Business Insider ran this article today that caught my eye:
5 time travel questions to ask Google
The idea is suppose you end up 10 years into the future, what would you ask Google before you came back?
This got me intrigued, beyond the obvious avarice inducing questions which presume biological and physical determinism that I reject because I believe in free will, what would you ask that could change the future?
And what I realized is that if you look at science, there is about a twenty year time horizon between an idea being valuable and an idea turning into a commercialized success. And so what I could do to change the future would be to find out what was novel in the future 10 year future, and bring it back thus moving humanity 10 years in some disciplines.
The question is which disciplines and where to get that information?
If I could bring backward some idea, in what discipline would it be?
The first practical challenge would be that I know a tiny sliver of human thought… and I am aware of a tiny amount of real science… So if I was going to time travel, before I got into my device, I would do some research about where to go to ask the questions. Then armed with those disciplines and and places to ask I would go ask.
Now suppose I found myself thrust forward in time due to a rift in the space-time continuum and I had only a few moments, I suppose I would ask
- Top ten breakthroughs in physics 2023
- Top ten breakthroughs in medicine 2023
- Top papers in computer science
- Key note speech siggraph
- top y-combinator 2023
quickly copy the results and head back to the past, and hopefully, somewhere somehow someone could use that data to move the human race 10 years faster than anticipated…