more short term capital.
As for all the comments about everyone going for the Get Rich path and not the Nobel Prize… Well, yeah. Even if you do have a literally encyclopedic knowledge of current and future geopolitical events, it’s unlikely anyone important is going to listen to a 10 year old. Especially so if you’re not allowed to give the game away. You could readily trade stocks online in 2002, though, even if you were a minor as long as you could employ some creativity (or get permission from your parents). How convenient that by the time you’re ready to cash out, you’ve just turned into a legal adult.
Or FAANG
Oh damn, greta thunburg is an adult from the future going through this same scenario. (Different years)
I was in college in 2002, so I would go there and tell myself what is going on. That shouldn’t break the rules since nobody but me would know what was happening (just a different version of me). Working together with a blueprint of the next two decades, it would be trivial for college me to make money in the stock market. I would raise as much money as I could before the 2008 housing bubble bursts so I could buy up a lot of property cheap.
From there I could use the information on close elections to politically swing things the way I want. 20 year old me would practice writing so I could get into writing newspaper editorials, building my reputation as someone who has exceptional ability to predict political and social trends. This reputation would give me a foothold to get to speak to and advise people in power, further allowing me to shape the direction of politics. With this money and influence, I could make sure COVID was handled properly, that the war in Ukraine never happened, and that climate change was addressed with the seriousness it deserves. I could save hundreds of millions of lives and nobody would ever know.
I think you caught me there on a verbiage technicality.
I probably should have worded it better in the additional details of the premise, but my intent was that your old self simply doesn’t exist in this timeline. Your family is there, but they had some other kid instead of you on the same date you were born.
If your name is Jarnathan Smith, you like baseball and your favorite color is puce, you’d instead find that your family had a kid named Archideld Smith who likes rugby and whose favorite color is mauve.
Probably throw it through the wash on accident. First week.
The billionaire one is kinda easy
Sports betting to get your base funds up to a decent level then buy the shares in the successful tech companies post dot-com crash. Wouldn’t hurt to buy some gold and bitcoin too.
Sports betting would continue helping you live a lavish lifestyle until all the investment income gets to a good level.
If you do well enough, you should be able to amplify what you’ve already made to acquire an absurd amount of wealth on the subprime mortgage crash in 2008.
Bitcoin wasn’t big by 2010, so you couldn’t make much money that way.
2002? Damn, too late to warn everyone about 9/11.
Yeah, I picked that year for a reason. I was going to go with 2000 at first, but thought that people would feel too inclined to have stopping 9/11 be their first priority, thereby sending the world down a radically different trajectory.
Was thinking similarly regarding the stock market situation. I wanted to accommodate a window for people to game the stock market with prior knowledge, but wanted to leave everything after the 2008 global financial crisis a mystery, so capped its predictability to 2007.
Good luck convincing anyone of such an event as a 10yo
Maybe. But is it too late to convince Bush that Iran/Iraq doesn’t have WMDs?
He knew they didn’t.
Throw it in the trash, so Biff finds it and ruins the timeline.
If I was able to make lots of money somehow I’d buy up CDS’s before 2008 market crash.
Otherwise I’d just start mining bitcoin in 2009.
10,000 bitcoins were worth ~$20-40 in 2010.
You will need ~500,000,000,000 (500 Billion) bitcoin (unless my math is wrong, but suffice it to say, it’s a lot).
I believe to date only about ~20 million have been mined.
Isnt btc capped at 21 million total?
I believe so…
If I could get 9K bitcoin I’d have over $1B today with only spending money on a computer and electricity.
First, see if they have the wining numbers for Powerballs that were never won. Something in the tens to hundreds of millions. Then use the entries on the stock market to invest in things that will take off, allowing you to sell before they tank.
Then take all that money and put it in to left wing think tanks that will make this mess go away entirely.
All y’all just want to be rich. Pathetic.
Like it or not, the most certain way to affect any kind of societal change (if that’s your goal), is to be rich.
Getting rich is more plausible than winning a Nobel Prize.
The youngest Nobel laureate was 17 at the time, though, so it is possible.
Plausible and possible are different words.
Absolutely!
Luckily everyone gets a Wikipedia backup detailing all of the things people won Nobel Prizes for up until 2025, so you have that advantage going for you.
Problem is how to make it seem realistic for an 18-year-old to accomplish, and how to actually go about doing the thing on your own.
Might be my fault for including that as one of the example goals in the body of the post. I also put “Earn a Nobel Prize by age 18” for anyone who wouldn’t be motivated by money, I’d be interested to know those takes as well.
Bitcoin
Well, my immediate problem is the general lack of memory and personality change (can’t really rely on a 10 year old’s diary.) So… I’m probably going to need some sort of convincing injury to blame.
After that is the hard choice. I could toss the USB and just live. But the nature of the situation suggests I’m supposed to do something. At minimum I’d want the means to investigate the scenario. Running away has merits, but this sounds like a safe, stable situation, and it seems wrong to abandon the family this kid belonged to.
I’ll need a side hustle that works for a 10 year old… maybe trading cards or something along those lines. The money does not matter as much as the hustle and laying the ground work for an early interest in business and money making schemes. After that, retail arbitrage, then a bigger payout. Cashing in a big prize for a discovery or winning the lottery would draw too much attention, but sports betting could work. Then use that to move into financial markets. Moving slowly but setting things up to ramp gains by 18. I know that misses the goal, but doing it earlier depends entirely on the family situation. 20 is probably more doable.
2002… uff, that would be hard. As a ten year old there is so little you can do!
I guess I would steal an identity and get some ground breaking research out on a quicker time scale. In particular trying to get ahead of the climate deniers. I would invest in some whatevers that made it big as soon as possible, then during the 2008 crisis, then Bitcoins.
I would find it impossible to not look for my friends and family, even just stalking them from afar. That would probably drive me insane.
I’d use my wealth to lobby hard for climate justice and climate research. Probably still hide my true identity. I’m not American, so I would need to think really hard if preventing Trump is worth it, but I would lobby for a quicker energy transition and for a better social net. I’d assume with the knowledge I have at hand, I could even tweak the end result of the 2008 crisis… but that would be a massive butterfly to introduce.
On a global scale, I would think that some properly timed interventions in Africa could have dramatic impacts both socially and ecologically, but I’d have to study more to figure that out.
2002… uff, that would be hard. As a ten year old there is so little you can do!
Yep, that’s the catch! You have the knowledge, but who’s gonna let a 10-year-old open an investment account? Or who’s going to believe that a presumably middle-of-the-pack 4th grader suddenly unlocked the secret to mRNA vaccines?
I’m with you, I think identity theft is probably the easiest way to start out (especially back then when it was so widespread, and not as many people knew what to look out for) but it becomes one more secret to have to keep covered up that can screw you over later if found out.
Just spend 8 years planning. By the time you’d be 18 you’d still have 15 years of events before your knowledge caught up. I’d expect the trickiest part of it all would be making sure whatever you do doesn’t alter the timeline. One mistake and it won’t matter what you know if the course of history changes.
