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A time traveller comes back from 50 years in the future. You have 3 hours with them. What do you do? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 11 months ago by Danterious@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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Rules:

The time traveller is able to travel backward and forward through time (max forward is 2074) and they can only transport things that can fit in a small backpack.
You can choose when the 3 hours begin but it has to be in 2024 and once it has begun the timer can't be reset or stopped.
They will answer to the best of their ability but imagine this is a random person from 2074.

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[–] Jakdracula@lemmy.world 17 points 11 months ago (1 children)

People in time travel movies always talk about going back in time and accidentally changing one small thing that reverberates into an immensely large change today. In real life people never talk about making a small, deliberate, positive change today in their own life timeline for an immense positive change in their future.

[–] Saigonauticon@voltage.vn 5 points 11 months ago

The one thing we learn from history, is that we do not learn from history.

I guess that's why we dream of time travel -- so we can just go back and do those small things, instead of picking up a pile of history books and reading about what the Romans or Chinese (or whoever) wrote about what they wish they had done (and then maybe doing it). It's a technology that lets us pretend to be wise and have made the right choices all along -- a device that lets us escape regret.

To be fair though, reading some small fraction of those history books is quite a time investment for most people, and we seem to need those lessons (and be wise enough to take them to heart) at the exact time in our lives when we don't have any free time to learn them. I'm feeling this personally a lot right now. It's like we all learn why our reach exceeds our grasp just barely too late to really do much about it, except maybe read the stories of how that happened to everyone else, and know we are in good company.